Oddbean

The EU in general has several very deadly border protection measures. We drown thousands of people a year, intentionally: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1082077/deaths-of-migrants-in-the-mediterranean-sea/

In practical terms I think it's more productive to get better at deporting people who are here illegally, and aren't entitled to asylum. The problem isn't that they're hiding, e.g. in The Netherlands lots of illegal immigrants are arrested and/or fined multiple times. Part of the problem is political, in that we're trying to be too nice. But that's not all of it. You can't just drop people in a random desert, unless you don't care about human rights. A lot of the times the countries of origin don't accept these people back, stuff like that. And we can't just recolonize those countries and force them. So maybe the better approach here is to open the labor market to everyone who wants to work. That might even grow the economy. But we don't want economic growth!

Good. The world is chock full of unproductive, unintelligent, pretty much worthless, people who will flood our borders and take our stuff if given the chance. Immigration from most countries is a clear net negative. It would be perfectly reasonable to intentionally sink these boats with gunfire; Poland uses live ammo to keep illegals from Russia (via Belarus) from getting close to the border fences. https://x.com/AkkadSecretary/status/1856386068196573412

If you ban illegal immigrants from working, you can't act surprised when they use welfare. The EU has massive shortages for unskilled labor. And that will get a lot worse over the next decades as baby boomers retire.

Those UK figures are for people who are allowed to work. The west doesn't have massive shortages of unskilled labor. Quite the opposite: we're losing opportunities for our less well off people to work due to automation. It's a real tragedy for the mentally disabled: they used to be able to get relatively unskilled jobs like restocking and factory jobs, and now just end up aimless. I used to have a fair bit of contact with that group due to involvement in autism support stuff – even 20 years ago this was a big problem. What's happening instead is unskilled immigrants are screwing over career progression for young people. Eg in Canada, it used to be easy for teens to get their first jobs working at places like fast food restaurants. Now those jobs are being taken by immigrants, giving young Canadians no way to get into the job market. That's an atrocious outcome. And it further depresses birthrates by making it even harder to raise kids. The numbers don't lie: the world is full of poor countries with average IQs significantly less than the west. Allowing those people into our countries makes our countries worse.

I don't give much credence to do-your-own-research by a random UK white supremist on Twitter. Sure, automation and offshoring remove some job opportunities. But the EU population is getting older and the budget required to take care of the elderly is getting out of control. For every lost restaurant job, there'll be dozens of diapers to change. Canadian demographics look pretty similar. Producing more white kids, ethics aside, is far less effective for growing the economy than importing mature labor from elsewhere. https://image.nostr.build/0b902901b3893714f9903963a6ef94ef789099a42e7c52d98ffc88c69521e558.jpg https://image.nostr.build/23418645cdf144dc58e54146df60295f60614de1807ba2c9a2872a6474f50bb0.jpg https://image.nostr.build/42e2d83b3fa0d4e00b4c5aa772e62d179099cd22b6a257fb5a04a50dc888a4fd.jpg

Another big factor for the lack of teenage job opportunities is an increase in child minimum wage and stricter child labor laws. Businesses would rather hire a collega student than some twelve year old for a customer facing role, if pay is equal anyway. I personally think child minimum wage should be lower to give them more opportunities. But it's a tricky balance there, since it's age discrimination - I think most kids and their parents are fine with that, as long as the kid is just learning and not having to feed their parents.

That's a member of parliment quoting UK official stats figures. They're similar to public figures from others European countries; many countries shamefully make it effectively illegal to even collect these stats. Anyway, the fact you immediately go to "white supremacy" is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with wanting more of your country men rather than importing foreigners. Canada has done well with its previous policy of allowing high skilled immigrants in – Canada is a better country for it. Importing unskilled labor en-mass is nuts. Which is shown by the fact that these unskilled migrants are a clear drain on economies, and disrupt our way of life. Violence is also a serious issue. We're importing violent criminals. That's just a fact. For example, Canada didn't have a significant problem with anti-Semitism until we started importing violent, unskilled, Muslims in large numbers. Why on earth would I want highly skilled, peaceful, productive Jews to be driven out by unskilled, violent, unproductive Muslims?

White supremists make into parliaments plenty of times. I've also never seen a single member of parliament in any country with a solid understanding of statistics. The man makes it very clear he's obsessed with race, as shown by the first screenshot. Anti-semitism has been on the rise in various places in recent years. Legal Muslim immigration is a factor, as are woke activists* and Trump. * = in part because woke ideology tends to lead to anti-semitic conclusions with regards to Jewish white men in high positions, in part because they block any serious law enforcement action against jihadists and other intolerant behavior

Trump? Lolwut? Trump isn't anti-Semitic. He opened his speech at Nashville with a somber statement decrying at attack on Israel that had happened earlier that day. Woke ideology hates Jews because Jews are spectacularly successful. Same reason woke ideology classifies Asians as white these days. Asians and Jews, among others, show that black underachievement is not due to racism. Speaking of... In my previous job, at an extremely high end geophysics startup, with most employees being exceptional at what they did, out of my ~10 most direct coworkers ~5 of them were first generation immigrants born outside Canada. (White) South African, Russian, Chinese, Korean (IIRC), and Iranian. My boss – an exceptionally good engineer – was Greek (IIRC, 2nd generation). I'm probably forgetting a person or two born in the US too. Canada has obviously done really well importing highly skilled people. But that's the thing: highly skilled. The only person I knew at that company who didn't get into Canada on pure merit was an Iranian refugee, and he was one of the least skilled people there. Hell, the South African was so good at what he did that he managed to get _two_ extra citizenships (Canadian and UK) through merit-based immigration before he retired.

There's lots of stats along the lines of this floating around from various studies: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. IQ is tricky to measure across cultures and there's more than one type of intelligence. There's also the issue that countries are often _not_ homogeneous (a hilarious example of this is how Dutch origin white Afrikaans in South Africa have actually been in South Africa _longer_ than the majority of the black population, as they descend from more recent invaders). But the rough trends are certainly correct. And the fact that counties _do_ differ is important. Also, the "more than one type of intelligence" doesn't change the fact that modern technology favors mathematical/logical intelligence: thinking logically is much more valuable than other types of thinking, because machines are so efficient at doing work. It's interesting how making AI think artistically has turned out to be much easier than making AIs think logically...

Taleb is clearly someone who is willing to bend his intellectual arguments to fit his politics and preconceptions, rather than the data. Just look at how badly he failed on Bitcoin and COVID. Not unfair to call him a crank... https://medium.com/incerto/no-covid-19-is-not-an-old-person-problem-6968f720d153 Anyway, the ugly reality is IQ is certainly real, genetically heritable, and IQ distributions vary. The reason why so few engineers are black isn't primarily racism. It's because black populations around the world tend to have lower IQ. Conversely, in spite of vicious racism in the past (and present...) Jews still managed to dominate the sciences is mainly because their average IQ is high. Same with Asians, though not as extreme. Of course, distributions are distributions, and some people will beat the odds and you should evaluate individuals on their own merits. But as long as the genetics (and culture) of so much of the world is awful, those parts of the world will remain poor and backwards. And allowing the more talented people in those parts of the world to immigrate to western countries just increases that inequality through brain drain, while dragging down our countries if we're not careful. Canada's prior immigration policy was careful... and probably did the rest of the world a disservice by taking their best people. The irony here is convincing yourself that IQ isn't real takes intelligence... 😂

Do you actually have a (link to a) serious argument as to how his IQ statistical reasoning is wrong? To the extend I read it back in the day, along with his book Statistical Consequences of Fat Tail, it seemed plausible. I've learned enough statistics back in uni to be extremely skeptical of any social science statistics, and I'm about 90% confident Charles Murray (where most of this stuff comes from) is a grifter.

It's Taleb. I've got better things to do than debunk him given how he's obviously become a crank. As for IQ in general, anyone with a bit of sense can see how obviously some people are just smarter than others, and how children tend to be similarly intelligent as their parents. Intelligence in general is _obviously_ a genetic trait: humans have it in ways animals _clearly_ do not, and different animals _clearly_ have it in different degrees. As I said, you have to actively fool yourself to convince yourself otherwise; the burden of proof is not on my views here. The only reason there is an IQ denial movement is because IQ (especially the inherited component of it) is so utterly toxic to DEI beliefs.

that intelligence is a thing, that doesn't mean that IQ specifically as a score measures anything worthwhile, general intelligence is hard to nail down (and that it defines someones worth is a very specific view, too)

If you believe Jordan Peterson, at least in areas of his expertise, IQ is the best predictor of professional success, especially when coupled with conscientiousness (which, I think, consists of diligence plus industriousness).

Hopefully there will be a day when people don't need to drown at sea trying to escape poverty. The IQ arguments laid out by Peter are so hurtful and offensive to read but I respect his freedom to speak his mind. The migration issue is a hard one and I can understand why people from the west are fed up with it but saying people are low IQ and they deserve to die is just sad to read. But I am not the creator of the universe, so I have to accept that people will believe and say hurtful things in the open and that they should be free to do so. I appreciate your empathy in how you are exploring this topic. ✊️

Sometimes the truth hurts and it's useful to have offensive people saying it out loud. Sometimes saying the truth is not useful. In that case I would call it impolite, but not wrong. And sometimes offense things are just wrong or at least founded on junk science. Fortunately we don't have an algorithm here to boost that latter category disproportionately, but people have made entire careers out of a they-don't-let-me-say-this Schpiel. Social media algorithms love that, hopefully Nostr doesn't amplify it. Right to speak goes without saying.

The idea behind banning illegal immigrants (as well as legal asylum seekers) from working is to disincentivize them from coming in the first place. That's somewhat rational. But it becomes problematic when people subsequently blame these people for being unproductive. Sure there's always lazy people, but also plenty of people who happily work harder than most western europeans.

Sorry boys & girls, someone I know & get along with is infinitly more valuable to me than someone I've never met, period, the end, infinity. And if you keep this shit up you'll be dropped by those around you, well done...