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Eugine_Nier comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Come now, you know how normal distributions work. Small differences in means cause over-representation at the extreme ends of the scale. From your IQ I can predict a ~30-40% chance of you being Ashkenazi, despite them being a global minority, just because of a "slightly" higher mean of 110. This is an important thing.
(EDIT: This calculation uses sd=15, which may or may not be a baseless assumption)
Plus, maybe there's a reverse-"Level above mine" effect going on here. The difference between someone at 90 and someone at 110 might not seem big to you, but it might just be your provincialism talking.
(Agreed about the immigration rationalization though)
Um, as far as immigration. You may have noticed that some countries are much nicer places to live then others, i.e., some have low crime and highly functioning economies and others are poor crime filled hell-holes. Why is that? Is it that something about being north of the Rio Grande magically makes people more productive and less prone to commit violent crimes? <\sarcasm>
The main reason is the people and culture of those countries. Thus if you import too many people from a different country, the pleasantness of the country to live will depend on the the nature of the new people. Notice that this argument assumes nothing about the role of nature versus nurture.
Both Koreas are ethnically and culturally the same. What makes one a SF near-utopia and the other a starving disgrace is the accident of having fallen within opposite spheres of influence during the Cold War and the subsequent development of radically different political systems. One could argue something similar happened with pre-unification Germany. I've read somewhere that the relative poverty in rural Southern Italy and wealth in industrial Northern Italy mirror the North-South dynamics of Reconstruction USA.
You seem to not know what culture means
In fairness to your criticism, I must say: That downvote did not come from me.
Yep, and I totally agree. The point I'm making is that with immigration we can afford to have more finely-grained selection criteria. Instead of a blanket ban on immigrants from third-world hellholes, we can at least choose the best ones.
Again, provided we are comfortable with disparate impact and all.
I would support such a policy, provided the criteria aren't easily gamable.
Well, if productivity and proneness to commit violent crimes depended only of nurture, the children of those people would resemble people from the country where they're growing up, rather than their parents, so the problem would only exist for first-generation immigrants.
This is only true if we enforce strict integration of immigrant families, but where there are large populations of immigrants they tend to form enclaves where their social circles consist of other immigrants. Hence little tokyo, chinatowns, and whatnot.
Most people are raised largely by their parents, so the parents would have a large effect on how the children are nurtured.
I took “nurture” to refer to socialization, and it turns out that parents are much less important than same-age peers (e.g. people who grow up in a different place than their parents did end up with the accent of the former), but I had forgotten that of course literal nurture also matters.