1. Women actually do, often, prefer “normal” men to exceptional men. Women want men who will pay attention to them, not men who will always care more about their craft than any human being. Like your last post, I have to bring up the Greeks. Their strive towards artistic, athletic, and intellectual greatness was done completely out of the eye of women. In fact, most male greatness is meant to get praise from other men
2. Women care more about people as in, social people. The western love of portraiture comes from a recognition of the human body as divinely inspired in form
I came to the same conclusion after COVID. There is no amount of reduction in the price of accounting services or dentistry that would make me want to wear a mask all day.
While the stultifying genetic effects of arranged marriage are probably significant, there are also cultural effects. Having a woman (and perhaps concubines) guaranteed to you no matter what you do - with advantage if you can pass imperial examinations- reduces the drive to take risks and find fame like Columbus among young men. Puritan America also guaranteed wives to young men through different means, I'm not aware of many great works of art and such by them - though they were industrious.
I'm always enthusiastic about insights animated by HBD, but there are often important exceptions. Classical Greece also had quasi-institutionalised arranged marriage (not concubinage), yet famously there was no shortage of great art or expansive enterprise generally among the Hellenes.
I guess the explanation there might have something to do with the specially limited carrying capacity of the soil, which drove inter-polis competition, exploration, colonisation etc and contributed to the rise of the individual. A culture of individuality seems to be a pre-condition for 'creative churn' and production of great art.
I think Greece's soil was limited relative to the ultra-fertile river valley civilizations -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, and, yes, the Chinese core regions. Though not especially relative to the rest of Europe.
I picked up from the late Raymond Crotty the theory that the non-Egyptian civilizations of the Mediterranean region were what he called "individualistic slave societies" because they faced a labor shortage, in contrast with riverine societies that fed more people than could productively work the land. A slave can be made to work marginal land for his master that would not be productive enough to provide for a farmer and his replacement-rate-TFR family, and therefore would otherwise lay fallow.
This economic circumstance encouraged an individualistic and entrepreneurial approach to gathering and maintaining slaves, who were more valuable than land and needed to be continuously replenished in order to extract profit from them. Slavery can be seen as the impetus for a lot of what you describe there: exploration, colonization, and competition.
By contrast, in ultra-fertile riverine civilizations, the land is the only thing of real value. The state might in some sense "enslave" the local peasantry by further oppressing it, but there is little economic value in going about and gathering more slaves to work the land (though house slaves might be kept as a luxury or status symbol). Instead, the focus is inward, on protecting the rich real estate of the river valley. This has a tendency to breed stagnation, and indeed, Egypt's curious millennia-long stagnation has often been noted.
The lack of creativity or complexity in Chinese paintings comes after many reasons. And the examples you raised here are very limited. I doubt to what extent it is related to sexual competition of males. Paintings and calligraphies are circulated among a small group of elites for transactions or as gifts. Most painters and musicians were not professionals. They served as governors and art was their hobby. Between Song and Qing dynasty, China was ruled under nomads, which means rulers are not interested the traditional arts of the Han ethnicity. Most Han people were not living a good life at that time.
'All throughout nature males compete for female attention by differentiating themselves from other males in feats of individual achievement. Human Males are no different and when left to their instincts - Men seduce women by outperforming other men in creative individualistic pursuits like music and painting, as-well as through displays of displays of individual vigor in athletic feats.
What happens when civilizations mobilize to eliminate all female choice in the question of who they reproduce with? You may get high IQ clerks, but in no society has any normal woman uttered the phrase:
“My parents wanted me to marry an artist but I hoped to marry a clerk.”
We can thereby expect a society that eliminates female choice in marriage to see a degradation and perhaps even the near-extinction of it’s creative potential. We can track and measure this phenomenon clearly in at least one society where it occurred - China.'
*****EXACTLY*****
This is an excellent explanation in just a couple of paragraphs of why (residual) arranged-marriage cultures are culturally/aesthetically stagnant.
There is a Chinese instrumental EDM composer, Mengyuan Xu, who has some catchy melodies, but I think they illustrate your point. I wonder if those sort of primitive melodies of EDM lend themselves to that kind of composition. Example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrUf_5NYj4s
I worked as an English teacher in China for a few years and liked some Chinese music. Here is a folk song that is very listenable, called "Dance of the Yi People" on the guitar
"Dance of the Yi People" is very pretty, but it's a 1960s piece which is very clearly heavily influenced by the Western musical tradition.
I do need to do a deeper dive on traditional Pipa music though. From what I've seen so far It's masterpieces seem to reach far greater sophistication than the Guqin but are heavily discordant in a way that at least some Guqin masterpieces aren't. I haven't found one I'd ever listen to again while drunken fisherman is genuinely soothing.
The guqin is more contemplative and relaxing. I thought maybe the guitar version of Dance of the Yi people was more westernized, but not the pipa version, although I didn't listen to the whole thing, as I had heard it many times long before.
How many Chinese students with college visas are you talking about here? Right now the Asian population is 6% in America, that's really far from a number that would threaten to swamp western culture. Idk exactly how you define "tech right" but if draining cognitive talent from China to the US and Europe helps us advance faster and remain globally dominant then that's a good thing.
The real question is - "What percentage of top universities and sense-making institutions are going to be East Asian in a test-determined meritocracy?"
Communications technology now makes it possible to transfer the details for any technology one has stolen... abroad, anonymously, in minutes. How do you think draining cognitive talent from China is gonna help us stay ahead exactly?
That's a good point, what could we do to filter for East Asians that are genuinely pro-western? A certain portion of Chinese citizens seem to be very dissatisfied with the CCP, so I think getting them to immigrate would probably be beneficial since they are likely to be in the top 10-20% of Chinese in terms of disagreeableness and individualist orientation and would probably be at least as patriotic as the average White American.
Regression to the mean means their children will on average be less disagreeable; but anyway if you've read my earlier piece on fertility you'll find that being CCP friendly is the least of my concerns.
All East Asian groups appear to have certain neuroses that I do not want to see more reflected in my society. And it's outright ridiculous to import these.
"Patriotic" - Towards what? Imagine an otherwise Conservative America, where masking and Covidian restrictions lasted as long as they did in South Korea or Japan or Taiwan. One where people at work and children in school commonly put in hours as long as those in South Korea or Taiwan.
Is this a country you'd feel patriotic about? It sure as hell isn't one I could ever love.
I wouldn't but in my admittedly limited experience a lot of Chinese immigrants who left for political reasons are anti-communist and consequently oppose masking and other Democratic policies.
As I said they should demonstrate some degree of opposition to the CCP so they don't have dual loyalties. I still think we should in general try to siphon as many immigrants who are economically productive as possible from other parts of the world (of course we should also deport the non-productive ones though so the total number of immigrants would end up being a lot lower than it is now).
Go to Canada or Australia and see if you still think Chinese immigration is nothing to worry about. I mean they're better than Muslims or Indians but you're setting the bar pretty low if you think that's a recommendation.
Also, it's not only a question of numbers. Relatively few high-IQ Chinese immigrants can do a lot of damage. They're very ethnocentric and there are many spies among them.
Problems:
1. Women actually do, often, prefer “normal” men to exceptional men. Women want men who will pay attention to them, not men who will always care more about their craft than any human being. Like your last post, I have to bring up the Greeks. Their strive towards artistic, athletic, and intellectual greatness was done completely out of the eye of women. In fact, most male greatness is meant to get praise from other men
2. Women care more about people as in, social people. The western love of portraiture comes from a recognition of the human body as divinely inspired in form
I'll have to read these East Asian Question papers soon!
I came to the same conclusion after COVID. There is no amount of reduction in the price of accounting services or dentistry that would make me want to wear a mask all day.
I think this was meant as a reply btw.
While the stultifying genetic effects of arranged marriage are probably significant, there are also cultural effects. Having a woman (and perhaps concubines) guaranteed to you no matter what you do - with advantage if you can pass imperial examinations- reduces the drive to take risks and find fame like Columbus among young men. Puritan America also guaranteed wives to young men through different means, I'm not aware of many great works of art and such by them - though they were industrious.
For sure it's cultural too.
I'm always enthusiastic about insights animated by HBD, but there are often important exceptions. Classical Greece also had quasi-institutionalised arranged marriage (not concubinage), yet famously there was no shortage of great art or expansive enterprise generally among the Hellenes.
I guess the explanation there might have something to do with the specially limited carrying capacity of the soil, which drove inter-polis competition, exploration, colonisation etc and contributed to the rise of the individual. A culture of individuality seems to be a pre-condition for 'creative churn' and production of great art.
>Carrying capacity of the soil
I think Greece's soil was limited relative to the ultra-fertile river valley civilizations -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, and, yes, the Chinese core regions. Though not especially relative to the rest of Europe.
I picked up from the late Raymond Crotty the theory that the non-Egyptian civilizations of the Mediterranean region were what he called "individualistic slave societies" because they faced a labor shortage, in contrast with riverine societies that fed more people than could productively work the land. A slave can be made to work marginal land for his master that would not be productive enough to provide for a farmer and his replacement-rate-TFR family, and therefore would otherwise lay fallow.
This economic circumstance encouraged an individualistic and entrepreneurial approach to gathering and maintaining slaves, who were more valuable than land and needed to be continuously replenished in order to extract profit from them. Slavery can be seen as the impetus for a lot of what you describe there: exploration, colonization, and competition.
By contrast, in ultra-fertile riverine civilizations, the land is the only thing of real value. The state might in some sense "enslave" the local peasantry by further oppressing it, but there is little economic value in going about and gathering more slaves to work the land (though house slaves might be kept as a luxury or status symbol). Instead, the focus is inward, on protecting the rich real estate of the river valley. This has a tendency to breed stagnation, and indeed, Egypt's curious millennia-long stagnation has often been noted.
The lack of creativity or complexity in Chinese paintings comes after many reasons. And the examples you raised here are very limited. I doubt to what extent it is related to sexual competition of males. Paintings and calligraphies are circulated among a small group of elites for transactions or as gifts. Most painters and musicians were not professionals. They served as governors and art was their hobby. Between Song and Qing dynasty, China was ruled under nomads, which means rulers are not interested the traditional arts of the Han ethnicity. Most Han people were not living a good life at that time.
'All throughout nature males compete for female attention by differentiating themselves from other males in feats of individual achievement. Human Males are no different and when left to their instincts - Men seduce women by outperforming other men in creative individualistic pursuits like music and painting, as-well as through displays of displays of individual vigor in athletic feats.
What happens when civilizations mobilize to eliminate all female choice in the question of who they reproduce with? You may get high IQ clerks, but in no society has any normal woman uttered the phrase:
“My parents wanted me to marry an artist but I hoped to marry a clerk.”
We can thereby expect a society that eliminates female choice in marriage to see a degradation and perhaps even the near-extinction of it’s creative potential. We can track and measure this phenomenon clearly in at least one society where it occurred - China.'
*****EXACTLY*****
This is an excellent explanation in just a couple of paragraphs of why (residual) arranged-marriage cultures are culturally/aesthetically stagnant.
There is a Chinese instrumental EDM composer, Mengyuan Xu, who has some catchy melodies, but I think they illustrate your point. I wonder if those sort of primitive melodies of EDM lend themselves to that kind of composition. Example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrUf_5NYj4s
I worked as an English teacher in China for a few years and liked some Chinese music. Here is a folk song that is very listenable, called "Dance of the Yi People" on the guitar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YMLuZweSjQ
and the same song on a traditional Chinese instrument, the pipa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KWdhEQiAMk.
Also here is an instrumental version of a Chinese pop song that was popular when I was there "The heart is too soft."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvZhgKGl08
Also a Chinese propaganda song "There Is No New China Without the Communist Party"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ou-wAbuXJI
"Dance of the Yi People" is very pretty, but it's a 1960s piece which is very clearly heavily influenced by the Western musical tradition.
I do need to do a deeper dive on traditional Pipa music though. From what I've seen so far It's masterpieces seem to reach far greater sophistication than the Guqin but are heavily discordant in a way that at least some Guqin masterpieces aren't. I haven't found one I'd ever listen to again while drunken fisherman is genuinely soothing.
The guqin is more contemplative and relaxing. I thought maybe the guitar version of Dance of the Yi people was more westernized, but not the pipa version, although I didn't listen to the whole thing, as I had heard it many times long before.
How many Chinese students with college visas are you talking about here? Right now the Asian population is 6% in America, that's really far from a number that would threaten to swamp western culture. Idk exactly how you define "tech right" but if draining cognitive talent from China to the US and Europe helps us advance faster and remain globally dominant then that's a good thing.
The real question is - "What percentage of top universities and sense-making institutions are going to be East Asian in a test-determined meritocracy?"
Communications technology now makes it possible to transfer the details for any technology one has stolen... abroad, anonymously, in minutes. How do you think draining cognitive talent from China is gonna help us stay ahead exactly?
That's a good point, what could we do to filter for East Asians that are genuinely pro-western? A certain portion of Chinese citizens seem to be very dissatisfied with the CCP, so I think getting them to immigrate would probably be beneficial since they are likely to be in the top 10-20% of Chinese in terms of disagreeableness and individualist orientation and would probably be at least as patriotic as the average White American.
Regression to the mean means their children will on average be less disagreeable; but anyway if you've read my earlier piece on fertility you'll find that being CCP friendly is the least of my concerns.
All East Asian groups appear to have certain neuroses that I do not want to see more reflected in my society. And it's outright ridiculous to import these.
"Patriotic" - Towards what? Imagine an otherwise Conservative America, where masking and Covidian restrictions lasted as long as they did in South Korea or Japan or Taiwan. One where people at work and children in school commonly put in hours as long as those in South Korea or Taiwan.
Is this a country you'd feel patriotic about? It sure as hell isn't one I could ever love.
I wouldn't but in my admittedly limited experience a lot of Chinese immigrants who left for political reasons are anti-communist and consequently oppose masking and other Democratic policies.
There is the precedent of the German-48s indeed.
Aggressively recruit true genius level talent, but not fall over yourself for every 115 IQ future drone unit.
As I said they should demonstrate some degree of opposition to the CCP so they don't have dual loyalties. I still think we should in general try to siphon as many immigrants who are economically productive as possible from other parts of the world (of course we should also deport the non-productive ones though so the total number of immigrants would end up being a lot lower than it is now).
This ain't Hanania's stack ya know
I'm not Hanania, I think western culture should remain White-dominant but I'm skeptical that Asian immigration is much of a concern at this point.
Go to Canada or Australia and see if you still think Chinese immigration is nothing to worry about. I mean they're better than Muslims or Indians but you're setting the bar pretty low if you think that's a recommendation.
Also, it's not only a question of numbers. Relatively few high-IQ Chinese immigrants can do a lot of damage. They're very ethnocentric and there are many spies among them.