Sunday, June 27, 2010

Where Angels Fear To Tread, Even In Pairs

Eric S. Raymond takes on "race" and leads readers on a merry chase. Anything I might say here will prolly be misconstrued -- go read what he's got to say.

Aw, I'll say one thing (and he and I agree on it): when the dust settles, it's individual abilities and accomplishments that matter. IMO, all curves are smoothed -- but human achievement happens in the "noise."

(Also -- is liking soccer innate or learned?)

4 comments:

Stranger said...

Now, that is a neat way to express the truism that melanin is less important than persistence.

But I think most people are growing up a bit. There is much less attention to anything but ability than there was when Harry Truman integrated the military and repulsed the Democrats.

Stranger

Standard Mischief said...

As a rule I don't blog anything without adding my comments in. I've already read the linked post last week and I didn't want to touch it as blog fodder with a ten foot pole.

Which is kinda telling in its own way.

Roberta X said...

Yeah, it's explosive stuff; I read it when first posted and liked the way he followed all the way through. He ends up about where he (or Heinlein) started and yet the trip is worth it -- it's just that so many dam'fools get off at the first stop.

LabRat said...

Mmm. My own suspicion is that, given perfect human genetic mapping and any possible sorting of humans into groupings thereof, the vast majority of the categorizations aren't going to be remotely sortable into the predefined cultural boxes... something that is already known by anyone seriously into population genetics. (Ashkenazi Jews are actually one of the few with a visible cultural mapping that corresponds at all well to any sort of genetic grouping, which is why I suspect he chose that example.)

My other thought is that focusing as much on studying evolution and how such variations and subgroupings actually tend to wind up playing out would make a lot of people feel much, much better about the whole thing...