A supervolcano with 8 billion people on the planet would cause a stir. The population can't stay where it's at no matter what. Why not become intelligent sooner than time-scales of 100,000 years force us to be? Of course, population is probably going to be corrected the next few centuries, but the point is that the population never should have gotten this high to begin with.
I'm currently going through Dilworth's book and there are decent explanations and a lot of research explaining why the human ape behaves as it does.
>This is, of course, bull shit with no actual definitive backings besides some ramblings on a github repo
Uh, no, remember where I got that from? <em>Too Smart for Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind</em> by Canadian philosopher Craig Dilworth. You can go digging through this volume to try find how I'm misrepresenting Dilworth but you're not going to have much luck.
A thought just occurred to me, by the way: if you don't read it, can I accuse you of being "illiterate"? After all, unlike your sources that were intended to uphold "it's still the material conditions, maaaaan", clear relevance to the claims being made has actually been demonstrated here.
>While the actual largest contributors to climate change are corporations and agriculture (mostly cattle)
And these are both sectors that can be used to elevate social status and/or furnish resources for offspring. So your point is: ? If you have an alternative reason why people (mostly men) often aspire to climb the corporate ladder and become hotshot executives, you need to tell me what it is. It also looks like you have an alternative forecast of where our planet is headed re: climate change. If so, please tell me what it is so I can compare it with mine and we'll see who was more accurate one day.
>This is largely because you're not a primatologist and don't have to experience to know the various social organizations of primate speices.
So are there primate "speices" lacking haves and have-nots? That would certainly be an interesting find. Because you have extensive formal qualifications in everything you talk about I'd like to hear about this.
>Biological determinism has not really explained a lot, despite all the bluster from people like Dawkins and Pinker.
Pinker has said some dumb things. When he said neural networks aren't capable of dealing with recursive structures that had been false for well over a decade. So I don't uncritically accept everything that he or Dawkins says. But I do agree with both of them that "biological determinism" (not sure either would accept that label) has been far more successful than tabula rasa (wishful) thinking.
>Definitely before eugenics and genetic modification of intelligence becomes realistic.
I want a decade estimate here. Like, say, "sometime in the 2020s". UBI implemented in a mostly capitalist system doesn't count by the way. I don't know if this is news to you, but the majority of people on this planet don't share the same political priorities as you.
Also, PGD is being used now and is inherently eugenic—it means that some embryos will not be allowed to come to term because of their genetic traits—so you're really behind the ball on that one.
>There's been several decolonial actions previously, but they've been stymied by capitalist regimes so it's not at all unlikely
If anything, it looks like the world is heading towards more colonialism, with the PRC inheriting the mantle of the European powers in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the third world. It's almost like this "hegemony" you talk about isn't the sole province of white people, but that they were simply the best at doing it for a very long time.
On the other hand, I will readily admit that the West is far and away the most patriarchal part of this world and that we would do well to have more diverse influences from other cultures, in Africa, the Middle East, East Asia and so on, all so conspicuously lacking in any patriarchal tendencies.
>Again, you're human nature is really just a myth.
It's a myth because: ?
>Socialism doesn't require that so this is a non-issue.
Then why does it constantly fail to deliver the promised results whenever it's implemented? Why do people constantly want to leave socialist regimes? Why do said regimes tend to enact policies designed to prevent people from leaving? Look, I know I advocated a police state earlier but that's different because I don't care whether people would like it; you on the other hand are apparently claiming that people will like socialism despite very strong evidence to the contrary. Could it be that socialism just doesn't mesh well with human nature? You held up Cuba as a positive example earlier (which is kind of dubious to begin with) but do you know how Fidel Castro lived?
One other thing: I may be beating a dead horse at this point, but your earlier hilarious claims about high IQ not being necessary to be an academic researcher made me think of a book I read years ago, <em>The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind</em> by Gregory Feist. I would have sworn it had something to say about IQ and it sure did:
>High intelligence, as measured by traditional IQ tests, would appear to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for scientific thought, interest, and achievement. One’s IQ predicts the kind of career one goes into, with scientists, mathematicians, engineers, medical doctors, and academics scoring higher on these standardized tests than people who go into other professions. To take one example, PhD physicists have an average IQ of 140, almost three standard deviations above the mean of the population. Such high scores for scientists are not surprising: two of the three major components of IQ tests, namely, quantitative reasoning and spatial reasoning, predict scientific interest and talent.^3 Absent these intellectual skills, one is not likely to be interested in or to become a scientist.
The footnote says:
>IQ predicts: Cox 1926, Eiduson 1962, Eysenck 1995, Simonton 1988a, Terman 1954; quantitative reasoning: Achter et al. 1999, Benbow and Stanley 1983, Benbow et al. 2000, Gustin and Corazza 1994, Schoon 2001; [spatial] reasoning: Baker 1985, Cooper 2000, Gardner 1983, Piburn 1980, Reuhkala 2001, Shea, Lubinski, and Benbow 2001.
This is more or less exactly what I was saying. It's amazing what becomes obvious when you're not a blinkered ideologue! :O
And there's a bonus! Evil Richard Lynn is not mentioned anywhere in the entire volume so you can't blame him for your guesstimates being comically inaccurate.