Wastrels Among US | Misallocation, Opportunity Cost and the Condemnation of Intelligence

I'd like to begin this video with a fictional story that I'm going to tell you. A mini-story, not a very long one, about a situation that is in fact somewhat absurd. And I'm hoping that before I reveal the absurdity of the situation contained within this story, you can pick up on the absurdity before I do that. So imagine a situation, this story where you have two teenage boys who are 15 years old, both born the same month, same year, obviously. One is named Tim, Timothy, and the other is Tom. Timothy has no athletic aptitude whatsoever. In fact, he's significantly below average by all accounts and by all measures in all things related to athletics and sport. He is kind of nerdy, pudgy, not an athlete basically. That is Timothy. Tom, on the other hand, is in many ways the complete opposite of Timothy. Tom is exceptionally athletic. He's tall, he's well-built, he has one of those classic mesomorphic structures that one might speak of, and he is great at a significant number of activities. He's good at basketball, he's great at sprinting, he's not a bad swimmer either. He's just a really talented athlete, and he really has a profound interest in sport. I'm not really sure which direction he wants to go in, but Tom definitely knows that he wants to go into sport because he's just built for it. He's made this way. You look at his stature, his physique, already at 15. In a couple of years' time, he'll be even more mature, and he could have potential to reach the upper echelons, at the very least do very well, even in a professional sports setting. Now, Timothy, on the other hand, as I pointed out, is the complete opposite. So in this world, this strange world, people get together and they decide to say the following. You know, Timothy, he's not very athletic. You can look at him, he doesn't have the frame or structure, he's not tall, he's not fast, he's not strong, he's none of these things, but he certainly could be better than what he already is. Timothy might be pudgy, and all these other things, and unathletic, and slow, and weak, but he can definitely be better than what he is currently. So I think the best thing we need to do is to take lots of money and resources, and sports coaches, and invest time and energy in Timothy, so we can improve him, and so he can improve in his athletic performance, and feel better about himself, and just be a better human being as a result. Who knows, maybe in time we can convince others to invest scholarships and bursaries in Timothy, so he can maximize his athletic potential, and be a fully contented, and fully fulfilled individual. Now, why on earth would we want to help Tom? I mean, he's already gifted, there's no real point to that, right? And we move to another school, similar situation, Donald and Dave. Donald, in this case, is the athletic one, and Dave is the not-so-athletic one. And this philosophy of empowering individuals, and improving them where they are weak, and improving their lesser qualities, this is embraced by this school. And, well, Dave gets the same treatment as Timothy does. He gets coaching, he gets all these things, and so he improves immensely. He's somewhat faster than he, well, he's a lot faster than he used to be, stronger than he used to be. But Dave is also a lot weaker than Donald, and just like Timothy, will always be a lot weaker than Donald, and also a lot slower. And pretty soon this philosophy, if you want to call it that, educational principle, we can call it that, spreads across the country in the United States. We're talking about a fictional United States here. And everyone thinks, yeah, we really got to boost these people. They are not, they could be doing so much better if we just helped them out, and we did our best, and we could make them into more athletic people, and we could make them more capable, and faster, and stronger, and they're going to feel better about themselves, and they will be self-actualized, and it'll be fantastic. And from the east to the west coast, every high school, every high school embraces this educational philosophy, and it's incredible, is it not? Now, I bet I know what you're thinking. I really hope I know what you're thinking by now, and I'm going to speak your words out loud, presumably. That sounds absolutely absurd. In fact, it sounds like the definition of absurd. In fact, some of you are thinking, man, what the **** this nigga Stata's talking about? Nigga crazy. Right, that is true to some degree. However, I want to point out something that should be obvious as well to many people that by now, yeah, that is the system we effectively have in place in the United States, and in many other places in the world. But I will be focusing on the United States because of the fictional story, only it's the opposite. I should also offer to mention that in those fictional scenarios, both Timothy and Donald, they're very, very smart people, very smart. Could go a long way cognitively, but that's another story, isn't it? And because of the nature of things. The crux of my argument here is that we are doing things that are patently absurd to any normal person when removed from the sphere of the intellect and cognitive abilities to others. Now, in reference to this, I want to read off some comments I recently received on my older video about Charles Murray and Sam Harris because they're pretty enlightening. So let's get into that. So I'd like to read off a comment made on that video by an alleged geneticist. I say alleged because, well, I have to take him in his word and he was citing things that don't measure up with the data. And I'll mention this in a bit. He says the following on that video, I had to stop where you mentioned that IQ was mostly genetic and environment was still minimal. While it is true that around 60% of it is genetic, that's not correct, and I'll get into that in a bit. The environmental factors are still highly significant. Without proper nurturing of said capabilities, they will never reach full potential. The other thing that is that even people with a fairly low IQ, the same studies that prove the genetic component of IQ also showed, and I'm waiting to see the data on this, that they can be compensated for by placing said individuals in a highly stimulating and involving environment. I don't see any data supporting that. While they'll never reach genius levels, they can do remarkably well after getting that help. Charles Murray does not believe that they should be getting that and basically that the smart people should be lavish with attention and assistance, while the people who actually need help the most should be cast on the wayside. I mentioned he means by the wayside. This is a dangerous idea and it'll worsen things even more in the US, which already has a huge problem in helping those who need it. Then he ends it by, this is a discussion with a PhD in STEM field and studies genetics for a living. It's really eye-opening and defines a lot of things, like what does heritability actually mean or heritable? I respond to that. I don't know if he's actually a geneticist. I mean, I could write a random comment and claim an astrophysicist. People have to take me in my word. I'm going to read off a comment. Let me cover all the basis on the nature of IQ in relation to environment. Then I want to get into some other stuff. This is from a publication in 2013 that does not support what he's claiming. Ronald Wilson presented the first clear and compelling evidence that the heritability of IQ increases with age. We propose to call the phenomenon the Wilson effect. We document the effect diagrammatically with key twin and adoption studies, including twins reared apart that have been carried out at various ages and in a large number of different settings. The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at around 0.80 at 18 to 20 years of age and continues at that level well into adulthood. In the aggregate, the studies also confirm that shared environmental influence decreases across age, approximating about 0.10 at 18 to 20 years of age and continuing at that level into adulthood. These conclusions apply to the westernized industrial democracies in which most of the studies have been carried out. That kind of flies in the face of what our friend the hotshotter, as he calls himself, claimed. And, as I said, he might claim one thing, but that study, among many others, has showed me that IQ is largely heritable, it increases with age, and there's very little that education can do. But that really isn't the crux of the issue now, is it? Return, once again, to the aforementioned absurd situation of Timothy and Tom and Donald and Dave, respectively, where people got in their heads that they wanted to maximize and optimize the athletic potential of two individuals, and following that across the country, because they think it's a great idea, who have no athletic or sporting aptitude whatsoever. It simply doesn't exist. They're very bright, but that's not their forte and not their strength. Donald and Tom, on the other hand, are born athletes. And it's funny, because in our society, we have no qualms about cultivating athletic talent, and we have no qualms or issues about bringing out the best in those who have certain aptitudes in the physical realm, the athletic realm to be very specific. If we see someone who has sprinting potential, who has lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers, and he's the fastest guy in high school, and the fastest guy in the county, and maybe even the fastest guy in the state, we don't say to ourselves, hmm, you know, that other guy who's really lagging behind, who's the slowest guy in the gym class, we really need to help him become a faster runner, because god damn it, that would make him feel fantastic, and he might feel fulfilled and content. So let's send in the coaches and the sprinting trainers and make him the best runner possible. No, we don't do that, do we? Instead, we promote the fastest sprinter in the high school, in the county, in the state, with the potentiality that one day he might be the fastest sprinter in the country, if not the world. That is what we do when it comes to athletic talent. But this policy I'm talking about, of course, does not apply to the cognitively gifted, smart people, intelligent people. They don't need help. No, the cognitively weak, those who are not very smart, they need more cognitive help. Let's just quote this alleged geneticist again, right? Without proper nurturing of said capabilities, they will never reach full potential. Hmm. The same could be said of Tom Donald. Could it not? If their athletic abilities are not nurtured, if they don't receive coaching, maybe certain techniques in stretching, the way to optimize sprinting, the way to handle football, if they were to become quarterbacks, who knows? Then, of course, they're not going to reach their maximum potential. They'll still blow all the non-athletic people out of the water, but they could be so much more if they receive the aid. Why doesn't that apply to cognitive abilities, one wonders? The below-the-neck fallacy, of course. So here, the below-the-neck fallacy strikes again, does it not? And this strange paradox seems lost on most people. Most people don't even grasp what I'm talking about when I mention this. I try to argue this all the time with a few normie friends of mine and some acquaintances. They don't get it. They don't understand. I mean, he goes on, of course. I love this part. The other thing is that even people with a fairly low IQ, I guess English isn't his first language, even with people with a fairly low IQ, the same studies that prove the genetic component of IQ also showed that they can still be compensated for it, despite the evidence. I deduced in that one study can be compensated by placing said individuals in a highly stimulating and involving environment, while they'll never reach genius levels. They can do remarkably well after getting that help. I'll just insert some other names in here. The other thing with even unathletic people is that even with a lack of athleticism, the same studies show that prove that the genetic component of sporting ability also showed that sporting ability can be compensated for by placing said individuals in a highly stimulating environment and involving environment, while they'll never be top top-notch athletes. They can do remarkably well after getting that help. No one in modern American society or elsewhere in the West would take that argument legitimately and yet, or accept it as a valid argument, and yet here we do it constantly when it comes to the cognitively deprived and those who are, let's face it, intellectually not up to par. We have no problem accepting that people have differentiated and differing athletic abilities and that some should be promoted over others if we want to achieve a certain goal. If we want somebody who's a great running back or quarterback or sprinter or basketball player, then we want to support him with bursaries and scholarships and even tuition to get through the hard academic work that they tend to suck at, or the increasingly easy, just so they can get through quote-unquote college league and then move fully into the NBA or the NFL or what have you. We have no problem with that, but we do have a problem with doing the same thing with intelligent people, with gifted people, cognitively gifted people. Why is that? Well, a lot of it is doctrine and a lot of it is effectively ideology. There's no doubt about that, but it's also something to do with changing of the times. What do I mean by that? Well, if you were to hark back to the 19th century, the kind of helping the weak out, the kind of promoting basically dumb people by giving dumb people lots of education, and the process engaging in a massive opportunity cost to the detriment of smarter people who could vastly profit from such help and aid, and indeed profit far more, would have been just as absurd as the scenario that I presented at the beginning of the video, where I'm talking about these athletic young teenage boys who are not being helped and promoted in their abilities, and that help and support is then given to people who have no talent whatsoever. Well, the idea of helping the cognitively deficient would have been equally absurd back then, and sounded also absurd to many people. This isn't just a matter of ideology. It is a matter of environment. As I've mentioned probably a thousand times by now in the course of my YouTube history, I've often talked about the mechanization effect. What of course do I mean by the mechanization effect? It's essentially modernity, the technology, the innovation, the chemistry, the biochemistry, the pill, for example, all these things going into society and transforming the landscape to degrees that had previously been unimaginable. Nobody had thought that the 21st century would look like this in the 18th century. Human beings live in a particularly harsh environment, and the further back you go, the harsher it tends to be. And so nobody wanted to squander or waste resources, misallocate resources, towards those who are not capable of handling certain burdens and doing certain things. Whilst this might not be a perfect analogy, I do want to bring up one issue that is in fact related to this. Let's talk a little bit about infanticide. Infanticide is to most people from an ethical perspective, perhaps rightly so, viewed as an absolute horror. Nobody in modern western society supports the idea that a woman should give birth and then dump the kid out in a river to die, or dump the kid off a cliff, or in some cases kill the kid. And when it happens, it is regarded in large measure as a criminal offense. That was not always the case, of course. Whatever one's ethical intuitions about this, whatever one's biological proclivities, to the contrary, notwithstanding, infanticide was a mainstay in some respects. A small percentage, but a mainstay, a continual mainstay of previous societies. So let me just quote something from what is called the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Fabulous source, I guess, titled Infanticide. Quote, most societies agree that the drive to protect and nurture one's infant is a basic human trait, and indeed it is. That's my commentary. Yet infanticide, the killing of an infant at the hands of a parent, has been an accepted practice for disposing of unwanted or deformed children since prehistoric times. Despite human repugnance for the act, most societies, both ancient and contemporary, have practiced infanticide. Based upon both historical and contemporary data, as many as 10 to 15 percent of all babies were killed by their parents. The anthropologist Lilo Williamson notes that infanticide has been practiced by nearly all civilizations. Williamson concludes that infanticide must represent a common human trait, perhaps genetically encoded to promote self-survival. End quote. So not all that uncommon whatsoever, and it displays a continuity that one can detect across most, if not all, human civilization. Infanticide. Until we come to the modern comfortable societies we live in, and then it becomes a crime. And then it becomes unthinkable, inactionable, because we live in a society that has just too much comfort. The environment is too safe, in some sense, and so people think, you know what, we're done with killing babies because we regard them as deficient. The environment shifted, and so did our mentality, and many ideas, many ideologies, and many frames of thought shifts themselves when they enter a new environment. So the former attitude was a prevailing attitude in the 19th century and in former times that one should not squander resources on the weak and the deficient and those who are just not up to par, or as I like to say, can't cut the mustard. Well, that changed because the environment changed. Instead, in this world of abundance we have, we have people who want to support this and support such people as our benighted and overly hopeful conversation partner in the comment section that I cited mentions. We need to provide assistance to these people. We need to make sure they reach their full potential. We need to do all these things, even though such a practice is in fact ultimately negative and has negative consequences for the rest of society. It's also somewhat dysgenic, but that's a separate issue. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about the strange bewilderment people feel when confronted with their own cognitive dissonance. I'm talking about the scenario I painted, this absurd situation where we promote non-athletes to improve themselves so they can be in a stimulating environment and feel good about themselves and actualize themselves and all this nonsense. I mean, that's absurd. Everyone accepts it as absurd, but we do the same thing with the dumb. We do the same thing with the average. We do the same thing with those who are not cognitively capable enough to truly benefit from this stuff. And by that I mean, who's going to do better? Should we pour resources into a young teenage boy who has an IQ of 140 or a young teenage boy who is very athletically talented but has an IQ of 90? What about an even harsher example? A young teenage boy who has neither athletic talent nor cognitive talent, also has an IQ of 90, maybe even 85. But should we favor that child over the child who has an IQ of 140, who's already taken an interest in biochemistry, or rather in chemistry and physics, who clearly has an aptitude in mathematics? Should he not be furnished and furthered in his own way in a way that will of course be much more beneficial not just to him, he will actualize himself better, but even to the kid who frankly speaking is dumber, because his actions will have a much bigger ripple effect on society in the long term. He'll be more productive, he'll contribute more, etc, etc, etc. No, we don't do that. We do quite the opposite. A little anecdotal example that recently came up in a conversation I had with a friend of mine who works in a budget office in a major state in the United States. He is a very talented older gentleman. He knows what he's doing. Told me the story of hiring a relatively wet behind the ears guy on to the team, engaging in these budget analysis activities. And the guy really is not cutting the mustard, not being up to par, not being able to really keep up. They were considering firing him, but instead my friend in his great munificence decided to take him under his wing and tutor him for untold weeks if not months to make sure that he does a good job. And by golly, all of a sudden after two or three months of intense tutoring, wasting time after work, wasting time during work helping the guy out, he became better and self-sufficient. And now he can do the work on a fairly average level and even isn't too bad at it sometimes. Ah, but the opportunity costs. The opportunity costs there in the scenario paint a perfect picture of the greater opportunity costs that arise in such situations as the ones I depicted, whether it's the absurd fictive scenario I offered in the beginning of the video or the actual real contemporary scenario we suffer from in the United States and elsewhere with regards to such things as affirmative action and helping people when the help is not justified or warranted. No, this is something that is quite similar. So the budget office of that state could have avoided the extra opportunity costs, the waste of time, by getting someone who would actually do the job alternatively, or getting someone who could actually do the job and helping that person out to become even better at the job. No, instead time, resources, etc. are wasted on an individual who simply cannot cut the mustard. Well, I think this is bad policy. I think this is a bad practice and is a practice that is reinforced, of course, by the dogmas of our time and the doctrinal nature of education. But, of course, that is a product and has been birthed by modernity, by the modern environment. In the past, people engaged in infanticide, and women have a much larger tendency to, greater tendency to engage in infanticide than men. One could speculate why my hypothesis would be for the same reasons why women are the limiting factor in reproduction, because they have a, well, they're sort of essentially wedded to the child and they have a huge investment to make, and so it makes sense that they would be the ones to kill the child if they deem it necessary. Neither here nor there. We get in the situation where we're being blinded by the comforts of our society as to what is best for society. Now, society is a strange word, I don't like using it, but it's a synonym for civilization in many ways. It's a synonym for the greater good, for what's out there. If you want to experience the best in society, we're not going to experience that by promoting failure, by promoting, frankly speaking, the weak, the incompetent, the deficient. Now, I'm not arguing here, as many might impute, potentially, those who seek to denigrate my content, that we should be doing, causing active harm to people that are cognitively deficient or weak or just not that smart or average, but neither should they be getting excessive help. They do not warrant it. Now, of course, this isn't fair, but life isn't fair. Life is a genetic lottery. Life is a lottery of the environment. As I said a thousand times, who knows how different the Stardust, who had been born in Arkansas as opposed to a middle-class family in New York, would have turned out or been. Who knows? Yes, it is all random. However, we need to take the randomness and make the best of it. And whatever pity, whatever sympathy we might have for the cognitively deficient, for the average, etc., it does not strike me as a good argument to support that for reasons of ethics. Because if you really want to be ethical, you have to argue the long-term benefits of engaging in certain activities, not the short-term. So, maybe little John, who's not that bright, might feel a lot better about himself, and maybe his literacy rate will, his literacy ability will increase, and maybe he'll read a few more books. Maybe he'll do all these things. And who knows? Maybe he'll be a clerk somewhere as opposed to a guy who sweeps the streets. Well, why not invest all that time and energy and all those resources into somebody who's going to achieve far more and be more of a benefit to society? And this is actually somewhat of a left-wing argument, even though I'm definitely not left-wing, because they argue all the time for the good of society. I suppose it's a bit utilitarian as well. The greatest good for the number Jonathan Stuart Mill, etc. But look, I see this as a very clear-cut case, that just as we should not be inclined to support the physically weak and the unathletic with bursaries and scholarships and offering them coaches, I don't think we should be wasting our time with average people and below-average people trying to support them and make them better. Sure, they would improve, but they would never, ever reach the same level, as he rightly points out, the genius level that some of these other gifted children might. And the evidence for the failure of this policy and these practices abounds. The evidence is everywhere to see. Everywhere you look across the vast yonder in the cesspit of modernity and modern society, you see this practice. In the West, at least. You see the promotion of stupidity over intelligence. You see affirmative action programs that are meant to help those who need the help. Those, partly as well, who at some point in time whose ancestors had been subjects of a great miscarriage of justice, perhaps, would be one argument some might offer. All these things offered in place of a reasonable, much more logical line of thought than what I'm offering. And not because I'm offering it, but because in an axiomatic statement, I would argue that that is the way of things and that is the way societies improve by promoting the best they have, whether that's athletic or cognitive or intellectual or otherwise. We have seen the massive failure for decades on end of all these programs. As I had recently mentioned in the discussion with Red Pill Germany, it's never ending. Recall, if you watch that video or listen to it, I will repeat it here, the example of that nutty Jewish professor from New York in 1980, I believe it, talking to Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell asking the very pertinent and very relevant question, how many years one needs to evaluate the effectiveness of quote-unquote welfare programs? And the professor was hard pressing. Well, I would say maybe another 20 or 30 years before we proceed. I'd say a good 30 years. Well, OK, we're all the way in the future, way into the future, 30 years hence, in fact. We're more like 37 years hence, and it still hasn't worked. So I guess we need another 50 years or 100 years. How long will this insanity continue until everything collapses in a great calamity? And that is what I fear, among many other things, the great calamity of supporting all these people of squandering resources on those who might deserve it. Although IQ is, of course, related to socioeconomic status, it strongly correlates with that. There will be poor people who are smart, and those poor smart people, they need that more than the dumb smart people, because we want smart people. And I will repeat this in future videos, and particularly in a future video that is of great importance, but the most important resource out there is not gold, it's not oil, it is not diamonds, it is none of that. It is human intelligence, human cognition. And if we don't support that resource and extract it, by that I mean, yes, take advantage of it, in the same way that diamonds are extracted, or gold, or oil, well, a similar effect to what would happen if we decide to shut down oil production will affect society. Which is to say, that if we stop harvesting oil from the earth, many of our, well, our entire civilization would collapse, we're still fossil fuel dependent, unfortunately. It's not a perfect analogy, but if this trend continues, and we already see it continue, things will get worse and worse and worse. We need to somehow acquit ourselves of what has become, of course, dogma, the dogma of our age, but also something that's very strongly reinforced by the environment we live in, that is supporting and aiding people who do not warrant that aid. Now, you can argue, but as I said before, it's all random anyway, why it doesn't matter whom you choose to support. Well, it does, because there are long-term consequences. Personal consequences for the gifted, the intellectually gifted, but also long-term consequences for civilization. We need smart people. Human intelligence is our most important resource, and this welfare system, and supporting the cognitively deficient, and the dumb, and even the average, this must be done away with if we actually want to move towards a civilization that is truly advanced, that we can actually be proud of, that we can actually do something with, and most importantly, that actually has a chance, a minimal chance, but a chance to withstand the possibility of an extinction event, or the destruction or annihilation of the planet. If we keep on supporting dumb people, that's not going to happen, among a host of other things. So, I hope this video has been informative. This is my view of things, and as likely is the case, I will probably produce more content in the future, assuming I'm still alive, so thanks for tuning in, and I will check you out on a future date, in hopefully not the all too distant future. You If you liked this video, please like, share, and subscribe. 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