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| Re: New Blog Post: This one is for SMAZ, LuchAAA, and italianstallion... (903239) | |||
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Re: New Blog Post: This one is for SMAZ, LuchAAA, and italianstallion... |
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Posted by JayMan on Wed Jan 25 19:57:37 2012, in response to Re: New Blog Post: This one is for SMAZ, LuchAAA, and italianstallion..., posted by SMAZ on Wed Jan 25 18:11:30 2012. Awesome!First and foremost, Occam's Razor is your friend. I'll return to that shortly. >>>However, it couldn't be primarily responsible for the divide or even a significant part of it because there is little genetic overlap between Northern, Central, and Southern Italians. Exactly. The difference in IQ and economic development is based on historical migration patterns, especially after Unification. The more high achieving and adventurous ones left. The fearful, conservative or just plain dumb ones stayed. So here you're saying that the differences in IQ and other personality traits of the various Italian regions are due to genetic differences between them while here: It's why your data is worthless when grasping (or gasping) for some sort of underlying genetic factor as an explanation for varying IQs based on regional residence. You're saying that they're not. Which is it? As it turns out, it simply could not be the case that even a sustained northward brain drain is the source of the differences in the Italian population, because there is no genetic overlap! Unless the assortment happened a long time ago (which is possible), there would be a whole smattering of Southern genes among Northern populations. There isn't any. >>>Well, America has its own ethnic divides that break down trust and cooperation, something I'm going to delve into when I take a look at Appalachia and the American South. The Eskimos, the Blacks or the Ozarkers caused the Exxon Valdez disaster? My point was that a good portion of America's dysfunction is due to its ethnic diversity, and not even the under-performing ones per se, but the fact that there are so many different groups. I wasn't saying that "Eskimos or Blacks cause shipwrecks and undersea explosions," more that the institutional dysfunctions caused by American diversity play a role in such tragedies. But let's not forget, shit does happen. This is especially the case with the Exxon Valdez. But sometimes, what's especially telling is what happens after that, as we saw with the Costa Concordia, the BP disaster, and with the Nordlys. >>>Even though Costa is based in Genoa, this doesn't mean that the man who gave Schettino his job wasn't somebody from the South who was doing his bro a favor... It also doesn't mean that Schettino may put his toilet paper rolls paper front vs paper back when wiping his ass. You are grasping at straws. Am I? And I'm sure these things will all come out, and we'll see. >>>Are you saying that these aren't honest depictions of Southern Italian mobster culture? Those are somewhat honest depictions of AMERICAN mobster culture. And where are most Italian Americans from? Yup, Southern Italy. For the record, every documentary or crime expose I've seen about REAL mafiosos does make them seem very similar to what is portrayed on screen. And then there's this. The real people involved in the real events depicted in "Goodfellas" were also of Irish, Jewish and Anglo origins plus African-Americans and others. It doesn't get more American than that. Fair enough, but still... see above. Besides, like I said, there's a reason we keep getting movies about Italians and not about the Dutch or the Polish. It's because Italians have spunk and are interesting. It's also why Americans keep making movies about the Ancient Romans as opposed to whatever boring shit was happening in Estonia and Finland at the time. They sure are! Italians are nothing if entertaining. Italians are often charismatic and more masculine than those that originate to their north, and hence we like to watch movies about them. But so are Blacks. So are Rednecks. So are Scots and Irish to an extent. Lower IQ people are often entertaining and more spontaneous: The Colbert Report (Of course, not all lower IQ groups seem to be this way. Muslims and Hispanics don't seem to be very interesting groups in this sense.) This reasons for this are fairly simple. In harsh northern climates where survival called for men who were good providers (and where monogamy reigned), different traits were selected. As a result, northerners tend to be more introverted, and well, boring. Notice that the most boring societies tend to also be the more orderly ones. By contrast in warmer climes, especially by the time you reach Africa, men didn't need to be as much providers as they needed to be warriors, and this selected for more extroverted classical masculine men (and by extension, women as well, since they were the descendents of these men). In Southern Italy, with its inbred and hence highly clannish society, maintaining an air of extroverted masculinity was important. That and the complex networks of respect and familial loyalties makes for natural topics of interest for the movies. So we have a country (Italy) whose southern parts test like they have a lower average IQ, perform worse off economically as people with a lowered IQ would, has a layout where levels of corruption, strength of civic institutions, prevalence of nepotism and levels of historic inbreeding all correlate with this IQ difference, and for which there exist a fairly solid genetic divide. On top of which, the high-IQ/low-IQ divide sits on squarely on a line dividing where people one side (north) historically practiced late marriage and high levels of exogamy and on the other (south) earlier marriage and high levels of endogamy. The simplest explanation is that there are genetic differences in the population—likely stemming from historic mating patterns—that lead to these observed differences in IQ and behavior. Any other explanation is rather ad hoc and doesn't explain all the data we see, especially since this explanation seems rather parsimonious for other parts of the world. Occam's Razor is your friend. >>>>The longevity thing is a good point for investigation, though. It is well known that there a correlation between IQ and longevity, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out on the European continent. There is a correlation because higher IQ people produce more physicians, medical researchers and scientists that allow it to happen. They also produce the top flight administrators that make their medical facilities and health care systems run well. Indeed, as well higher IQ people tend to have fewer health problems in general and take better care of themselves. But we've heard that Mediterraneans have a low incidence of hearth disease, but it'll be interesting to map life expectancy in Europe and compare it average IQ. I'd be interested to see how well the relationship holds, and see who are the outliers. |
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