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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

I believe it was Nick Land who described cities as “IQ shredders”; they attract high intelligence people from rural areas and then immediately tank their birth rate.

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Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is this the same Nick Land famous for his racist views that kickstarted the "dark enlightenment"?

> Is this the same Nick Land famous for his racist views that kickstarted the "dark enlightenment"?

Yep, looks like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701129

The neoreactionary perspective is just oozing from that post, too.

Uh oh, that must make everything he says wrong!

Well, yes? It means he's primarily an ideologue telling just-so stories rather than someone acting in good faith.

For the curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20140918210933/http://www.xenosy...

For much of human history cities had disease rates so high that they were below replacement rate even in the pre-contraception era. It remains the case that that's where the art and culture happens, because the synergistic benefits of bringing like minded people together make them far more effective at producing culture than isolated farmers.

Yes, this is why Asians and Whites are the dumbest races. They had traditions of religious celibacy, which while not always honored, caused lower birthrates among the intelligent, whereas Africa, the New World, and the Middle East did not.

Joke explainer: That was sarcastic, but the point is anyone can make up a plausible just so story about anything by picking some factoids to support their prejudices.

Your joke doesn't really get to the point - do you think religious celibacy is as significant of a demographic factor as urbanization? Urbanization affects over half of the population.

So if you were being sarcastic about Asians and Whites being the dumbest races... are they the smartest? Seems a little racist. Please make use of the edit button.

There's a guideline on this site to assume that the poster is acting in good faith and not to take the worst interpretation of what someone is saying.

They almost certainly meant there is no difference rather than it being the true opposite.

Yes, just to be explicit: there are no meaningful genetic differences in intelligence among human "races" (which is not a meaningful genetic group anyway).

They don't tank them enough to damage society, right? Most intelligent people still have kids.

It's a good thing intelligence isn't a heritable trait.

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