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Richard Hanania writes we need to shut up about HBD.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
He defines HBD as believing:
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
And he goes on to criticize 2-4. I tend to agree with those criticisms, but I think it’s fairly common in these kinds of circles to believe a version of 2 focused on ideological competition, not between racial groups, where the social justice left and its preferred policies to rectify group differences can only be defeated by using the facts to explain group differences that won’t be rectified through policy.
While I accept Hanania’s point that the facts frequently don’t matter in which political ideas rise to the top, I still feel like Cofnas has a point (whom Hanania is responding to).
I’m quite philosemetic, for example. The best argument against antisemitism based on observing Jewish overperformance and concluding it’s due to some kind of plot is explaining that intelligence matters and the Ashkenazim underwent a particular history and we now observe them having very high average test scores.
Hanania himself wrote not so long ago about how Jewish personality traits might be needed to fully explain their political interest and influence, beyond just intelligence.
Using biology to explain overperformance but not underperformance seems like a strange compromise.
In much of today’s polite society, if one points out the achievement gap among groups, you’re a racist.
But if one doesn’t acknowledge the achievement gap between groups to justify affirmative action, you’re a racist.
And that’s without even mentioning biology! Watching lefties like Kathryn Paige Harden and Freddie deBoer try to (admirably) describe these kinds of issues while trying to remain in the good graces of polite society is enlightening.
Now, if you could guarantee me a return to a more race-blind culture and legal system if we shut up about genetics then I would take that. But we are on a path towards learning the murky details of (and being able to influence) genetics of both groups and individuals. I don’t think the elephant in the room will stay quiet.
It’s a bit remarkable to read Hanania write:
I think he means, “talk about something publicly” as opposed to at all, but actually I’ll easily bite those bullets and say we ought to understand the disadvantages short men face due to female preferences and that we ought to know just how much we expend society’s resources on the severely handicapped.
Social desirability bias is incredibly powerful and one should choose one’s battles. Polite society in the West went from being quite racist, in ways that didn’t always align with the facts, to correcting hard (thanks, Hitler) to race is only skin deep, which also doesn’t align. And then we got the influence of Kendiism.
Even ignoring immigration (where he doesn’t cover the Garret Jones stance), a lot of US politics comes down to this issue, and HBD was mostly in a quietist tradition the last few decades with little influence for being outside the Overton Window.
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts. Conceding the present Overton Window is unassailable is I think conceding defeat to the social justice left.
A rare miss from Hanania. Much of the piece is just railing against people he doesn't like using group differences for their own political projects. Obviously this happens, but these people are incredibly fringe and have no power (although you'd be almost forgiven for believing otherwise if you spend a lot of time on twitter). Hanania seems to pretty much acknowledge he believes HBD is true in the essay, so I won't even get into that argument in this post.
The reason talking about HBD is important is that so much policy is based on the false premise that not-HBD. How can you even begin to attempt to fix education without addressing the inevitable racial gaps in ability grouping and standardized testing? Hanania's example about the politician slickly changing the subject is very stupid imo. Cofnas is right that smart people and the elite opinion-makers that have an out-sized influence on politics and policy will not be convinced by these cheap tricks. If you want to eliminate the injustice and (worse) inefficiency of policies based on blank slatism then you need to convince the intelligentsia. These people will not be convinced by changing the subject. I think popularizing HBD is much more likely than western elites saying "liberty is so great that it's worth racial inequality". That tradeoff has already been rejected. What might work is the knowledge that correcting disparities via school lunches or iPads for schools or preferential admissions/hiring will not work.
I do have some sympathy for the argument that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really work and political movements aren't based on good arguments. Even the environmentalist position, as long as it acknowledges the achievement gap which is pretty much impossible to deny, entails blacks in the US being underrepresented in any meritocracy. Of course, progressive environmentalists will never say that "obviously affirmative action means less-qualified applicants are hired, but those applicants are less qualified because of lead/food deserts/redlining/racism so it's good and right to balance those disadvantages out" even though that's the logical consequence of acknowledging the achievement gap and being pro-AA. The coherent position is rarely the one stated or defended, but Hanania's argument that we should therefore not talk about HBD doesn't follow. Arguments are soldiers, but forcing progressives to twist themselves into knots trying to explain why non-blacks so struggle to run 100m in under 10 seconds is a good rhetorical tactic. There is an enormous corpus of literature that's essentially blank-slatist racial cope, identifying environmental causes for black underachievement which can only conceivably be remedied by the types of policies Hanania has spent the last few years fighting. I don't see any rhetorically viable response to this corpus from an opponent of DEI or whatever the race-communism buzzword is these days other than HBD. Basically, I agree with Cofnas and don't think Hanania really refutes him.
It's also very strange to cede the idea that truth has value in political discussions. Falsity has costs. Propagating the truth about Lysenkoism wouldn't have destroyed the USSR or communism as an ideology but it may have saved many lives. Talking about HBD is likewise not a silver bullet, but if it's true then there's a lot of alpha in acknowledging it, if only to reduce the inefficiency of policy based on false premises. Also, Humans are irrational but that doesn't mean there's no advantage in making arguments based on true rather than false premises.
I'm not sure if Hanania is really trying to distance himself from his Hoste days, if he's making some attempt to increase his mainstream palatability, or if he just genuinely has a bad opinion. Whichever it is, not talking about race differences is how you get SCOTUS opinions saying that "in 25 years, affirmative action will not be necessary". That quote from the Grutter case upholding affirmative action is a direct link between the false premises Hanania doesn't want to correct and the laws that he wants to change.
For those reading this who are unsure of the facts but have noticed that many proponents of HBD are obnoxious and/or have politics you find objectionable, let me just say that autism is a superpower and the truth of a statement is completely orthogonal to how it's used in political discourse. In general, you can have whatever moral or aesthetic preferences you want, but you should be interested in having as accurate a view of the world as possible, if only to implement your preferences effectively. There's room for progressives who want racial preferences in embryo screening or genetic engineering to close the achievement gap! Effective politics may be possible without concern for the truth but effective policy is not.
I don't consider it much of a "rare" miss. I find Hanania's writings increasingly incoherent across the board, and I think he is generally searching for an odd niche to try and maintain relevance now that his actual big splash in has waned. Trying to balance takes in the anti-woke sphere to ensure you are "respectable" tends to put you into a land of comments that are either uninteresting, or fallacious, and thats where this one, and a lot of them recently, have landed.
He's not trying to be respectable, he genuinely believes most things he says, and just likes being inflammatory in all directions, I'm pretty sure.
I usually like his writing.
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If he were really trying to ensure that he was "respectable", he would not mention HBD at all. Instead, what he is doing is almost systematically pissing off both the left and the right at the same time, burning bridges on both sides. I respect him for that, it takes courage. Plus I think that both the left and the right should be mocked, so I enjoy that he riles them up.
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He's become utterly unbearable on X (it's the same joke ad nauseum. Wegeddit, the IDF are the good guys) , but I wrote that off as Twitter basically becoming an engagement farm for him while substantive posts go on Substack. You can actually maintain these positions - Bryan Caplan both accepts HBD and is for immigration - but Hanania specifically comes across as a troll looking for an audience.
Reading his response to comments here... Maybe I'm crazy, but I can't see how he isn't playing dumb (right down to standard tactics like "there's no taboo on talking about this")
It's hard to disagree with the commenter's charge that he's refusing to answer "well, why not open borders but no Muslims?" because it'll either reduce to an "unPC" take from our supposed contrarian or force him to bite the bullet on accepting Muslims, which he also doesn't want to do for obvious reasons.
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I think he’s putting out a lot of good information and content at what seems like a rapid click to me.
But in finding his overall voice he seems incoherent to me.
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Who, uh, doesn't spend a lot of time on twitter? Matt Yglesias spends a lot of time on twitter, and often quote-tweets these fringe far-right figures. Tucker's writers breathed the twitter-far-right environment both when he was at Fox and now. Random smart people I know IRL follow all sorts of people on twitter. Even many years ago the social network for the "liberal media" was ... twitter. And a lot of relatively mainstream right-wing media figures follow various far-right people on twitter. Sure, the far-right doesn't currently have *power, but it certainly has influence. And most of the far-right does mix in the 'statistical differences in IQ' part of HBD with white identitarianism.
His point is sort of that 'not-HBD' is a key part of the logic justifying affirmative action, but not actually a key part of the political resonance of affirmative action for almost everyone. The political resonance is just that people really really don't want to be racist and really really want to help the poor black people helpless in the face of structural factors. Someone who's an earnest progressive activist isn't going to be receptive to HBD, it just doesn't do anything for any of their motives.
And in terms of those motives: Scott Alexander clearly believes races have different average IQs. But he's a liberal so he doesn't make a huge deal about it - it just doesn't feel good. Whereas someone like ZHPL or Fuentes do believe races have different IQs, and they buy more into the whole far-right idea cluster so they make a huge deal about it. Hanania's significantly more liberal, so he doesn't really want people to become ZHPL or Fuentes, so he doesn't want to make a huge deal about race and IQ. Also, maybe emphasizing race and IQ puts you in a coalition with the 'nazis', and then the nazis are toxic to the public, so your cause loses.
As he says at the end:
(I'm not agreeing with his position here, just trying to explain it)
He'd say 'yeah, we already tried to convince the intelligentsia, see the Bell Curve, it didn't work'. But - does that mean we should stop trying? Just because it's not enough doesn't mean it isn't useful to promote HBD on the margin. Some of the intelligentsia (eg Scott and the many mainstream people who respect him) clearly are convinced, and that can't hurt the Right or Freedom or w/e.
I think the right-wing Overton window is already shifting in the HBD direction, partly because Musk bought twitter and allowed it to be discussed. In real life though, it's still absolutely unthinkable and career suicide to talk about it frankly. I take your point though, the idea does actually have (increasing) power just because of it's popularity on twitter. Maybe we'll see that translate into real life in the next decade.
It's a fact that obviously helps the right more than the left because it torpedoes a core left-wing belief about the world, but in the end it's just a fact, like evolution, that can be used to justify whatever policies the arguer wants. LKY seems to have instituted affirmative action in Singapore partly because of his race realist beliefs. I think it's really asinine to assign facts a political significance in and of themselves, even if it happens that currently one political faction likes talking about it more than another. It's not hard to argue for largely the same things leftists are arguing for now while being race realist, but I think discourse and policy would be less dysfunctional were leftists forced to do so instead of making magic dirt arguments.
I agree this is his point but I disagree with him. I think a drastic shift in the Overton is possible simply by popularizing knowledge of HBD-related facts. I think many people are genuinely unaware even of the achievement gap, let alone the evidence for it being largely genetic. The NYT runs an article about selective highschools having an issue with diversity every couple of years, not sure how that would even be news unless people weren't aware of the achievement gap. In my interactions with people I don't reveal my actual views so maybe they don't either, but I get the impression most people are simply unaware of the kind of stuff you see on race realist twitter. If that's really the case, I think there's a strong case that talking about it can change peoples' minds.
I also really dislike the argument that because wignats like talking about it no one else should lest they be associated with wignats. Politics is primarily about preferences but facts are actually important as well. Yglesias has a relevant piece on this https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-strange-death-of-education-reform-3f5 wherein he pretty much says that denying the achievement gap exists is stupid and harmful. I think a similar argument can easily be made from a liberal perspective for not denying that the gap is significantly genetic. Preventing wasteful policies that are based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is reason enough to talk about it. There's a great quote from HBD-archon Greg Clark about this:
"This is not an “ugly” fact. It is not a “beautiful” fact. It is just a fact. This fact helps explain why it is so hard for societies using the levers of social policy to eliminate group disparities in outcomes. It is a fact that we should be aware of in thinking about inequalities of income and wealth."
The evidence will only continue to grow, I think eventually it will just be too much to deny. Even with the taboo on talking about it and researching it, even with institutions like the NIH forbidding research on it, it's just inevitable that if HBD is true it will become undeniable eventually. If it's true then the sooner it's acknowledged the better for crafting effective policy, so if you believe it's true I think you should want to convince people. Of course, taking the position Scott Alexander tacitly confessed to in his Kolmogorov And The Lightning essay of not talking about it to save your social status is completely fine too, you just shouldn't discourage others from talking about it.
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I think his point is valid that it's not something to go out of your way to bring up because it looks bad to many people, but yeah, you could well end up in situations where you have to bring it up.
I think given the relevance to so many current political issues, and the fact that so many elites and so many policies operate under the belief that it isn't true, it's actually just important to talk about in general. I agree that most of the people who do talk about it are cringe, but that doesn't affect the need to talk about it.
There really doesn't seem to be any way to respond to the progressive objections to Hanania's preferred positions other than to talk about it. If blank slatism is true, doesn't the free market just perpetuate the underclass status of an ethnic group that could otherwise be just as successful as others? Aren't we missing out on a huge number of doctors and engineers by not trying to remedy the environmental factors causing such a huge disparity in every measure of cognitive ability?
The problem is that it reads to me as having a higher chance of biasing the typical person against you rather than for you, unless done very carefully.
You could point to culture, but yes, it's to answer that sort of question when it might be most reasonable to bring it up.
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Cofnas misunderstands the progressive impulse. Cofnas’ proposal is the equivalent of telling the commissar “well, you see sir, if we allow capitalism, private property and great wealth inequality, we’ll all be richer”. This is true, but it’s not the point. The point is ‘equity’, the point is that ‘private property is inherently exploitative’, the point is that racially disparate outcomes are inherently wrong, regardless of cause.
Progressives won’t be convinced by the “HBD supports meritocracy” argument because meritocracy isn’t axiomatic for them; equity is. DEI doesn’t require a lack of HBD, DEI can easily adapt to HBD, the central shibboleth of leftism is “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. The distribution of ‘ability’ is not hugely important.
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I agree, as I said it's completely possible to be a pro-DEI race-realist, it's just that it would necessitate a different narrative and a different set of supported policies and rhetorical positions. I think Cofnas believes (and I agree) that progressivism wouldn't survive the necessary shift in rhetoric and policy advocacy. I think you also underestimate how rational people are. There are some true believers but I think you underestimate the extent to which people are willing to change their mind based on facts. Look at the shift in attitudes towards the Soviet Union among western intellectuals after the Hungarian and Czech revolts and their suppression by the USSR. There are certainly some people who are beyond convincing, but the ascendency of this worldview requires the cooperation of so many people that I can't believe the zealots are more than a small fraction. I also don't see any better arguments, so if you value argument as a political tool at all I'm not sure what the alternative to talking about HBD is.
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You put it very well.
I got the sense Hanania was punching down against his younger self and all the dumb conservatives that annoy him. I don’t really come away from the essay understanding what his preferred approach is.
What’s funny is Hanania has quite literally written about his autism as a super power so it’s really full circle.
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