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Notes -
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.
I think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
Poverty sticks. If your parents lived their entire lives without wealth, then you're going to start with no wealth and little investment, you're going to take on debt and take short-term solutions over long-term investments just to stay afloat, you're not going to be able to afford a car to get to the better job you were offered 35 minutes from home, or you'll lose the job when your shitty used car malfunctions and you miss a day. Etc. The basis for all of capitalism is capital accumulation, money making money through investment or collecting rents, and that's a game where starting conditions and your initial pot matter more than anything else.
Poor education sticks. If it was illegal for your great-grandparents to be taught to read, and your grandparents were taught in segregated schools that barely treated them better than animals, and your parents were seen as per-linguistic savages because they spoke a different dialect than their teachers and were put in slow classes and neglected because of it, how well are they going to educate you as an infant, how well are they going to help you with your homework, what kind of relationship with the school and the state are they going to train you to expect? The US absolutely has social and cultural 'classes' that tend to run in families, and coming from a family with a history of poor education makes it a lot harder to escape your class.
Minority status matters. If you are making a movie you may as well appeal to the largest possible audience, white people. And if you want to appeal to white people, you may as well have a white main character. And if your main character is white, a white writer and white director and a white makeup artist and hair stylist will probably provide a more authentic voice and feel to that character. None of that's discrimination, it's just smart business decisions... and you can make the same argument for the management of a company that sells clothes aimed at white people, or customer service jobs in a majority white area, or etc. It's not discrimination to want to mentor up-and-coming employees who you have a lot in common with and see yourself in and enjoy hanging out with, and hey look for the majority white managers those appealing mentees overwhelmingly tend to be white for actually truly non-discriminatory reasons.
And etc., across every aspect of life.
And these aren't just drags on the system that slow down the process of everyone attaining their 'natural' place in the hierarchy. They're mutually-reinforcing process that actively push the people on the bottom further down.
If your career doesn't advance as fast because your boss wanted to mentor someone they felt more in tune with, then you might have to work longer hours and have less time to help with your kids homework, you might be in a lower-tier position that just fires you when your car breaks and you come in late instead of a higher-tier position where that's fine and no one cares, you might retire with less savings and your kids will need to spend their money and time on caring for you in your old age instead of getting themselves training and slack to look for better positions, etc.
I feel like there's a libertarian logic which expects people to be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the position in life that their natural talents naturally oblige them to. And I'm here to say that, while that story is not impossible for any (single individual to live out, that is just not how hugely stochastic processes involving millions of inter-related causal factors and hundreds of millions of people work, at all.
When you average across hundreds of millions of people, all of those stochastic factors that make it harder or less likely for one newborn infant to have a life trajectory towards their full potential than another really add up.
And if no one is making any conscious effort to correct for those factors - if we have no diversity initiatives and no AA and no social efforts to lift up disadvantaged people and no policies that care about this at all - if we just leave it up to chance and the standard grinding gears of the economy and society and government, then things are not going to sort themselves out quickly.
I don't expect 100% of the first generation of hugely disadvantaged people to experience zero discrimination to completely solve the problem and attain their genetically-proper level in their lifetime. I don't expect 100% of their children to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their grandchildren to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their great-grandchildren to attain it.
I have personal experience with families and their family histories and trajectories that span great-grandparent to great-grandchild. I can see how family circumstances flow over 4 generations, and I can have an intuitive sense that while there's definitely room for variance and changes over that timeframe, there is not an actual 0% casual relationship between the financial and social circumstances of the first and last generation. Not even close.
I admit that I don't have the type of intuition needed to guess what happens after 10 or 15 generations. If our systems of capitalism and government and society don't undergo any big changes in that time, then I still expect the correlations to exist somewhat even over those timeframes, but I really don't know. I can admit that maybe that would be long enough to erase them, just through entropy and simulated annealing, if no one was making any intentional effort to erase them otherwise.
But, that those differences would disappear in 60 years since the Civil Rights Act, even if we pretended that that date was the end of all racism and discrimination in the country. No. Fuck no. Come the fuck on.
People's grandparents were educated under segregation. People's parents couldn't buy homes or get out of slums due to redlining. People in the prime-age workforce today grew up under the anti-ebonics backlash that treated them as stupid and illiterate for being fluent in a non-standard dialect and refused to teach them in a language they understood.
Lots of people overcome those disadvantages, but stochastically they will drag teh average very far down. That's what the word 'disadvantage' means in this context.
So when you say there is 'mounting evidence', my reaction is 'since when? I would expect the timeframe to be hundreds of years, so the fact that the gap has only closed a little in the last 40 years seems like not much evidence to me, pretty close to what I'd expect. And the modern debate over HBD and cancel culture isn't even 40 years old, it's like 10 years old, there absolutely should not be appreciable changes in the data that could count as persuasive evidence over a timeframe like that.
Which makes me wonder if the 'mounting evidence' is less of 'we have a general model of how we expect this process to evolve over time under each hypothesis, and the data is favoring one hypothesis to a decisive degree', and more 'I've been talking about this issue for much of my adult life and nothing has changed in that timeframe, so it sure feels like the situation is unchangeable and will never change and anyone who doesn't admit that is delusional'.
Or maybe the 'mounting evidence' phrase does refer to the entire trend over the last 50 years, and you just expect much bigger changes over that timeframe. It's just the difference in intuition.
Which of course gets back to the big difference in philosophy and intuition between classic liberals and progressives.
The liberal position is 'erase discrimination from our laws and our hearts, and you're done. Without those hard barriers, people will rise to their natural level, we'll have a true meritocracy, no one will have anything to complain about, the world will be just and fair.'
And the progressive position is 'Well, that's a good start, but you don't actually live in the most-convenient-world where that's all it takes. There are inertial factors that keep formerly poor and oppressed groups poor and disadvantaged far into the future, there are persistent structural factors that disadvantage minorities for totally non-discriminatory reasons. Those forces push away from a meritocracy, so if you want a meritocracy you have to actually study what those factors are and apply some type of corrective against them. Those forces have nothing to do with the individual and are fundamentally unjust, so if you want justice you have to go out there and make it yourself.'
And this gets to the fundamental difference in intuition between the left and the right on things like AA and diversity initiatives and minority scholarship grants and etc. The right sees a situation where two resumes arrive and you care about race when evaluating and sees a process that pushes away from meritocracy. The left sees a system where many people never produce a resume that represents their full innate potential because of systemic factors working against them, and sees a correction applied against those factors as a long-term pressure towards a meritocratic equilibrium.
Of course, this is me once again saying 'people who think like me look at the whole picture and the full complexity of the world and have sophisticated thought about how to correct it, people who disagree with me just look at small atomic situations and have simplistic thoughts about how to react to them and never consider the macro-scale implications of that policy'.
There's an extent to which that just feels true, like, the right is more focused on individualism and individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and what is right-or-wrong behavior when two individuals interact, and is inherently suspicious or dismissive of systems-level explanations that rely on stochastic process and probability distributions over outcomes over generations, right? Being derisive towards that type of academic-sounding socialist/communist egghead bullshit is part of the brand, right?
But there's also an extent to which I feel like that must be wrong, where probably everyone can model how their opponent reacts to individual bounded scenarios but can't simulate their larger complicated systemic worldview, and therefore concludes their opponents don't have such a systemic worldview to begin with.
I certainly have the experience of people on the right describing people on the left as though they are motivated by individual-level hatred of white men instead of macro-level concerns about how the overall structure of the system unfairly and dangerously advantages some demographics.
Am I making the same myopic mistake when I say the right views this question through the lens of individual achievement and personal responsibility and misses the larger systemic/stochastic factors that produce national trends in the data? Or is that just literally actually their position?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on that bit, it's a place I could learn something about people's positions and worldviews.
I agree! Even if you multiply a number by .8 every decade, after 300 years .1% still remains. However, crucially, I don't think that a .1% - or even 7% - remaining difference in racial wealth or achievement gaps is a huge political issue. And then it's plausible again that the gap closes faster. How long closing the gap to that takes depends on how quickly someone who has average genes, but is poor, mixes into having average income.
I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway. There's just so much going on in society that it's quite hard to figure out cause and effect. The thing is, there are other much stronger lines of evidence, like the fraction of of black people in the top .1% of intelligence being so small, the gap in IQ or standardized test scores, etc. And once you believe that for other reasons, it's a simple explanation for existing income gaps. But I'll go through this first:
And yet, the absolute poverty rate has absolutely plummeted. All of our great-grandparents lived in conditions that, by today's standards, were truly horrific. Yet, here we are. The vast majority of Americans aren't in any sense poor. The relative costs of food, rent, transportation, etc are cheaper than they've ever been. And many of the people I know personally who are high-income or high-status had average income parents or grandparents.
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite (~50%) heritable. It makes sense that, over multiple generations in a deeply connected modern world, people would cluster along these lines. And that it'd be difficult to distinguish without careful looks this effect from 'poverty keeps people down'.
I think the material abundance of modern life sinks ideas like 'poverty rationally forces you to take on debt and short-term solutions' - you can just not spend much money on non-must-haves, save, work, etc. The poor people I know all attest that poor people are worse with their money than middle-class people, act less rationally, etc. Yeah, it's a distribution, there definitely are smart people who are poor for one reason or another, but not anywhere near enough to explain most poverty or even racial income gaps.
This is why there are so many (bad) papers to the effect of "poverty makes impulse control worse", "epigenetic effects of poverty", etc. Unfortunately, they're methodologically poor and don't replicate.
I mean ... universal education. Six hours a day, five days a week, being directly taught in every subject. This system has taught the vast majority of kids, smart and average and below average, rich and poor, over the past few centuries. Like, it's a significant component of why modern life works at all - the hyper-smart kid who's randomly born into a middle-class family does well on test scores, gets into a top college, specializes in something, and goes into industry from there and designs a chip or writes scripts for a movie or trades bonds or whatever. And even if the average person doesn't go to a good school, they can excel once they've gotten a job and then be promoted based on their competence and rise from there. Both of these have happened constantly, for any given successful person if you go between 0 and 3 generations back most paths terminate at someone whose parents weren't well off but did well in school or an occupation. Poor education mostly doesn't stick. Yeah, it sticks in some cases, but I don't think most. And even granting that, modern technology helps even more - a kid in a bad home can teach themselves english with TV, they gain knowledge and skills just by having fun on the internet, etc etc etc.
Or, quantitatively, take a look at this, a visualization from a paper (i'm not super confident that the data for this is correct, but I'd be surprised, but not terribly so, if it was wrong enough to affect the conclusion): https://viz.theinequalitylab.com/Animations/1-mobility-rates.html
Your theory would predict that being bottom 20%, or bottom 40%, is 'sticky'. Yet, 40% of children of whites in the bottom 20% made it out of the bottom 40% (and 27% of black children). In the second poorest quintile, 29% of white and 14% of black children make it to the top 40%. It seems like poverty is a lot stickier for blacks than whites. Being rich is a lot less sticky for blacks and whites though! Go look at the visualizations, it's quite striking. Curiously enough, the numbers for the 2nd top quintile seem a lot starker than for the poorer quintiles - i.e. in a relative sense poor blacks and whites have somewhat similar rates of existing poverty, but richer blacks drop out of the rich quintiles a lot faster than rich whites. This isn't at all what you'd guess if stickiness of poverty was what was driving racial income gap differences. And again this is where the multigenerational trauma or poverty habits or whatever research comes in, but that doesn't replicate.
I mean, this illustrates the other problem. If you've watched any popular media recently - there are ethnic minorities everywhere. Even Biden notices it. This is an explicit effort on the part of the progressive-leaning people who make up the media. If some sort of implicit bias in media makes it harder for minorities to get jobs, it's more than made up for by this. We're basically discussing black people specifically here, and:
And, despite this representation, the SAT score gaps aren't closing. The progressive arguments were a lot harder to rebut sixty years ago, when 'structural racism' and 'patriarchy' as described today were manifestly real and significant. But people with similar beliefs to you been hard at work dismantling them. And, you know, some of these gaps did close, especially for women. But the remaining gap is very difficult to explain along the same lines. I'm sure you've heard all about the test score gap before, so here's something:
But to demonstrate racial IQ differences, I think the clearest example is just that ... there are so few black people in high IQ professions. Like, nobel prize winners in math and science, top scientists in general, CEOs, and to a lesser extent anything intellectually demanding. And just anecdotally, any community that's very g-loaded just won't have a noticeable number of black people. I wonder what the rate here is. And the dual of this, of course, is that asians and especially jews are very overrepresented in those areas. And again anecdotally, any community around something that requires high intelligence has heaps of jews and asians. If you read around on wikipedia articles on pure research mathematics, there are jews (2% of US population, less internationally) everywhere, and barely a black to be found.
This can't be primarily explained as a poverty or racism effect. Plenty of these people were average income as kids, or had average income parents. There's clearly a strong race effect after you control for income. So many successful historical figures began their lives as poor or middle class Jews. And yet there are enough rich black families that you'd expect a lot more successful black pure mathematicians than there are.
And, to be clear, by my argument this is no inevitable somber fact of nature, but could be fixed by just modifying a small fraction of the nucleotides in the human genome of each (future) person. Or maybe large-scale selective sperm donation, but that's not really socially plausible in anything resembling today's environment.
(I think a better version of this post would have a lot more numbers and data, but w/e those are my thoughts)
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
Thanks!
The first thing was more of a composition error - I mean to imply that the whole basket of traits were somewhere around 50%.
The second mistake was just implying something incorrect though. I know that, I just wasn't paying enough attention while writing so broadly.
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