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Notes -
What would you consider to be sufficient factual evidence to shift your views on HBD in various directions?
In order for the question to make sense, it is probably helpful to think of one's position on HBD along two axes, as in the Political Compass test, and one discrete parameter that would make less sense on an axis. You're also welcome to point out omitted positions.
x-axis, ranging from 0 to 10, where moving right indicates agreement with the statement: Human populations have significantly different average levels of intelligence, and this becomes far more pronounced in the right tails of the distributions.
y-axis, same range as the x-axis, but measured as 10 * perceived percentage of genetic contribution to the difference above. If you attribute some of the difference to the interaction of genetic and environmental influences, give that half the weight for simplicity.
Parameter z: How does intelligence correlate with the moral worth of a person? This can take on one of a few values:
(-1) Negatively
(0) Not at all
(1) Positively
(i) The moral worth of a person is dependent on their actions or beliefs, and intelligence only provides bounds on their culpability or merit.
x: 10 as stated, but with the caveat that differences within populations matter more than differences between populations - I'd rather work with 99th percentile white person than the average jewish person.
y: 7, rising to 9 at the tails, but the difference in eg income or achievement is somewhat less because there are other factors in between intelligence and outcomes.
z 1, if you take anything resembling a materialist or consequentialist approach to morality, even if it's also religious, smart people are capable of having more valuable experiences / contributions to society than less smart people
What evidence would change my mind:
If the next generation of the best writers, startup founders, scientists and mathematicians, programmers, et cetera had significantly higher black and hispanic representation, that would pretty quickly change my opinion. Or a change in my observation that, in general, any area with a high 'skill ceiling' in terms of intelligence seems to have asian/jewish overrepresentation and hispanic/black underrepresentation. The fact that that's currently not true is a bigger factor in my belief in HBD than any science or statistics right now. And the claim that various forms of racism cause this just doesn't add up, and here are a few more things that, if I was wrong, would change my opinion: Jews and asians with poor or average backgrounds are more likely to rise up into that cognitive elite than black people with rich backgrounds. And top people who are self-taught, top people in hobbies that require a lot of intelligence, or just the smartest people in internet communities I'm in, have just as much asian/jew overrepresentation and black/hispanic underrepresentation, even though you'd expect 'implicit bias' and 'systemic discrimination' to matter less for something entirely driven by personal interest. Gifted children who score high on tests show the same racial patterns. "Okay, but, uh, environmental racism, poor children have worse diets and this stunts their growth, lack of representation prevents them from achieving their dreams, epigenetics..." One of my favorite programming bloggers "grew[sic] up in a household that spent so little money that [he] was regularly lightheaded from hunger because I was actively starving", and yet has gained a significant following and is clearly very smart. He is, of course, asian. And leaving aside races, my personal experience also very strongly suggests that there's some 'general factor' of intelligence that some people just have a lot more of, that it's almost impossible to increase, and that is heritable. Every alternate explanation for differences in IQ or achievement between races just feels like a 'god of the gaps', and doesn't fit the whole picture nearly as well.
Even if we cordon that all off, start from an uninformative prior, and just look at the science and data, HBD still wins. Arguments for the validity of IQ and individual heritability of IQ are very strong, and the arguments for genetic IQ differences between races are pretty strong. There are sophisticated arguments against all of that, eg gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/, but if I dive into any individual technical argument usually either the HBD side wins or both sides have bad arguments. If that changed - if I changed my mind on the strength of the scientific evidence, or factual claims by hereditarians that I currently believe in ended up false - I'd become significantly less certain, but it'd move me less than the above observations changing.
This is very good. I recommend reading it for everyone who wants to learn more about population genetics.
Oh I thought I linked to a subsection, it's very good generally but the section about IQ is misleading imo http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.u5i4y14hya4j
This is a good demonstration of how the science genuinely is complicated though, all it takes is the wrong starting point or a bit of motivated reasoning for someone very capable to take the wrong position (even if sasha is right, it's still true bc there are smart people on the other side), and it's part of why I put more weight on holistic observation than data here
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