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What is the value of HBD being true?
I was talking to my psychiatrist about this. He seemed amenable to HBD, he has heterodox opinions, but he was curious as to why I was curious.
I think that most people at the motte generally accept that IQ scores aren't evenly distributed among groups, but what is the counter argument to: "Why does it matter?" and "in the past, when we've focused on differences, it ends badly".
Scott thinks it matters because he believes that our resistance to using IQ tests is based on the fact that favored classes do poorly. I think he's right; we have our (heavily discredited, but still used) hypothesis of multiple intelligences. And the Nazis developed their own hypothesis of multiple intelligences, "practical" and "theoretical", because they realized that their favored class "aryans" performed more poorly than their hated class "jews".
What do you think of the idea that multiculturalism needs a "great lie" in order to function? Subconsciously, progressive whites know that black people broadly aren't as intelligent; they downshift their speech around black people more than conservatives do. I don't think this is because conservatives are less "racist", but because they aren't willing to make themselves less competent to cater to black people. But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious? My most honest thought is, I don't know what comes next. Because I don't know, it could be worse. I have to admit that's a possibility. But I don't think we'll ever get a satisfying conclusion by lying. But I would like to harvest some thoughts here. Are we setting up for another holocaust if we push this mainstream, or is that just more nonsense?
I think that recognizing that IQ differences are a thing would open the door to separating classes by aptitude. I think the primary resistance to this is that you'd see the wrong concentrations in the high aptitude and low aptitude groups. Currently, in CA, the new (old) thrust is that talent isn't real, aptitude isn't real. I think that a denialist approach will probably do damage by not challenging each type of student appropriately. And we have a tendency to be willing to disadvantage higher performing students, like cutting AP math classes because of "white" (asian) supremacy. We know that students learn best when around other students who are their peers in terms of academic ability. I don't think this would be persuasive to a hardened woke, though. I think that even if they knew IQ differences were real, and genetic, they would resist this because they would see it as harmful to low aptitude students.
Group differences in IQ being genetic could be a strong pro-welfare position. But that also makes me uncomfortable. Should we really make it even easier for the low IQ to further outbreed high IQ people? But I'm just rediscovering eugenics. Should that be a bad word? In the past, strong selection (cultural, and biological) probably led to Britain escaping the malthusian trap (see "Farewell to Alms" for more details). What could we accomplish if we again constrained reproduction to push for the kinds of traits that get shit done? Where I'm sitting, it looks like we're caught in a sort of trap. What problems could we solve if we tried to create better people? Maybe intelligent species die in their planetary crib because once they reach a level of sophistication supported by their biology, they engineer ways to decouple reproduction from the stuff that matters, and as a result, they fail to achieve anything more. They maybe succeed in creating a comfortable way of life, but not an innovative one. So, a society like ours, that favors Nick Cannons over Von Neumanns. Still working through this line of thinking, any thoughts?
White and Asian kids are being raised, from my view, to be sacrificial lambs. I see it as a modern, woke retelling of the White Man's Burden. If Black kids weren't raised to blame White kids, and to turn their feelings of inferiority into weapons, I think that would be good for them. And it would certainly be good for White kids to not grow up internalizing that any disparity is their fault. Same with Asians, they aren't even White but they get hit with this shit the most. But again, this isn't going to be convincing to a woke. Can this be framed in a way that they will understand? Or is that structurally impossible? My view of things is that the White guilt narrative allows White elites to outmaneuver other Whites by allying with non-Whites. If this is true, being completely correct means nothing as long as this alliance is paying dividends.
More generally, a principle I believe in is: it's much harder to solve a problem when you're deliberately ignorant to the cause. We didn't solve anything in the '60s, I think we put off the problem, and we'll have to pay, with interest, but I'm not totally sure the form this will take.
I don't think I could answer better than naraburns' (not sure how to ping users on the new site) post here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/azpeio/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_11_2019/eib5dfx/
Okay. My comments in what follows will take this stipulation seriously, so please bear that in mind before forming opinions on what it is that I actually believe.
The most important thing that comes next is, we stop wasting money trying to "uplift" people through social welfare programs.
The fact that this is totally distinct from e.g. arguing that someone doesn't deserve dignity or respect, is a point that seems to be completely lost on the critics of HBD folks like Charles Murray. But here is how the received welfare narrative functions on the Left:
If you have a shitty life, it's because someone fucked you. If nobody fucked you, personally, then their ancestors fucked your ancestors. Nobody's life is irredeemably shitty, it's just that the patriarchy or the colonizers or the 1% would rather fuck us all than share their boundless wealth and power actually improving the human condition. And if we just give people with shitty lives enough free housing, nutrition, education, and income, then we'll break the cycle of poverty, we'll smash the school-prison-pipeline, we'll wreck the pattern of abuse, we'll repair the damage of slavery, whatever historical thing it is that is to blame for your shitty life, we can fix it, and then we'll all start from a "level playing field" and everything that happens after that will be legitimate and just.
This narrative is entrenched in extant justifications for social welfare programs. Sandra Day O'Connor once voted in approval of Affirmative Action on grounds that after 40 or 50 years, it would be unconstitutional again because once a generation of fair racial or gender representation was forced into existence, this would sufficiently address the wrongs of the past and future generations would have proportional representation emerge organically. The whole premise of slavery reparations is "bad stuff continues to plague black communities because of the legacy of slavery, reparations will put an end to that."
If you believe in HBD, then you know why Sandra Day O'Connor was wrong. There is no more affirmative action for women in law schools or medical schools, because once they were told that they were allowed to do these things, women did them. But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did. And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place. Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities, because black communities will still be filled with young men who murder each other and catch others in the crossfire, and slavery will still have happened, and giving them extra money won't change any of the things that actually matter.
So if you are building enormous social welfare and education programs on premises like "everyone can succeed," "all kids deserve to go to college," "nobody is born stupid," then you are lighting piles of money on fire. It's not a problem of dignity; it is a problem of having false beliefs and acting on them in ways that never deliver the promised utopia and then refusing to recognize that your beliefs about race are destroying resources that could be used to actually make things better, if only they were directed to projects that could possibly succeed.
Notice that we could totally say, "people of X race have lower IQs on the whole, so it shouldn't surprise us if they don't earn a lot of PhDs," and still accept members of that race into PhD programs when they show themselves to be a statistical outlier. But when that person says "I would like for this profession to be less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever," our answer should not be to, by hook or by crook, make the place less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever, our answer should be that, until we build some IQ-boosting gene therapy, they are just going to have to make their peace with being an outlier.
If you combine this reasoning with e.g. Bryan Caplan's Against Education, you might notice that there's a lot of money being poured into inner-city schools to try to lift them above miserable failure, and it doesn't work. The Obama administration demonstrated this extremely well by pouring billions of dollars into "fixing" failing schools, with no substantial impact. You can't pay teachers more to fix kids who are constitutionally incapable of learning algebra. No amount of money will give them cognitive capacities they lack at a genetic level. Frankly, it's cruel to try.
And you can't even fix the problem by, say, liquidating social welfare and issuing cash payments. But maybe we should do that anyway; once we've accepted that some people are going to have shitty lives, not because someone fucked them, but because they are genetically disposed to have shitty lives, we can worry a lot less about fixing everyone's shitty life. Better yet, this may actually improve people's lives, in those cases where the real problem is a poverty trap, or where the solutions they need are discoverable by individuals outside the scope of regimented bureaucratic "solutions."
The main reason we don't go this route, I suspect, is because it shatters the illusion of government as solution-maker. If the nanny-state can't actually solve our problems, then why would anyone support having a nanny-state? Of course it is transparently obvious already that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems, but if you entertain false beliefs that everyone could be an upper-middle-class professional if only they were given the right handouts, then you may refuse to notice that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems. Or you may even admit that the nanny-state can't solve all our problems, but insist counterfactually that it can at least solve these particular problems.
This, as I understand it, is kind of Charles Murray's whole shtick. He sees that first-world nations are sorting people into IQ clusters before they have a chance to form long-term reproductive relationships, and he sees why that is bad for populations over time. He sees first-world nations trying to fix problems ostensibly caused by "historical injustice" rather than by genetic disparity, and he identifies why that's not going work. And yet most people I meet who even know Murray's name just have him pattern-matched as "that dude who falsely believes that black people are inherently stupid." Not only do these people have a false belief about Charles Murray, it is a false belief that protects their other false beliefs.
So when you suggest that really understanding the truth of HBD is just an intellectual dead-end where certain people get to feel smug and other people have to feel sad and nothing more can be said, all I can say is that you are operating from a stereotype of HBD, one that has been primarily crafted to preserve a politics (egalitarian leftism broadly, but certainly SocJus leftism) that is empirically untenable. You're right that, humans being humans, some people who learn the facts about disparate racial IQs draw bad inferences from that data and become racists in various horrible ways. But far more harm is already being done by the lies that we emerge from the womb as mental equals, and that such suffering as persists among us can be done away with if only we can implement the right pattern of resource redistribution.
In short, if HBD is true, then the premises of distributive egalitarianism are false. That's a very, very important consequence, far more important than any worries you might have about the way people are made to feel by hearing the truth.
Excellent, this is what I was looking for. Thanks for the link
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