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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.
It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.
Pretty much.
Whether you think equality between persons and peoples is an important end-goal or not, you should still be very interested in actually figuring out the causal basis of the observed inequalities. ALL of the causes. You cannot solve a problem (or at least what we've labelled a problem) if you are very blatantly ignoring the main reason for it's existence.
The next step, however, is that we don't have the technology to address the core issue here and if we fully accept the fact that genes et. al. are huge determinants of outcomes like happiness, intelligence, health, wealth, status, etc. etc. etc., especially on the larger population level, then indeed we end up having to question the validity of the concept of agency at all, at least among those that fall beneath a certain point on various bell curves. And the classical liberal order and the philosophy of individual rights and autonomy hinge on the ideal that every person has agency and deserves to control their own life decisions until proven otherwise.
i.e. believing in HBD ends up forcing us to examine ourselves in light of this factor and merely believing we're 'superior' to someone else on this basis doesn't help us at all on the question of "what do we do now?"
So perhaps the objection to HBD needn't be based on how true or explanatory it is, but that the implications will only leave us with severely uncomfortable questions to examine with even more uncomfortable possible answers, which might be better to save for a later date when our tech is much improved. Not my preference, but arguably it's like drawing up plans to colonize the galaxy before we've even set up a presence anywhere beyond our primary planet: a fun question to ponder, but ultimately a task for later generations.
I'm already willing to bite the deterministic bullet and say that the universe is causal so I can say the water is just fine over here. I'm not so sure that we'd be doing ourselves any favors saving this for a later date, how many more rocks can blank slatists turn over trying to cure the achievement gap before the possible sources of discrimination start sounding like blood libel? I genuinely think HBD denial may be an existential threat.
I'd rank it very very low on the list (as in, less dangerous than many other risks) if so. Certainly could argue that to the extent it hobbles our ability to deal with other problems and slows our species' social and scientific progress it makes us more susceptible to other existential threats.
The question is slightly less about whether the universe is causal... more about whether there's anything we can 'do' about the causal universe from the inside. The acausal universe I'd 'accept' because then we can probably agree there's nothing we can do to impact anything, since anything could happen to anyone at any time for no reason.
But assuming we come to understand the rules of the universe well enough to comprehend the way events follow from one another down to a, say, molecular level, does that mean we're capable of acting on it? That's the agency question I'm trying to bring up.
e.g. if we simply don't have the tech to influence particular outcomes, there's simply no point in pretending we have any say in the outcome at this point.
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