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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.
Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism. Now, I actually think that black underperformance in very large part is explained by the legacy of slavery and subsequent structural racism, but, for instance, in the case of Asian-Americans, the selection effects of the American immigration system appear to account for their above-average performance in education etc.
Furthermore, 'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?
This is a silly way of flattening all difference between the history of various countries. Of course, almost every country in the world has experienced strife and warfare, but that doesn't mean that for every country concatenation of various circumstances has led to different outcomes in each country.
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How much is a very large part? Can you list off a few specific metrics in which you believe that black Americans underperform, give the relative numbers for some other races, and then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely? Can you also provide what you'd expect the numbers to look like for other races in a hypothetical no-discrimination-at-all environment?
I mean, you do have some kind of "X specific discrimination which happened in these specific ways at these times caused these gaps, which I expect to persist for this many generations.", right? It would be very silly to claim that you had any idea what the expected but-for-slavery-and-Jim-Crow outcomes of black Americans relative to all other colors of American would be absent that kind of comparison, after all.
Let's get some actual numbers around this, both in terms of how you see things now, and how you'd expect to see things differently with a few specific point interventions.
This is a silly hypothetical given that, absent the legacy of slavery, most African Americans would not be here at all. Nonetheless, we can observe immigrant groups from Africa whose circumstances of arrival more closely mirror that of Asian immigrants, and they tend to do pretty well. Recent Nigerian immigrants and their children out-earn the national average.
I don't really grasp the thrust of the rest of your comment. Obviously it's going to be very, very difficult to parse out the effect of every specific aspect of historic and structural racism, but so what?
Hmm. I don't think that the circumstances of recent Nigerian immigrants actually do mirror, e.g., those of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants particularly well, but I'd be interested to hear you break down what you think the salient features of Asian immigrant waves were, and how they compare to the circumstances of the given Nigerian wave.
We've got a lot of immigrants to a lot of nations being done by a lot of ethnic groups across a lot of history for a lot of reasons under a lot of circumstances; we should be able to tell pretty quickly which of those factors (if any of them) most saliently predict outcomes.
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Yes it does. You even call the other source you postulate racism. Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.
BLM? Embedding every institution public and private of a certain size with DEI initiatives? States like California trying to repeal laws against racial discrimination so that they can institute corrective racism? The increasingly hysterical insistence that racism is baked into the very core of our society and thus our society must be deconstructed brick by brick is not some unheard of sentiment. Where have you been?
Source?
This is a relatively fringe position. Other things like quota-based affirmative action hardly 'tearing society apart'; America had quota-based affirmative action in universities for a good while before Bakke, and society remained notably intact.
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Suggesting that BLM is caused by affirmative action rather than by animosity between cops and black folks is a huge stretch.
Who said it was caused by affirmative action? Blank slatism is not just expressed in policy like affirmative action, it is the root of this uprising of race essentialism and fixation on race that has gripped the nation and set the stage for things like a BLM riots.
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I may have misread the original comment, but I don’t believe he suggested affirmative action caused BLM, but rather that blank slatism did. And that blank slatism also causes affirmative action
I believe the argument would be like this. Blank slatist observes more black men are shot/killed/imprisoned by police and the justice system. Because of blank slatism the only conclusion can be that this is a result of systemic racism, as opposed to any difference in criminality or violence in the affected populations. This same reasoning is leveraged for affirmative action and BLM: that any different average outcomes can only be the product of racism because of blank slatism.
In my view this is an accurate diagnosis of the faulty reasoning underlying both movements
It's a little silly to suggest that people woud look at the data and say 'ahh well, it's fine that a.man was choked to death because statistically he had 15 lower IQ points and was thus slightly more predisposed to criminality. I guess we'll just accept our lot.' The blank slate argument is just giving voice to an already held belief.
The premise of BLM is not that what happened to George Floyd was a personal tragedy for him but a rare, highly-unrepresentative stroke of bad luck, requiring a calm local investigation into what went wrong. The premise of BLM is that cops are routinely targetting black men for death, requiring nationwide [protesting/rioting and arson] to persuade the authorities to rein in the police violence ... and, implicitly, that the racial disparity in rates of deaths-by-cop cannot be accounted for by a comparable disparity in the rates of the kind of behavior that tends to draw the potentially-lethal attention of the cops.
You're missing a key component though: getting away with it. What really outrages people is when they think someone is getting away with murder. No amount of 'well, it's very rare' will mollify a person angry about that.
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