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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 think the chief value of HBD is as a frame work for upper class autists living in heavily segregated cities like LA, New York, and DC to justify their discomfort with the lower classes as something "rational" and "scientific" rather than a product of natural human bias/discomfort with the outgroup. HBD being true turns their preexisting biases and resentments into admirable qualities that further demonstrate their status as rational, intelligent, and thus superior people, where as HBD being false would be evidence of them being no better than anyone else.
You think this is the chief value? Or is this just your own hangup? I almost married a black chick, even though I believe in hbd. I can see a lot of cultural and political effects that are far more important than snark snark autism snark.
I was never in that situation exactly, but I would have no objection to marrying a black girl as long as she was smart (and, y'know, hot etc.) ... but I worry about how that conversation would go if you were ever called upon to explain your beliefs to her. Did your almost-wife know about your HBD position - or indeed, was she already HBD-pilled?
She did know my beliefs, I developed them halfway through our relationship. Well, I had suspicions at the start, and found confirmation partway through.
It was dicey at first, but she was open to it. It helped that she knew me by then, and that it wasn't a "my pure hu-white blood" thing.
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Yes. I think that is the chief value. Even if we take take the HBD advocates claims at face value, the effect size of race on outcomes is minuscule in comparison to things like nutrition, cultural background, economic status, marital status, age, religiosity, etc...
This raises the question of "why the focus race, at the exclusion of everything else" and to me the answer seems obvious, because academia has been mind-killed by intersectionality and identity politics. and because it's conclusions flatter the egos and support the preferences of a certain class academically inclined contrarians.
Nutrition within the US isn't a factor. Economic status is an output. The effect is not miniscule compared to age; we see the effects when comparing people of the same age. Cultural background is hopelessly confounded with race, and is doing all the work there.
If your "outcomes" include income, wealth, that sort of thing, then including economic status as an input variable is entirely circular. If your outcome is merely test scores or something similar.... the racial gap persists when adjusting for socioeconomic status. The "focus on race" isn't merely mind-killed contrarianism and asserting so is just bulverism. The focus on race is because it's a variable with high effect size that just won't go away despite decades of trying.
It's not circular because kids generally don't have income.
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You're assuming the conclusion.
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Do you have some numbers here to back this up? It would be great grounding point if you could put a dollar figure to, for instance, how much poorer your Jewish parents would need to be than a black couple for you to have the same expected educational and crime outcomes as said couple's hypothetical child.
I had a whole bunch of links on standby back when I used to get into it Trannyporno, Eggo, and Autisticthinker on a regular basis, but that was a good 6 - 7 years ago now. My 2004 think-pad has long since kicked the bucket and I haven't bothered to replace/rebuild it because because it rarely was an issue on reddit and the conversation had just gotten tired. That said if you or @The_Nybbler, or the OP have a study that you believe demonstrates that melanin content has a significantly greater effect on criminality or academic achievement than growing up a two parent household I'd like you to present it.
Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:
From [2]: (It's interactive and tabular, so you'll have to click around)
In the Homicide Offender vs. Victim demographics, we see that pernicious hate ratio again (with blacks committing 51% of all murders in the U.S. over the past 10 years, and Asians committing less than 1% of murders.) And, as our control, white people ring in 36% of the murders. The remaining 11% are done by a racially-unknown perpetrator.
With blacks being a relatively-consistent 12% of the population and Asians being 6%, we would expect to see ~12% and about 6% of murders. White people with Latinos rolled in (which, for some reason, the violent crime stats always do) get us to 76% of the population.
I will leave pulling the actual p-values as an exercise to the reader, but the numbers are clear; race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact; if you are black, you are several times more likely than average to be a murderer (with, of course, the proviso that the vast, vast majority of black people are not criminals, and 5 times a very small number is still a small number overall), and likewise, if you are Asian, you are several times more likely then average to score a 700+ on the SAT (with, again, the same proviso that only a small minority of that small minority are exemplary math students.) It is absolutely not the case that every black is a dumb violent criminal, and that every Asian is a peaceful geometer-hobbyist. But it is true that black people are wildly overrepresented in violent crime and underrepresented in mathematical achievement, and that the reverse is true for Asians.
Now, I don't have any sources I particularly trust for the dual-parent question, because I haven't examined it, but a quick perusal of sources did give me an entry from the Institute for Family Studies[3], which didn't seem to obviously contradict the other few sources. It gave the percent of Asian children from two-married-parent homes at 85%, with 74% for non-Hispanic whites and 36% for black children. This, obviously, is a much closer outcome ratio than we see in the two above outcome cases; if coming from a broken home was the primary determinant, then we'd see those 15% of 6% (0.9%) do as much crime proportionally as 63% of 12% (7.56%). And yet, the ratio of Asian super-achievement on the SAT to black is 25 to 1; when it comes to violent criminals, the ratio is well over a hundred to one.
As far as I can see, getting married and raising a family is just another outcome in which Asians do better than the average, and black Americans do significantly worse. But I would be fascinated to see if you can find any studies which specifically compare the the outcomes of children of two-parent black households to non-two-parent Jewish and Asian households, to really get into family status as a signifier on its own.
Also, to be clear; this is not a melanin thing. Asians have more melanin than whites, and do better. Blacks have more melanin than whites, and do worse. It's also a purely-statistical truth; we can absolutely drill down to the Igbo or Laotian immigrant populations and see divergent results. Black and Asian are both large, diverse groups which contain many, many, many subgroups, and of course, the individual is the smallest and most significant subgroup of all.
1: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/
2: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
3: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still-live-in-two-parent-families
Your latter two sources kind of support my point rather than refute it because if "race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact", socio economic class, marital status, and geographic location IE living in a Democrat controlled city like Chicago or Baltimore has an even more dramatic and obvious impact.
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No it wasn't. Because I'm at an age where I'm long past trying to impress anyone if it isn't going to get me paid or laid. More pointedly, why is the burden on me to prove HBD false rather than on yourself and the OP to prove it true? Like I said, have a study that you believe demonstrates that melanin content has greater effect on criminality or academic achievement than growing up a two parent household I'd like you to present it. Otherwise, that which is asserted w/o evidence can be refuted just as readily.
It bears mentioning that we have pretty good reason to think that black marriage outcomes are in fact environmental, because their outcomes were in fact significantly better before the sweeping social changes of the 60s and 70s. Even if those social changes can't be reversed, it's at least possible that other changes could be implemented to ameliorate or resolve the issue.
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