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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.
Just a specific response on my phone (sorry in advance) to your second paragraph, seeing as my partner is a psychiatrist and I've mentally ruled out discussing the subject with him anymore.
It's impossible to overstate (at least as a generality) how fucked up psychiatrists are personally, how much they suffer from imposter syndrome, how inferior they feel in income, status, knowledge and career trajectory to their peers, and among the brighter ones, like my partner, the ugly knowledge that as soon as a pathology has an identified physical substrate it ceases to be in their purview ... So a priesthood, really, and not one that has worked in any measurable outcomes, including those of sufficient importance to arguably constitute the field's raison d'etre (e.g. how are those suicide rates going, etc?).
I know my partner feels intense shame for not getting into surgery, and for that matter, getting a second-round offer years ago. He would go to tatters if he didn't have Gardner's silly theory of multiple intelligences to fall back on, as much as he recognises psychometrics as useful statistically and forensically.
I can't bring myself to go to parties with psychiatrists anymore but when I did, it seemed like my partner comprised the minority of maybe 20 percent of registrars who were seemingly straight white men. Of course this may not be true elsewhere in the world but this exodus indicates that the profession will only further decline in esteem IMHO.
I think my psych is an odd one. He doesn't buy the multiple intelligences hypothesis, or a lot of the other stuff he's supposed to. He doesn't see trans clients anymore, because he's skeptical of the affirmation first model, and feels that psychs are put in a no win scenario.
He told me a story about a friend of his, another psych, who works at a hospital. One of his friend's residents had a trans patient that wanted to surgically transition. The resident wasn't sure what to do, so he asked her. She said she wasn't sure either, and referred the case to their gender center (or whatever they call it now). She was informed, in no uncertain terms, that if they ask for it, they get it. Then she found her responsibilities curtailed. So he doesn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
He believes in hbd, and believes that the black community has been taught to externalize their problems.
He's also really critical of feminists, after he clashed with them on campus because of sex based research into the brain that he was doing. He buys into red pill-lite ideas.
He's still mostly a NYT liberal, but he has to keep his mouth shut about a lot of topics (and has plenty of stories about how he's gotten into trouble because he couldn't)
I think you're right about the trajectory of the field. If I had to get a younger psych I probably wouldn't bother. They won't let guys like that in anymore.
PS if you like him, try to communicate, as much as it is possible with a boomer, how utterly frivolous he is being with his career in speaking as openly as he has with you unless you are quite certain he is knowingly lowering his guard with extreme discretion specifically for you. Doctors aged 40+ don't seem to be aware that their workplace is a minefield rigged to the detection of the subtlest offence, and he would do well to be reminded that quite aside from breaching the important principle that his life should be a total enigma to you (younger ones disagree for the obvious bullshit culture war adjacent reasons) ... let's be honest, one doesn't arrive on the couch by way of a history of probity and good decision-making. I have had two incidents in the last year where I have needed to put myself at some risk to protect two psychs from the consequences of their own obliviousness to running their mouths.
I don't know much about surgery but just from what I have heard of the sheer novelty of methods of neovaginoplasty etc. versus the very well and time-attested, dutifully and comprehensively achieved methods of best practice sequentially arrived at over the decades that one sees in a textbook for, say, removing an appendix ... Well, I guess I respect the creative urge, it's not a spark that exactly sets aflame the soul of the commonest among us, but by goodness isn't there something that can be done whose effect is not so utterly ghoulish? Some of the latest examples of sculpture I have seen around my city are rather striking and as an artistic and aesthetic endeavour I think as an art form has a lot to recommend it, and I'll even admit to buying a few of those oddities made with trash embedded in plaster like a bottle forming a nose or whatever and so on and I'll even be so generous as to accept such efforts as something of a statement on environmentalism and consumerism - I feel like I am showing some serious broadness of mind here! -- and certainly painting is just a lovely pastime even if the skills required put it out of the reach of most even at a hobbyist level. But I must with all respect draw the line at the recreational destruction of genitals, even if the state of surgery was as staggeringly advanced as some suppose it to be, and each practitioner wasn't in fact more or less an inventor and kit-basher than stolid technician. (Seriously, even if I were in 100 percent agreement that every penis be flayed, every tit suppressed, there is a staggering legal liability that exists due to the total lack of professional consensus on standards of care, procedure, etc. It is too enormous a risk to survive more than a few more legal challenges regardless of how much goodwill or pity that community has somehow cultivated, or the seeming total commitment of practitioners to often knowingly break the law and/or support utterly unrestricted bodily autonomy (though after a thorough maiming the pharmacotherapy will consist of paracetamol and maybe if lucky 5 mg oxycodone here and there under nursing observation of unusual agony only -- arguments about bodily autonomy are so trite now that the genitals are safely binned and a butchers bill rendered and posted, indeed so well formatted too with such seemingly concern for aftercare and side effects that one might almost think one was the recipient of something akin to a medical procedure, which I might boldly describe as a type of procedure, for a medical benefit). Traditionally also trans patients are both simultaneously suicidally depressed and in a euphoria of trembling adoration of their gorgeous even if literally anatomically indescribable results, and the hug box closes like a crab pot upon personal criticisms ("I know that we're all built different ... But I'm investigating before and after photos and adjusting to the possibility that my new clitoris is the remainder of my glans. Not that it matters as it has departed on its own accord as it was increasingly necrotic from lack of blood supply in any case. Totally normal, right girls?") Autism often comes with severe deficits in the ability to recognise faces, features, etc. It is not associated as far as I know with great experience of personal intimacy. Add in a dash of a few personality disorders, and apparently a vagina and a vulture-gored sheep carcass are basically physically approximate. You are also well forewarned that you will lose your community if you happen to notice differently, or complain about even the most egregious butchery as to do so risks lowering the numbers of willing quacks and thus is equated to attempted murder (the suicide threat is the lifeblood of the transperson) upon those whose genitals remain of the tedious non-puzzle variety. So it is a field where incompetence is routine and unpunished, the victims are literally perceptually and otherwise impaired to the extent of being unable to notice the horrors committed upon them, and no standards of widely recognised surgical competency exist in any event.
I would have expected the racket to survive at least as long as the lobotomy, and I think it would have but for the politicisation of topics too extreme for most people to contemplate without abhorrence, e.g. children, sports etc. After all, wanting one's penis removed would at the very least seem to be prima facie evidence of a very serious issue. And it is, but it's not got anything to do with boys brains and girls brains being mixed up in some cosmic oopsie, but for the most part reflects the well known aspect of male sexuality to develop fetishes for content occurring in the context of an orgasm, and the heightening extremities one seeks on embarking upon the hedonic treadmill. I don't quite get the logic of being intensely aroused and so much so that one wants to heighten that by losing the source of the ability to be and exercise arousal, but that's the vast majority of the men in a nutshell, vociferously denied because it is tawdry and unspecial, not even a soul was swapped. I think the legal problems for practitioners will be based on complaints from girls, because their behaviour, while bearing superficial similarities, is more of the adolescent identity crisis/"one answer to every problem" type so much more transitory.
This is based on my observations and experiences but I have no training in any of the above. But I have not heard alternate ideas that explain reality nearly as closely.
He's well aware. I've been seeing him for a long, long time, and he trusts me somewhat at this point.
When he's going to talk about something that he knows could get him in trouble, he says it in a way that I know he's saying it against his better judgement. But he isn't telling this to most patients, he's told me that he knows he can't say this stuff with most of his patients.
But he has a history with heterodox stuff, and I think he likes it.
In the beginning he didn't tell me this kind of stuff, and he didn't share much about himself. But I think he ditched the typical psych stance because he thought he could better reach me by being more honest. And I think that was the right call, it's a large part of why I feel I can trust him
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