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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35350 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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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.

At least for me, accepting HBD was the first domino in a much larger chain of insight. At first, the IQ gap seems like the most important aspect of HBD and a lot of HBDers only really beat that dead horse of race and IQ. IQ is obviously relevant in weighing policy decisions like the extent of the Welfare State or understanding income inequality. In my classical liberal days, I became interested in HBD because I considered it to be a solid rebuttal to the argument that Capitalism is unjust because market conditions have led to persistent racial inequality. With the HBD premise, persistent racial inequality in social outcomes is not necessarily a market failure.

The IQ argument also helps the sort of Caplan-esque economic libertarianism. If you advocate for open borders with minimal welfare state, you can argue the former is a positive selection for IQ in the absence of a welfare state, but a negative selection for IQ in the presence of a progressive welfare state. It's a strong argument against the welfare state in the presence of relatively open borders.

I would call this sort of discourse HBD Level 1.

But the next step in the pipeline is to acknowledge what some have referred to as the "Iron law of heritability." It's not a question of whether or not a psychological trait is heritable, it's only a question of how much it's heritable. So well beyond IQ, we are now talking about all aspects of our personality including conscientiousness, conformity, religiosity, political inclinations, aggression, etc. which collectively should be considered vastly more important than the IQ question alone.

It also raises uncomfortable questions and leads to the "demographics is destiny" argument you'll see from the alt-lite or MAGA. Let's say you're a libertarian, and your ideological values are important to you - even more precious than your own children. You support open borders because it's economically efficient and a big step towards the ideal of free association. Well, with HBD we have to contend with the fact that open borders will bring people to your country who may simply not have the sort of personality that cares about your precious values. Are Hispanics, Africans, Indians, and Chinese going to realize the greatness of libertarian ideology with the same propensity as white and Jewish men? Probably not.

I would call this level of discourse HBD Level 2, and frankly I think most of the rationalist-sphere is stuck at this level of understanding of HBD. I say that because when it comes to the question of, if HBD is obviously true, why the hell are we denying it and acting the way we are as a society?, they will be far more likely to say, as you suggest, that this is simply an overcorrection of the moral lessons of the 20th century.

But that's still ultimately a Whig view of history and progress. "We learned the right moral lessons, we just haven't implemented them optimally. Sure, we've lost some knowledge along the way, but we can delicately integrate these rediscovered truths into the moral paradigm that has served us well." This is the mistake theory view.

HBD Level 3, which only a small number of people reach, and basically everyone I have seen at this level of discourse is in the Dissident Right, becomes conscious of the fact that HBD-denial itself, like all the highly regarded moral revelations of the 20th century, are the product of political competition and racial conflict.

The "great lie", as you put it, is not race and IQ; the "great lie" is much more all-encompassing and far-reaching in all corners of society. Looking back at history since the 1960s and before: the Sexual Revolution, Civil Rights, Holocaust Remembrance, the Cold War, War on Terrorism, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Diversity & Inclusion - all of it can and should be reinterpreted as contextual to political competition and ethnic conflict. Because tribalism is a coded behavior, and HBD pulls back the curtain on why society believes these particular "great lies" and shows that this tribalism is never going away. Even out greatest overtures towards moving away from tribalism have only been motivated by tribalism on the highest order.

That's not to say -everything- is a lie, but it is to generally move from mistake theory to conflict theory in rationalist parlance, and following the thread of HBD very well may get you there eventually.

Jews wield blacks, feminism, and progressivism as tools against White power as part of an age-old tribal enmity and self-preservation instinct. All efforts at empowering women, promoting minorities, and generally furthering any progressive goal is accurately understood as an act of hostility toward Whites.

I am not necessarily advocating this view. I am explaining for Roco.

Oh absolutely. Many white people display the same level of victimisation complexes they accuse minorities of harbouring. What these people need to realise is that we minorities don't give a damn about how well or badly white people are doing or have any desire to put them down, we have enough problems of our own to fix to worry about.

We just want to do well for ourselves and promote policies that do that, any harm or benefit to white people is coincidental; no different to how when the gardener mows the lawn, dozens of insects get their lives upended, but the gardener didn't do this to hurt the insects or even think about them at all when mowing, he just wanted an aesthetic result that looks pleasing from the house window.

We just want to do well for ourselves and promote policies that do that, any harm or benefit to white people is coincidental;

So what? What does it matter to me, as a White man, if your negative impact on my life is intentional or an accident? Either way I'm going to support the White boot on your face forever until you leave.

And with outright hostilities like that you can't be surprised when we see you as an obstacle towards our own success and want to see you and yours removed from any and all positions of power and influence. It's a shame really because white people on average are generally more competent than most other ethic groups and having competent people running things is good for society as a whole, it's your culture that's screwed up to the point of no return.

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Contrary to what some people may think we really don't give a shit about whites, we just want policies that benefit us and ours. If white people are a hurdle in the way (as they sometimes are), then we want to get rid of them, if white people also benefit from the policies we want, then good for them.

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I agree with him putting it there but I can't speak for him to say why he did it. I'll leave his take on the Jewish Question for him to explain.

Ah, understandable. No worries. I know what he was saying so I could translate, that's all.

Sure. HBD denial was established by and is maintained by the motivations of political actors, not random mistakes made by scientists and anthropologists. Those political motivations that gave rise to HBD denial are derived from ethnic conflict. That ethnic conflict is itself explained by HBD. Accepting HBD uncovers a deeper level of ethnic conflict than is generally understood.

Accepting this exposes other such movements which have presented a veneer of universalist principles, but scratching the surface reveals similar, particularistic motivations.

What is the evidence for this?

This could go in a lot of different directions. But it should just be sufficient to acknowledge that accepting HBD is tarred as racist and therefore highly immoral. So the opposition to HBD frames their position in terms of ethnic conflict.

The concern is that accepting HBD will alter the relations between ethnic groups. The greatest concern is that racially conscious whites will mistreat other groups based on this information. But ultimately, the observation that HBD denial is rooted in the concerns of anti-racism is sufficient for my point.

But on a deeper level, it's hard not to notice the history of HBD denial broadly falling along the lines of Protestant Darwinists versus immigrant Jews. Nobody is more responsible for the hegemony of HBD denial than Franz Boas, and his crusade against Madison Grant is understood as an expression of an ethnic conflict. This was not a clash of unbiased scientists who merely had different interpretations of data. They were, both, heavily influenced by their identities and their own inherited proclivities. The Boas academic takeover of anthropology in the Academy was the direct result of this conflict, which continues to this day.

If HBD denial was not a result of this conflict, why do you think HBD denial became hegemonic in academia and public consciousness? Do you think scientists were just trying to find the truth without respect to their own identities and personal proclivities or ethnic interests, and they just happened to get it wrong at the global height of the eugenics movement? Or did they win a conflict underpinned by ethnic motivations?

It really isn't, given that this concern can also stem from a universalist worry about the consequences of white race politics.

You've conceded the entire point. That HBD denial is rooted in a concern for the consequences of white race politics (and it always has been, even pre-WWII). That is an ethnic conflict. A scientific issue is transformed into political dogma because of ethnic conflict. Rationalists aspire to approach HBD without regards to the underlying ethnic conflict. Level 3 approach HBD with the appreciation that they are entering the political arena of an ethnic conflict, as they are in the analysis of a large portion of other cultural phenomena that are generally regarded as bottom-up and emergent.

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Ditto, and Minotaur's comment didn't really make it clearer for me. I think that given that this is described as an understanding that "only a small number of people reach", it should have considerably more explanation than levels 1 and 2.

"Level 3" has absolutely no evidence and makes no sense. The Civil Rights movement and the sexual revolution happened because people didn't like the status quo. You seem to blame jews for things like the war on terrorism started by Bush,a white republican and supported by the majority of whites or the cold war that was about competition for hegemony between empires. Some jews studied psychoanalysis and anthropology so they are jewish plots? You seem to think that women, black people and lgbt people like not having rights and if it wasn't for the nefarious tribal all powerful jews they would not have tried to achieve change and better their condition and that all progressivism is not people having different values than you and campaigning for their ideas or interest but people being puppet of the enemy in a war against whites but how does it make sense? Many progressives are white and feminism helps white women too like lgtb acceptance helps white lgbt people too and white progressives agree with all the changes. The truth is that your ideas are incredibly unpopular and require an incredible amount of oppression and violence and totalitarianism to enforce, when people with your values are in power millions of people die, you don't think the Holocaust happened but it did.

You seem to blame jews for things like the war on terrorism started by Bush, a white republican and supported by the majority of whites or the cold war that was about competition for hegemony between empires.

There's plenty of evidence for Israeli interests being a major motivator in the invasion of Iraq.

Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001 - 03), executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2005 - 06 ) , told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002, that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat . . . And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander and former presidential candidate, said in August 2002 that "those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." In January 2003 , a German journalist asked Ruth Wedgwood, a prominent neoconservative academic and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle), why the journalist should support the war. I could "be impolite," Wedgwood said, "and remind Germany of its special relationship with Israel. Saddam presents an existential threat to Israel. That is simply true." Wedgwood did not justify the war by saying that Iraq posed a direct threat to Germany or the United States.

In mid-May, Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister now serving as foreign minister, appeared on C N N , where he said that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and the United States "cannot sit and wait" while he builds a nuclear arsenal. Instead, Peres insisted, it was time to topple the Iraqi leader

The Israelis were also sending the US concerning intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, which turned out to be false after the invasion. They encouraged the war to advance their own strategic interests.

I agree with this but this is completely different than claiming that the war on terror and everything else after the 1960s should be interpreted as ethnic conflict (between jews and whites as implied) the people in power in the United States also had their economic interest in the region and the war was supported by many white people.

Indeed, Mearsheimer discusses this. He argues that it was a small group of neocons who started the drive to war, that Israel then egged them on. But these neocons were in love with and beloved by Israel. They had a heavy Jewish presence within their ranks: they were led by people like Wolfowitz and Feith, both Jews, 2nd and 3rd ranking civilians in the Pentagon respectively. And then there are people like John Bolton:

So much so, in fact, that in May 2006, the Israeli ambassador to the UN jokingly described Bolton as "a secret member of Israel's own team at the United Nations." He went on to say that "the secret is out. We really are not just five diplomats. We are at least six including John Bolton.

In the spring of 2002 , the Forward pointed out that Wolfowitz is "known as the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration," and it selected him later in 2002 as the first among fifty notables who "have consciously pursued Jewish activism.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on September 15, 2001, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the United States and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan.99 Wolfowitz was so insistent on conquering Iraq that five days later Cheney had to tell him to "stop agitating for targeting Saddam."100 According to one Republican lawmaker, he "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President's nerves.

It may well be uncharitable to say that Jews were using the Iraq War as a tool against whites. But there is a powerful pro-Israeli lobby group composed of Jews and gentiles with a fanatical love of Israel that ignores the interests of America to favour Israel's foreign policy interests. There are, as you said, gentiles who supported the Iraq War like CIA director Woolsey and Bennett. American Jews overall opposed the war more than the rest of America as of a 2007 aggregate of polls. But Israelis loved it, they were the only country that supported the war in polling. Would the otherwise inexplicable, illogical Iraq War have gotten off the ground if it weren't for encouragement from Israel and the Israel lobby? I think not.

Israel was the only country outside of the United States where a majority of politicians and the public enthusiastically favored war. A poll taken in early 2002 found that 58 percent of Israeli Jews believed that "Israel should encourage the United States to attack Iraq."4 6 Another poll taken a year later in February 2003 found that 77.5 percent of Israeli Jews wanted the United States to invade Iraq

If you look further, we have the Arabs causing the 1973 Oil Shock after the US bailed out Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Massive economic damage to the entire Western world. I won't say that the oil shock caused the whole 'what the hell happened in 1971' ongoing crisis but it certainly worsened things.

I'm definitely at 3. I think there's too much invested in the illusion for it to fail. White elites can pivot to the anti-White resentments of certain minorities to outcompete other Whites. Arguments about truth are irrelevant, even harm to the very groups we claim to be protecting is irrelevant.

As long as that coalition is a source of power, this stuff can't be used to help anyone.

What is the value of HBD being true?

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.

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.

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.

Do you have some numbers here to back this up?

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.

Was coming in here, calling everyone spergs, and then telling us the dog ate all of your totally convincing evidence supposed to impress anyone?

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.

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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Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:

The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.)

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.

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.

Economic status is an output.

You're assuming the conclusion.

I almost married a black chick, even though I believe in hbd.

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.

I don't see anything in his argument that implies that the last fifty years haven't been a total failure, or that another fifty years won't continue to be a failure.

I generally think it's pretty likely that HBD is true, but it's not useful, and it won't ever be useful. The core problem is that Blacks are here, and they aren't going anywhere, and there are enough of them that any plan they don't accept is a non-starter. Most of the plans springing from HBD involve writing off Blacks in some way, but that was never going to work, and certainly isn't going to now. You need something that gives meaningful resolution to their considerable problems, or you're dead in the water. Whether you're right on the facts doesn't actually matter if you can't do anything useful with the information, and working the problem from things we actually have reason to believe are fixable is more likely to be productive than working it from the side we're pretty sure can't be budged.

Stable families do a lot better in most ways than single moms and absent dads. Blacks had better family stability prior to the social revolutions of the 60s, so we have reason to believe that it's at least possible to do better than they're doing now. Black crime rate has decreased from its' peak in the 90s, and it's increased massively since 2020, so we know that policy actually has an impact there as well. It's possible that you can't actually close the gap, but if you get the raw numbers low enough that might not actually matter.

Any of this is vastly more productive that sitting on your thumb, waiting for the American public to embrace ideas it's been rigorously inoculated against for the last three generations running.

You need something that gives meaningful resolution to their considerable problems, or you're dead in the water.

No such thing exists if you accept that HBD is false. Because that keeps leading back to racism, racism, racism and "solutions" based on the problem being racist white people are all counterproductive. We are unlikely to get any solution in any case, but accepting falsehoods does not help.

No such thing exists if you accept that HBD is false

Sure it does. History shows us that the currently observed poor outcomes are far from inevitable. and while it may be very 21-year-old bay area rationalist with a chip on xer shoulder to say that "if my specific individual vote isn't the deciding the vote democracy is a sham" that's not how actual societies work. If you can make a marginal improvement by encouraging couples to stay together that's a marginal improvement. If you can make a marginal improvement through local oversight of schools and police that's a marginal improvement. Marginal improvements add up.

You can't make those marginal improvements, though. Encourage couples to stay together? That's racist, and besides don't you know our evil racist society is putting the black fathers in jail for no reason? Local oversight of the schools makes things worse; that's how you get elimination of objective standards, for instance -- because those doing the oversight believe that grades (and spots in prestigious institutions of higher education) are not earned but are spoils, to be handed out to the children of the politically powerful. And if they're not just spoils you have to explain why the black kids aren't doing so well.... and you're right back to "that's racist!".

And if you could make marginal improvements, they'd only add up if the rate of marginal improvement was greater than the rate of marginal deterioration. And causing damage is easier than improvement, and there's a lot of groups doing it, using "that's racist" as their tool.

Encourage couples to stay together? That's racist

Only if you're a progressive Democrat.

Are you a progressive Democrat?

I'm not, but they're the ones driving the bus.

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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 to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps.

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?

Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism.

Yes it does. You even call the other source you postulate racism. Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.

'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?

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?

Suggesting that BLM is caused by affirmative action rather than by animosity between cops and black folks is a huge stretch.

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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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.

Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.

Source?

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?

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.

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.

then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely?

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.

as if Asia hasn't been subject to strife, warfare

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

How does ignoring HBD solve this problem? The phenomena remain. the demands for solutions remain. Relevance to the culture war remains. If we're going to continue fighting each other over racial inequities for the forseeable future in any case, why should that fight be conducted based on lies rather than the truth?

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.

The future in which HBD becomes mainstream does not destroy the credibility of racism as a societal-level force (okay, maybe it discredits how the progressives push the idea of racism, but not the concept itself). You can live in a society where people accept that different groups will not all get the same social outcomes and still have to deal with some groups being discriminated against due to other factors.

An example: the current black-white IQ gap is about 15 points. Assume that this is entirely genetic and unfixable.

In such a world, the number of black astronomers or cardiologists, assuming all applicants are equally considered w/o regard to their race, is not 0. Traits like IQ lie on a distribution and we are only saying there will be fewer observed black people than white people at the higher levels. It is entirely possible such a world still discriminates against black people in a way that artificially suppresses their achievement.

Sure, and a world without hair color discrimination can have stereotypes like "dumb blonde" that probably move the needle. But do you even know what the blonde Burnette achievement gap is?

No, I don't. I'm also not saying that it's irrelevant.

I am as racist and White supremacist as any can be, and I don't want any of the terrible things people think racist White supremacists want. I don't want to lynch them. I don't want to fly them to Africa. I don't want to put them in camps.

I just want society to stop catering to its lowest element. I want us to stop burning wealth and social capital on trying to uplift the black race out of a hole they dug themselves in. I want to shatter the mass cultural delusion that White people are responsible for black underperformance, that it's us keeping them down instead of them holding us back -- I just want them to fuck off and do their own thing, and I don't care if that thing succeeds or fails, so long as I don't have to pay for it or live in it.

There is no fix. The White race are not messiahs or babysitters. It's up to them to fix their problems, and the best thing we can do is go completely hands-off while they do it.

Blacks were steadily improving from the end of WWII until about 1975. It was the import of mostly white originated social experiments in replacing the traditional family structure with welfare and single motherhood that ruined it, so whites have a duty to fix what they've made.

Of course the way of going about this is simply dumb and won't work and should be opposed for those reasons, but there is a real white man's burden to spread white civilization to african americans because on a deep and fundamental level, we broke it.

Blacks were steadily improving from the end of WWII until about 1975. It was the import of mostly white originated social experiments in replacing the traditional family structure with welfare and single motherhood that ruined it, so whites have a duty to fix what they've made.

I am comfortable accepting the notion of racial guilt and the need to address the mistakes of the past, provided we start at the early 1600s, not the 1970s.

provided we start at the early 1600s

What is the implication here?

1619 is widely considered the start of serious African enslavement in North America, at Jamestown, though there was a slave presence beforehand. If I accept Whites have a responsibility to correct their mistakes, as @hydroacetylene asserts, then I must accept that first mistake being bringing blacks to the country to begin with.

That ship has sailed. Culturally modern day African-Americans have nothing in common with Igbos or Shonas or whatever. They have slightly more genetically in common, but they're still mostly mulattoes who wouldn't be reckoned as black in Africa, and anyways we're talking about a broken culture.

African Americans as they actually exist today are an ethnic group characterized by broken family norms, elevated rates of crime, poverty, etc. And the latter two come in part from the former, which was broken by white people in pursuit of "liberation" in the 60's and 70's- before all that, blacks were taking strides towards closing the gap.

That sounds like a problem for them, not me.

If you're advocating for race politics, the answer to that is- your fellow whites shouldn't have broken those family norms for ideological reasons.

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Who is "we" precisely?

I took "we" to mean "white people."

Those policies were put in place by the Democrats who win 90% of the black vote.

I don't care if that thing succeeds or fails, so long as I don't have to pay for it or live in it.

Is that you, Antidem?

https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/dear-black-people/

One aspect of the establishment left’s recent push for gay rights is that they are quietly but visibly dumping blacks as their most favored oppressed minority in favor of gays. This is largely a simple matter of political practicality. When nice white ladies of the sort who often vote for Democrats turn on the TV and see large groups of feral blacks burning down Baltimore, it makes an impression

Boy that one aged like a little match girl. I guess he never imagined getting white ladies cheering for mass arson. Absolutely astonishing to remember 2015 from 2022.

Boy that one aged like a little match girl.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give....

Why?

Why do you think the primary determination of group membership should be race? “Catering to its lowest element,” as you put it, applies to welfare claimed by whites, to special-needs programs, to any infrastructure sullied by the huddled masses. Throwing out black people will not change that.

Racial segregation is stupid and wasteful. If all you really care about is raising average intelligence, then you’d be better off advocating general selection coupled with race blindness. But then you wouldn’t get to draw a clean dividing line, and you wouldn’t get to cash in on the easy tribalism.

This, of course, is assuming that intelligence is all we should care about! The founding principles of human success include the ability to extend charity to those less fortunate. You are careless to discard that skill, and foolish to do so on the basis of race.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability. As LBJ put it,

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability.

Consider that hundreds of years of chattel slavery is actually still ongoing right now in the continent they escaped from. If you look at a family, the ones that stayed behind are more likely to be enslaved or in horrible conditions right now than the ones whose ancestors were transported to North-America.

North-American Africans actually have way higher living standards than their cousins from back home.

Living standards do not sum up the entirety of the human conditions, but there is a case to be made about simply stopping to teach racial history to African-Americans.

The recollection of the racial violence seems to be just as bad if not worse than the actual effects of the racial violence. After all, the African-Americans alive today are objectively better-off materially than if their ancestors (not them) had not been enslaved.

They admit it themselves:

When her son wanted to leave America and give up his passport, she recalls telling him: “You will not give up the passport because it is the key to the candy shop” — meaning access to all the economic opportunities America provides. “It would be rewarding people who did what they did to my ancestors to give the key to the candy shop,” she told me. “I will stay here and throw the Constitution up in their face. I am going to be here. They would be so happy if we all got on a boat and left. And I do not want to make them happy.”

Why?

Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it. In that light, racial differences, racial in-group biases, and racial spoils are unambiguously real. I didn't make the game, but I'm willing to play by its rules.

“Catering to its lowest element,” as you put it, applies to welfare claimed by whites, to special-needs programs, to any infrastructure sullied by the huddled masses. Throwing out black people will not change that.

Time, money, status, and effort are all zero-sum. The more of anything we waste on blacks, the less we necessarily have for others.

Racial segregation is stupid and wasteful. If all you really care about is raising average intelligence, then you’d be better off advocating general selection coupled with race blindness. But then you wouldn’t get to draw a clean dividing line, and you wouldn’t get to cash in on the easy tribalism.

I don't care at all about average intelligence. If blacks were dumb but harmless I'd covet their multiplication.

This, of course, is assuming that intelligence is all we should care about! The founding principles of human success include the ability to extend charity to those less fortunate. You are careless to discard that skill, and foolish to do so on the basis of race.

I'm very charitable toward my people. I have no need to extend charity to outgroups.

I also object to the claim that hundreds of years of chattel slavery, followed by 100+ of abuse in a time of relatively limited mobility, counts as “digging themselves in” a hole. But I suppose that’s a moot point if you don’t actually care about culpability. As LBJ put it,

History is full of genocide, slavery, persecution. We threw the Chinamen in concentration camps after breaking their backs on the railroads. The western world has collectively tried to wipe the Jews out for centuries. Worse, even blacks in their own countries do poorly.

I reject your attempt to render agency the sole domain of the White race, as flattering as it is.

I don't want to fly them to Africa.

Why not? Kerosene too expensive?

Consider that it would be the ethical thing to do.

If you look at the Black American experience from an objective, detached point of view, for some their current situation can be considered to be worse than slavery.

Slavery meant regular exercise, food and healthcare included, and relatively stable lives. They potentially grew up with family or at least some kind of role models around them.

Some of them even graduated to lording over other slaves.

When slavery was officially abolished in Brazil, they just ended up without a job, so the landowners who had just freed them asked them 'so you're looking for a job? How about you come work on my plantation for less than what I was spending on your food, shelter and healthcare?' That's how favelas were created, they all piled up in poor conditions which remain over a century later.

Now they get in huge amounts of debt for college degrees that they may not even be able to complete, they get scammed by banks and car dealerships due to the white flight brought about by their freedom of movement, they murder their own children in unprecedented amount...

Despite all of that, if they still somehow end up being part of the small group that is hard-working, motivated, religious, behaving morally etc, still, they are at a huge disadvantage. They have to compete in the work place with people that are on average a lot smarter, even if they literally come from the 3rd world like Indians and top 0.01% African immigrants.

And on top of that they have to deal with the stereotype of the 13%, despite themselves being part of the 10%(?) 'good ones', they will never make other people comfortable, they will never have a waiter (even black themselves) enthusiastically take their table, etc.

The ethical thing to do is to send them back, for their own good.

Why not? Kerosene too expensive?

As much as I wish history went differently, they are legal US citizens, and have been widely recognized as such for a long time. I'm unwilling to support the government having the power to arbitrarily mass deport its own citizens.

I'd happily support a program to help deport minorities who voluntarily signed up and revoked citizenship, however.

This seems to be a troll. It's a new poster, whose first post is a top-level post, about a topic that Sneerclub loves to hate us for, using the terminology "HBD" which indicates familiarity with us, "asking questions" in a way designed to get charitable responses that can be quoted out of context.

The response which says "I am as racist and White supremacist as any can be", also from a new poster, seems to be the troll's ally. Come on, guys. Do you think anyone who actually had such opinions would come out and say it like that, knowing how people would react?

(Edit: Misread the posting history, they are not new posters.)

I'm not a troll. I've been in the rationalist world for almost a decade.

Do we avoid talk like this? What was the point of leaving reddit, then? Should we self censor based on some fringe loons who hate read us? If someone wants to paint an awful picture of us, they already can.

Tell me why I'm so wrong and crazy, then. That's the point of the post

You are correct, I misread your posting history. You do seem to have been around long enough to have heard of HBD and to legitimately want to post about it.

(The actual answer to the question is something like "the value of HBD is that it's a defense--a disparity cannot be assumed to have been caused by discrimination.")

Because I don’t like giving trolls what they want, including status or attention for pet projects.

We can now see that the incessant fears of “AEO” and “Sneerclub trolls” were always just ways to shut down discussion of certain topics. There is literally nothing to worry about now that we’re no longer on reddit but the accusations haven’t stopped

Reddit consequence weren’t necessarily the driving factor. I mean, they probably were for mods, but for normal users?

This is a community for engaging in good faith. If one suspects that a post is not doing so, I think it’s reasonable to avoid giving that poster what they’d want, even if it’s not a material benefit. Sure, a troll won’t get people reddit-banned. They can still waste time and effort, as well as souring other users’ impressions of the forum.

Compare, for example, the JB debacle. Once I got the impression that he wasn’t posting to discuss, but to advertise, there wasn’t much reason to give reasoned engagement. I think it was actually justified to call him out on this bad faith, since I was was interested in saving other users the trouble—and in keeping him from “getting away with it.”

For this case, the OP is probably acting in good faith, and my first impression may have been wrong. I’ve edited my responses to jTiro accordingly.

JB was unusually irritating and uninteresting though, which are worse crimes in my book than trolling that looks kind of like interesting posting.

Well, that was part of the debate. The response to JB-posting was inversely proportional to how many of his previous posts one had seen.

He was also very quick to use those few who were engaging as proof that the critics were hidebound reactionaries, rather than just irritated/uninterested. That sort of cover is part of what rude call outs aim to avoid.

For what it’s worth, @Minotaur has been pretty consistent about that stance. I think you’re underestimating how much some people enjoy saying edgy things out loud.

Buuuuuuut I’m kind of inclined to agree that the OP reads like bait, regardless of their actual intentions.

You misunderstand me. I'm not an edgelord; I am not thrilling in violating norms and being scandalous. I am rejecting the validity of those norms entirely. They are illegitimate norms. They come from a platform that is fundamentally hostile to what I know to be good and just and right.

I don't want you or anyone else to gasp in horror or think I'm some tough guy, online or offline. I would be quite delighted if the things I said were rightly taken as what they are: absolutely nothing special, eminently reasonable, and sympathetic.

Why do you care what SneerClub thinks? They can't get you Reddit banned anymore, Jiro. We're not on Reddit. It's time to let the fear go. Let the trauma heal.

I am not a troll. I am sincerely a racist, and I am and always have been comfortable admitting that. A black person can be great, but I genuinely hate black people -- their community is rife with crime, abuse, poverty, single motherhood, intellectual oblivion. It sincerely infuriates me to know how much time, money, and effort is wasted on trying to make blacks be something else, a repeated experiment that's been failing for longer than any of us have been alive in bringing the Promethean flame of civilization to something feral. And every time it fails, my people are blamed, even though we had literally nothing to do with it.

But I'm kind. I don't need vengeance. I will settle for my country putting the shovel down. It's time to stop digging the hole.

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/

Say that HBD beliefs about human intelligence are more or less accurate; it's genetic, it's heritable, and you can build a pretty accurate ethnic hierarchy of average IQ.

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.

My question always is, OK, what comes next? Do we impart that hierarchy explicitly into our laws and economies and societies? Are we as a society able to keep hold of the notion that all humans deserve dignity and respect? Does society become more racially stratified than it is now? My thoughts are, we're already not that great at this whole racial harmony thing; introducing a scientifically-objective caste system into the mix will not help things.

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.

If you have a shitty life, it's because someone fucked you. If nobody fucked you, personally, then their ancestors fucked your ancestors.

Note that if you switch their ancestors fucked your ancestors to "your ancestors fucked you through giving you shitty genes" then the argument still holds. If I want to prevent people having shitty lives it doesn't matter whether they have shitty lives because they were oppressed or because they have "bad" genetics or because their dad beat them or their uncle abused them.

My prediction is this. Even if HBD in the form you describe became a mainstream belief, roughly the same people who want distributive egalitarianism now would want it then. You are looking at their rationalizations not the cause. The cause is that they truly do not want people to have shitty lives. Lighting piles of money to try to help makes them feel better and those feelings will trump any facts. The arguments they make (as most people's are) are backwards rationalizations to justify how they feel. That's why they can switch the argument each time it is disproven and keep the conclusion, because the conclusion comes first. People are not rational, logical agents.

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.

Has it actually been demonstrated that most of these students are actually incapable of learning algebra? Or is it more that the school needs to slow down, separate out the high achievers and the actually retarded, and maybe adjust the teaching strategies(all things that the Obama admin strongly rejected trying in favor of doing the same thing, but more expensively).

Has it actually been demonstrated that most of these students are actually incapable of learning algebra? Or is it more that the school needs to slow down, separate out the high achievers and the actually retarded, and maybe adjust the teaching strategies(all things that the Obama admin strongly rejected trying in favor of doing the same thing, but more expensively).

I mean, some of the kids we're talking about in the public school system are profoundly mentally retarded, so you can't just discount them entirely.

But after that, it depends on what you mean by "demonstrated" and "incapable," I guess. Suppose, for example, there were someone who actually could learn algebra, but only if they have one-on-one tutoring for eight hours per day for five years? Of course, you have no way of knowing that's true at the outset, so: at what point between just "send them to a standard high school algebra class for a semester or two" and "expend every possible resource teaching this person algebra" do you conclude that they are "just not capable?" Or if "incapable" is just an off-putting word for you here, at what point do you conclude, "we've made every reasonable effort, at this point if they want to learn algebra they're just going to have to find the time and resources on their own?"

Slowing down and adjusting teaching strategies may not be what the Obama administration favored, but I know many schools have taken that approach anyway. I'm not aware of any impressive results that didn't experience regression to the mean in pretty short order, but naturally I'm not aware of every experiment anyone has ever done! But I've discussed educational experiences with a lot of students, and a large number of them manage to master just enough algebra to squeak out a "C" so they can graduate. The movement to abolish algebra requirements seems like some evidence that many educators have concluded, yes--some people are just never really going to get it, or at least not in a reasonable enough timeframe to justify the effort of teaching 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.

This is fairly obviously a gross oversimplification. For starters, especially in the kind of blue-collar communities from which most garbage men and plumbers will come, those kinds of jobs are surely still very male-coded. Certainly, fewer people are telling women they can't be plumbers etc. but, ironically, it's a very urban elite perspective to suggest that we've wholly eliminated gendered employment expectations, so all discrepancies must now be genetic/natural/whatever. A survey from a few years ago by City and Guilds suggested that, in the UK, around 17% of surveyed students were encouraged by their school to consider apprenticeships, compared to 33% of men. It's also important to remember that these things reinforce themselves without any individual engaging in career stereotyping - if every plumber who ever comes to your house or truck driver you see go past is a man, then one can see how girls might be dissuaded from such career choices.

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

This needs some sourcing; the onset of quota-based affirmative action in the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of black Americans graduating, not just enrolling, so clearly most of them were sufficiently well equipped to deal with the universities into which they began to enrol in larger numbers.

Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities,

Again, a baseless unsourced claim; there is evidence to suggest that more generous welfare provision does actually reduce crime;

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07418829800093741?needAccess=true

Look this pretty much goes for every claim you make. So many words and yet a total absence of any evidence to substantiate some fairly dramatic claims.

I think you missed the part where it’s a person quoting another person steelmanning a position he doesn’t necessarily hold himself.

Excellent, this is what I was looking for. Thanks for the link

I don't think I could answer better than naraburns' (not sure how to ping users on the new site) post here:

With an @, like this: @naraburns

Acknowledging the reality of HBD is important because if we don't acknowledge it we will end up with policies which are premised upon it being false (disparate impact doctrine for discrimination and affirmative action are the big ones, general distrust in IQ as you mention is another) and these policies are highly inefficient and unfair.

I don't want a world where people go "I know about HBD so I'm going to throw all the applications from black people away". I want a world where people go "I know about HBD so if after considering all the applications in a race blind manner I end up with 2% blacks in a highly technical field I won't be surprised or consider that problematic". And I'm not alone in this. Basically everyone I see talking about HBD feels the same. The first position is a strawman.

Basically everyone I see talking about HBD feels the same. The first position is a strawman.

My experience dealing with actual HR people feels like they do, actually, throw away all the applications from groups they perceive to be unlikely to be capable.

HR people do indeed show bias, but not due to HBD.

Well sure, but that's probably at least in part due to not believing in HBD.

I don't see how it is relevant to their belief in HBD. I'm arguing that if they were HBDers, that would be just another axis to create an arbitrary hard cutoff point at.

If you know about HBD then it wouldn't it be self defeating to examine applications in a race blind way? And why would black people be ok with that when they have the voting power to force you to hire them anyway?

If you know about HBD then it wouldn't it be self defeating to examine applications in a race blind way?

No because race is a very very rough predictor of aptitude and bosses screening applicants have access to much stronger predictors. If I want high mathematical ability in my candidates I could just select only Asian candidates as they tend to score better on measures of mathematical aptitude, or I could ignore race and screen based on something like SAT math scores or scores on a math test I make applicants complete. The second approach is vastly better at accurately screening for candidates with high mathematical ability.

Because in real life situations, race is almost never the relevant inflection point. You almost always have more specific information that swamps out any signal from race.

The main issue for me is that when a society says, "we are going to blind ourselves to this aspect of reality for the greater good," it's inevitable that we blind ourselves to other aspects of reality as well. Until we develop an ideology that has, at its foundations, a denial of reality itself. That seems to be the nightmare scenario we are stumbling towards in the dark.

Yes, this is the point that was so eloquently made by Eliezer Yudkowsky in "Universal Fire" and by Scott Alexander in "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning". Everything is connected; you can't deny reality in just one little harmless area without starting a chain reaction which ends up with promising young scientists purged, freedom of speech destroyed, epistemology in tatters, and object-level policy disaster after disaster.

Thanks for the links. I'll look into them when I have time.

Edit: They are both short pieces but great reads.

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".

It's not so much that HBD is the most important thing in the world, but that one side of the aisle seems adamant in suppressing or denying this info, such as the link between genes and life outcomes. Why is it so hard to accept that if physical ability is unequally distributed and can be quantified, that the same applies to cognitive ability too. There is a sort of conative dissonance in which people accept that individuals are endowed with unequal quantities of this 'thing' has the properties of intelligence, but it cannot be quantified and is of little to no consequence in life. If IQ does not exist or is not important, why does the left put so much effort into saying it does not matter. What difference would it make if blacks score lower than whites if these tests are meaningless? It's similar to how 'healthy at any size' goes out the window when you go to the doctor and are prescribed a dosage based on your weight, because not knowing this information could lead to overdoes or insufficient doses. I think some of this HDB denialism is a just virtue signaling. Revealed preferences are not the same as stated ones (rich parents in blue states spending thousands of dollar on enrichment intended to raise IQs and test scores but also denying that such a thing exists or matters)

Why is it so hard to accept that if physical ability is unequally distributed and can be quantified, that the same applies to cognitive ability too.

Much of our moral foundation is built on the idea of free will and people being responsible for their actions. That goes out of the window if we truly accept that cognitive faculties, thus thoughts, thus decisions are quantifiable and come from the gene.

Why does it go out of the window? I don't see the path from Point A to Point B here. It doesn't matter if you were born with a gene that makes you stab babies, you still stab babies and we're going to imprison and/or execute you.

Someone born with a gene to stab babies would be institutionalized and would have some sort of defense (like insanity) available to them, so that they would be innocent of assault or murder. This is probably how our moral and legal systems work.

I mean, fine, if you want to imprison these people in institutions instead of proper prisons I don't care. So long as they're removed from the general population.

I'm not buying it. Predisposition and natural ability don't sum to the whole of the grown person. To go back to the physicality example, people have very different natural capacity for speed, strength, and endurance, but that doesn't mean that people aren't able to build their capacity's and aren't responsible for how they use whatever talent they have. I'll never be an Olympic marathoner, but I can train up to run a sub-3 marathoner. Someone with a double-digit IQ is likely going to cap out intellectually well short of particle physics, but they can still ply a trade and be a decent, honest person.

Agreed. It seems pretty obvious that it's nature plus nurture. We only have direct input into the nurture side so that's where our effort is concentrated. Altering the nature side is possible but it's not a practice anyone wants systemised. Top bracket IQ score? Well done, take your pick of breeding partner from MENSA's singles beauty pageant, lol. Sorry, your high school sweetheart is assigned to the Capped Human Achievement Division. Ouch.

Edit: Also the most vigorous offspring being the result of outbreeding between dissimilar parents presents a conundrum for race-centric HBD'ers. Do they value human diversity, or human quality? My impression is they're uniformly against race mixing while using quality as the justification for that position.

If IQ does not exist or is not important, why does the left put so much effort into saying it does not matter. What difference would it make if blacks score lower than whites if these tests are meaningless?

That seems unfair in the exact same way as the mirror questions usually leveled in the other direction, that you're indeed arguing against right here.

If IQ is meaningless, that means there's a test that measures nothing important but people use it to judge your capability, in some cases even your moral worth as a person. People argue against helping the disadvantaged citing the meaningless number, arguing it implies they deserve their disadvantage. You also believe that disadvantage is actually due to racism.

If that reasoning is false, it seems very worthwhile to push against, just like "outcome differences between races are due to racism, therefore we need to fight this racism" is worthwhile to push against.

It's probably false, but honestly believing it's true makes speaking for it consequent, maybe even morally imperative. "If you really believed X you would shut up about it" is as unconvincing as always.

If having a low IQ is a sign of low moral worth or value, society would likely not invest so much resources into helping IQ people.

You're assuming 'society' is monolithic, which is strange when we're talking about intrasocietal political disagreement. That society puts resources into helping low IQ people only tells us which faction "won" in that specific policy question. That doesn't mean other people can't believe differently, and it doesn't mean these people can't be influential elsewhere.

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.

One working definition of a professional I came across in my readings for an upcoming exam -- people occupied in a position wherein their clients lack the wherewithal to judge the merits of their abilities. Of course this is a fairly wide continuum, and the therapeutic relationship matters most of all even if it's based on misunderstandings, pretenses, irrelevancies etc.

I tried to get my partner to start reading the Motte culture war thread and Kiwifarms because it was obvious he was being actively hindered by just having been too old/busy to keep up with the nomenclature and dogma. He called me in exultation after his last (nth) exam prior to full college membership where the question involved an Aboriginal woman having trouble meeting eye contact. "I can answer this!" he must have giggled before writing about Jung, Lacan, maybe even some Male Gaze nonsense .... I had to be the one to tell him he had failed again, that the question was designed to both be simple (special cultural needs for special groups -- in any case, he'd already been assumed to have any amount of technical knowledge as he had been doing it since his early 20s) as well as a plausible way to keep out those who haven't had the time and inclination to keep up with the mores of the day.

So I am trying to compile a sort of culture war compendium, or at least stick map of the deadliest minefields, for his benefit and maybe those of some of his colleagues down the line. If anyone has any ideas about how to go about this, let me know. A lot of people don't "get" the clues to the zeitgeist in wacky articles I might link to, it may as well just be The Onion as far as they're concerned.

Your boyfriend sounds amazing lol. I'm glad he has you as a minder to fend off the quokka-poachers.

Thank you. I am pretty weird and trouble-prone and he keeps me sane, happy and loved etc. He has always known about my financial circumstances and supported me during periods of "the outs" with my family and I don't think he actually believed me when I said what's mine is his -- at least not when I would get serious money. So I look forward to surprising him in less than two weeks when I get my inheritance for meeting my last condition and while I have not come up with a definite plan it will involve me studying and memorizing every detail of his face when he realises that the biggest hurdle is done in life and he can live, work, travel, etc. for as long as he lives. It will end up being the best or worst decision of my life -- obviously he will become capable of walking away and enjoying himself in his own way (sex with much better looking younger people) because he will be totally independent but I doubt it, and if he did he'd have earned it anyway for years of loyalty, and in any case I won't hold him hostage by doling out monthly sums. I also worry the money will destroy his incentive to study for his career exam and he may blame me on some level for not just keeping my mouth shut a few months longer. Which is admittedly my selfishness not my desire to help so much. So hard to decide what to do --- ugggh. Maybe I'll organise things somehow to give him all but a few percent in property so that he gets slow regular returns to live off and can't make any spur of the moment bad decisions on a roulette wheel. Or just tell him he gets only a few thousand a week until he meets his own exam goal, and allow that time to adjust to a new lifestyle? Or be an asshole and just say that though the money is his and in trust with me for the duration of our relationship only and I am just a stopgap in case he gets drunk and tries to buy a submarine? I feel like a total killjoy already...

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

how inferior they feel in income

Just a quibble, but don’t psychiatrists make bank?

It's usually the lowest paid medical speciality in my country. Vying with general practice. Again, this is region-specific, but given that the program here is usually a couple years longer than GP one (in reality, still longer as required placements/experience don't necessarily match up with jobs at hand, e.g. fifty hour intensive talk therapy sessions and write-up of the same, the aforementioned college exam failure rate being on some level designed to maintain a cheap labour force, and requirement for a further postgraduate master's degree, which is unusual here but not unprecedented (years ago I heard 50 percent of opthamologists have PhDs. What a waste of time and potential.

My boyfriend lives in a privatised "council flat" which means he has 10 years of university education to live next door to literal meth addict single mothers who haven't yet been moved out from $800,000 USD shitholes into still cheaper outskirting areas. He does choose low-paying work he believes in (prisons, youth reform stuff) but his $110K/annum wouldn't be lower than thirtieth percentile I don't think. It seems unjust to me but he is genuinely unbothered to wake up to a new crack pipe on his lawn from time to time ... Anyway I'm twelve days away from my inheritance and I plan on surprising him with the news that I was serious in saying what's mine is yours and giving him the option to retire or do something new. I get insane with anger when I hear about the constant bullshit ("Where's your pronoun badge?) and abuse (propinquity to the scum of the earth) he has to deal with so I just would be happiest paying for him to find a nicer house and improve his cooking and gardening but that conversation will inevitably come across as controlling or condescending. Currently I planning to help him study for one more shot early next year and drawing up a guide for him of pitfalls (all social, he's impeccable as a doctor) and if he fails, fuck it, let worse people do it.

HBD acceptance would IMO improve America by reducing low quality immigration and reducing anti-white trends.

and then you have someone like Bryan Caplan who believes in HBD yet supports low-quality immigration. I don't think these positions are compatible.

Caplan thinks that his economic model explains the full reality of social living, but it does not. Theoretically, if every human lived according to the fruit of their labor, then low IQ immigration wouldn’t matter. But low IQ people require greater services, demand standards that their labor does not afford, and commit crime that is wasteful to society. Caplan’s belief system doesn’t factor in the complexity here

This position to keep out low IQ immigrants is only consistent if you agree we should look at plans to also deport low IQ white "indigenous" people to nations where it would be cheaper to pay for their welfare (e.g. Kazakhstan). Those people also do all the negative things you mention.

Surprisingly I've only met people who are in favour of one side of this transaction.

No, because law and custom allows us to freely exclude foreigners, but does not allow us to deport citizens. This has to do the rights of citizens in Anglo tradition. Non-citizens do not have such a right.

Western law and customs also include a ton of giveaways for poor minorities and taxation on the well off to help the not so well off. But you are in favour of doing away with those...

There’s an obvious difference between hundreds of years of legal philosophy culminating in the constitution, and the implementation of a tax program by congress

Just out of curiosity, how does this even come up with your psychiatrist?

Sometimes when I'm researching random shit I'll tell him about it.

He can be a useful sounding board. Basically an NYT liberal, but heterodox enough to be able to have certain conversations. It helps ground me.

Huh. I thought therapists were for talking about why you were sad or whatever. I don’t mean to be rude but this just sounds like a paid friend where you just chat about whatever you like. Would he play xbox with you if you asked? Is there a reason you don’t just talk to a free friend about this instead? Once again, not trying to be rude but I had no idea people used therapists this way and it is very shocking to me

Everything I've read to date has cemented the impression that therapists are, in fact, people you pay to be your friend. There's pretty much zero evidence for any of the theory, and if I recall correctly there was a study where fully-licensed talk-therapists delivered equivalent outcomes to a control group of randos who'd been given a two-hour class on active listening. Psychology since its founding has lacked a paradigm, and knowledge does not meaningfully accrue. On the other hand, talking to a serious, reasonably intelligent person about your problems, having them listen carefully and then offer you well-considered advice is a really, really good way to solve a whole host of mental problems.

On the other hand, talking to a serious, reasonably intelligent person about your problems, having them listen carefully and then offer you well-considered advice is a really, really good way to solve a whole host of mental problems.

This looks a lot like reinventing confession. Or pastoral advice in general. I guess if you find a good idea, steal it?

There is an argument I'm using it wrong. Sometimes I talk about myself, but sometimes I'm in something of a holding pattern and talk about nonsense. I like to test halfway formed ideas, and his responses tell me when I'm being crazy and when I've legitimately noticed things that are true. I used to have a lot of guilt and shame about realizations I've had, and when he semi confirms something, it helps to ease that feeling.

I'm entering a new field, and once I've fully acclimated I will probably stop seeing him. But right now, it's comforting

What is the value of HBD being true?

In the worst-case scenario, every attempt at trying to help a group that HBD says is unlikely to rise beyond that point was a complete failure. Collectively, these attempts have cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours at the very least. I don't believe it's true to that point, but the simplest answer is that it would seriously threaten a massive flow of dollars, time, and energy into helping a poorer group.

What do you mean "help a group rise above a point"?

The reason for all the effort and focus on helping, say, black Americans via affirmative action, diversity training, racial quotas, etc. is the belief that their growth was stunted due to the actions of others in the past. Thus, whatever point they are at now, the idea is that they could do better overall.

But if we're talking about life outcomes, rather than e.g. IQ or height, HBD doesn't imply that black Americans couldn't do better overall.

HBD doesn't imply that black Americans couldn't do better overall.

No, but it does imply that they can't do as well as higher achieving groups, on average. And if the aim of Progressives is full uplift, to get them to the same level of life outcomes as everyone else, the value of spreading knowledge of HBD, conditional on HBD being true, is that you get people to stop burning money and resources on an unattainable goal.

(Well, unattainable without some serious eugenics programs, but Progressives are not likely to be fond of that plan)

Yes, I think that this is well put.

You're right that it doesn't, one could point to medical advances which help black Americans out. But in the context of HBD, the most salient question tends to be the nature of IQ, which does correlate nicely with/income. Having more money certainly never hurt, and as one economist put it, money is how you actually get the things people care about (nicer homes, nicer neighborhoods, etc.)

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.

I think this actually indicative of at least some kind of comparative racism. It's one thing to think ethnic groups have hereditary differences in average intellect that account for part of the difference in career and financial success, but it's a whole other ball of yarn to think people of some races basically just can't understand your normal mode of speech, or that they'll react badly to it. As much as the whole, "I don't see color, I just treat everyone the same" thing gets mocked, I think it's actually a pretty good starting approach for how to treat others.

The other possibility is that progressive whites downshift their speech around working class people in general, and black codes as working class. They'd talk the same way to a plumber in uniform, but black people can't take their skin off. This also doesn't portray progressive whites as exactly paragons of equality, but it's a totally different hypothesis that fits with observed behavior about as well.

Speaking as a working class white, I've never noticed it from blue tribe customers or clients. I can't say there's no chance they aren't picking up that I can follow, but I've seen how they treat black coworkers and the difference is stark. I mean the guy who was a demanding asshole with sky high standards at me yesterday will be patient, soft-spoken and understanding with a black coworker today. It definitely feels like a noticeable pattern.

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It is, but color blindness as the official policy would have put this to cycle to rest. At least more so.

There is too much power and money up for grabs, so the people who want to perpetuate the cycle of abuse outflanked the people who wanted to transcend the cycle of abuse.

If I'm right that elite Whites are pivoting to minorities to beat other Whites, then there is no place for a suggestion that doesn't emphasize racial conflict.

But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious?

In some ways, it kind of has. The overwhelming consensus in mainstream discourse is the environmental model of intelligence/capability/doing-well-in-modern-society: if you have loving parents, went to a good school/college, had good nutrition etc. you're going to be more likely to be successful in a wide range of metrics and the mentioned things are causally affecting this. At the same time, a common narrative is how certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities, the poor or people from the Global South have less access to things like Spanish immersion daycare or well-funded schools, i.e. exactly the things that are supposed to boost intellectual capability.

The obvious conclusion when considering these ideas together is that at this very moment, even if it's subject to change and also the result of unethical acts like Colonialism or racial segregation, generally speaking a rich person will be smarter than a poor person, a white one smarter than a black one, a westerner smarter than a third-worlder. This also goes for a lot of other things education/the environment in general is sometimes said to cause in people, e.g. open-mindedness, kindness or critical thinking. Taking the environmental model seriously, all the disadvantaged groups should be seriously lacking in these things, at least in comparison to people with stable finances or those going to Harvard.

Now, obviously no one is shouting exactly that from the roofs in mainstream media. Instead, a popular approach, often documented in this space, has been to say that certain groups are lacking by Western/white standards, but only because those standards were implicitly or explicitly constructed to systematically supress other, equally valid ways of knowing and societal conduct. A well-known incarnation of that idea is the now-removed chart that the NMAAHC had on its website for a short while (1, 2, 3). This isn't quite the same as a full on 4chan IQ-redpill link dump and it's also not attributing anything to genes, but it's still acknowledging significant and pervasive (and therefore hard to change) group differences all the same.

Man, those links are a trip. If I showed those to anyone back in the '90s, they'd think it was something a White supremacist put together.

Every time I've seen it (and I've seen it plenty) my thought is "Goddamn, this is the quiet part out loud". Dozens of black (and white?) people - full fucking committees - looked at that poster and didn't see the problems with it. Incredible.

As Covfefe Anon says, "The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream".

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 this is right. Somewhere in the HBD debate is the idea that you can provide more humane welfare with the recognition of how groups vary. If some groups are just going to have a harder time with professional training, maybe we can stop torturing them with memes like "learn to code!" and accept that if we want them to have an $80k/year quality of life, we're going to need to give them $80k/year.

To be clear, my vibe is that the difference in IQ between racial groups is not very significant but it's hard to know for sure given that any serious researcher who talks about HBD commits career suicide.

Anyway, this acknowledgement that some groups can't learn to code their way out of poverty will be good practice for the near future, when machines have rendered all of us unable to do productive work and we are all completely dependent on the state.

I think it's interesting that the wokes seem to push hard for more representation in the various fields where much of the compensation is in status(doctor, teacher, most writing jobs, etc), less hard for jobs where they're roughly equal(nurses make bank right now, but it's kind of an average job in terms of status), and not at all for jobs which are more or less trading status for money(electrical linemen, for example).

And my lived experience with the trades is- take with a grain of salt because it's anecdata- that bosses hire blacks easily, but they're much less likely to make it and usually end up in the least technical jobs available in a given field/company/department.

We're a long ways off from there really being no way to make money if you aren't substantially brighter than average. My plumber makes 250k, he's been doing it a while but his company is just him and two other guys.

I think that if we separated kids by ability and slotted them into tracks that lead to realistic career choices, you could have a lot of very successful Black and White tradesmen, foremen, etc.

But first, we'd have to admit that aptitude is a thing, and that not everyone can grow up to be a physicist. We make perfect the enemy of the good, and it's mostly the underserved who pay for it.

A lot of replies along the policy implications.

What about just valuing the truth? You are kind of asking "so what if HBD is true? we can somewhat ignore it right?"

But does the truth not have value in and of itself for being true? For being the best map of the world? For being the one idea among thousands that rises to the top of the heap?

'If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.'

I agree, but I'm not the one saying it, it's something I hear a lot. I saw a YouTube comment on some race vid, and the guy's point was "so what if it's true, bad things happen when we notice". I wanted the strongest argument against that.

When you acknowledge hbd is true, they can stereotype you as "clearly they want bad things to happen to xyz". I think it's important to not inhabit our enemies stereotypes of us, and I genuinely believe that suppressing hbd leads to worse outcomes for black people.

I believe that much of the resistance to tracking students differently based on ability is based on the idea that if x percent in the advanced or remedial track doesn't match the gen pop, then it must be racism. Therefore, we must not individuate. If it was common knowledge that hbd was true, then we could allow kids to be grouped by ability in a way that would allow them to be taught more effectively.

Or, maybe they're just rationalizing, and they'd be against that regardless. But they'd have to be honest.

The value of HBD being true is basically nothing, as far as I'm concerned.

I-- and, I think, a lot of other people here-- just have an intense, instinctive flinch response to people saying things that aren't correct and when people say obvious nonsense, even if it's the most well-intentioned nonsense in the world, it triggers that flinch response. Obviously I don't say anything about it; I'm not stupid, and I value my social life.

Constrained reproduction is the stupid and unethical way to go about solving dysgenics, though-- it's never gonna happen, and if it did it would get weaponized by the people in power almost immediately against the people out of power. That's aside from any ethical considerations about involuntarily blocking people off from having kids, which are real and important.

My suggestion? Government-subsidized polygenic screening for everyone, optimizing for health and IQ, let's gooooooo

(Never solve with social technology that which you can instead solve with actual technology)

I think there's a danger to putting off a problem with the view that it will eventually be (probably) solved with technology.

PGS technology exists today.

I mean, it seems like the woke push to abandon meritocracy is, and has always been, primarily about elite jobs that do not themselves do most of the work involved in their job description, with the lower-status careers that do most of the actual work being left solidly alone. So I'm not sure that we're abandoning meritocracy, we're just assigning status differently. You want to look at a real abandonment of meritocracy? Go to Russia, or India, or parts of Latin America, where well-compensated but low-status jobs are assigned via corruption and nepotism. These societies don't work very well compared to woke sectors in the US because the boss's competence doesn't matter all that much compared to the vast horde of non-boss's.

They did know that Jews were smarter, that's why they developed their own version of multiple intelligences. But you're right, it did nothing to dissuade them.

Why does it matter? It matters because of the implications it has for everything we see socially, academically, and professionally. Assuming that each group has the same average ability in every area of human endeavor forces one to see unjust discrimination wherever there is not exact proportionate representation.

Oh, in the past, when we've focused on differences, it's ended badly? Well, that's exactly what we're doing: focusing on differences. Only now we're focusing on differences in outcome. I agree with this sentiment; let's ignore the differences! Let's work towards a fair society for everyone. Let's blind each other to all features of identity that don't matter and let the chips fall where they may. This is the only way forward in my opinion!

Perhaps most importantly, everything we've tried doesn't work. The kind of social inequality they care about doesn't appear to be a problem solvable via socio-political means. So let's just stop wasting our time!

Thank you. I agree that the argument that it foments race hate falls flat when you take into account that the people saying this are pushing race hate.

What do you think of the idea that multiculturalism needs a "great lie" in order to function?

Multiculturalism as such may not need it but the racial settlement of America does mandate a belief that such gaps have to be assumed to be caused by environmental factors - on pain of lawsuit and cancellation.

I can easily see nations where certain groups are just assumed to be more intelligent than others. I hardly doubt the Ottoman millet system would fall apart if Jews were seen as favored to be more intelligent on average.

But this isn't going to fly in America, for all sorts of historical, legal and cultural reasons.

Does this mean that we need to waste another 60 years on interventions that will at best make things not worse, and then blame White kids (and punish Asians) in perpetuity?

But, you're right of course. White and Asian kids are on the hook for our current order, for the foreseeable future

The value of HBD being true is that it is a defense to the assertion that mere mathematical inequality between groups is proof positive of discrimination between groups. Sometimes different groups of people on average like to do different things, or are better or worse at different things. This is not necessarily injustice (and it isn't necessarily justice). Mathematical inequality is orthogonal to discrimination.

HBD (at least the soft version) is trivially true. You can tell people of different races apart just by looking at them (in most cases), just as you can tell men from women (usually). This has zero effect on their moral worth as human beings, but it is true. What governmental policy you think should address the fact that not all people are perfectly equal on every measurement of humanity is left to the politics of the individual. In fact, no two people anywhere in the world are perfectly equal on every possible measurement. The project of "equity" is bullshit from start to finish. It is not physically, scientifically, mathematically, morally or politically possible. Even if it were, I don't think it desirable.

Mathematical inequality is orthogonal to discrimination

I wouldn't say that it's orthogonal, it's just not parallel. I mean, discrimination is a possible cause of inequality it's just not the only possible cause. I'd say they're at maybe a 30 degree angle

I think the neo-liberal, globalist types (maybe not so much the woke kind) dont need to acknowledge the group differences, as their vision is honestly a "globohomo" human - mankind consisting of fully atomized individuals without any distinct features, be it culturally or biologically.

For example look at the new "lord of the rangz" or "the witcher" TV shows. Every group in itself is a mixture of all races with no connection to the lore. Race is treated like eye color - something totally random with no deeper implications.

Thus the status quo does not really need a "great lie". It is simply regarded as a very temporary state that will quickly and "organically" be overcome. I think this is honestly the view of most political elites of the WEF type (aka the ones in power in most western countries) - at least in europe.

I realize it might be useful to discuss your thoughts seperately for the US due to its distinct history with race compared with most other western countries.

I don't think believing that race/ethnicity/whatever should not be a site of collective feeling implies that you want an atomised society. Indeed, that's the whole point of civic nationalism.

In the short term, society could stop wasting money and effort on policies that don't work and that make society less efficient. Humanity would be richer and better off without these drains on output.

In the longer term, making HBD common knowledge would (could?) lead to differences in values. In particular, it would be seen as relatively good for a competent person to have children, and relatively bad for an incompetent person to have children. This would produce a kind of crowd-sourced eugenics pressure, in that people's everyday choices in who to value and who not to would affect people's dating choices, their policy preferences, how they allocate status to others. My hope is that it would change the culture enough to improve humanity's genetic trajectory.

HBD is important because it's a refutation of the myth that low black and indigenous achievement is due to racism. It's also a refutation of antisemitic conspiracy theories about high Jewish achievement.

You point out the effects of genetics denialism on education, but it goes far beyond that. It also results in nonsensical ideas about and policies to address underrepresentation in cognitively demanding occupations, earnings and wealth gaps, incarceration rates, and even a literal blood libel about the causes of racial disparities in police shootings.

Note that although race gets all the attention, there's also class HBD, i.e. differences in average genetic potential for academic and professional achievement that break down along class lines, which is the main reason why even within races we see that children of successful parents tend to do better in school and earn more than children of poor parents. Because of genetics denialism, we get pants-on-head stupid discourse about "mobility" premised on the ridiculous idea that intergenerational income elasticity can be entirely attributed to rich parents buying advantages for their children and poor children having no chance to get ahead.

A lot of people, mistakenly believing that HBD is racist, nevertheless don't buy into the idea that racism causes racial achievement gaps, instead attributing the gaps to culture. There's probably a grain of truth here, but the very small effect of shared environment on adult IQ in twin studies is hard to reconcile with SES or culture explaining more than a small portion of the gap.

Aside from the fact that it appears to be wrong, I don't like the fact that this hypothesis adds insult to injury. Why blame people for something they can't help.

As for the dysgenic effects of welfare combined with low fertility among the cognitive elite, I do worry about this and would certainly be in favor of, e.g. sterilization of convicted violent criminals or making welfare eligibility contingent on use of long-term birth control, but I'm counting on genetic engineering to save us from the long-term consequences of the dysgenics program the government has been running.

Short and simple answer: because public policy is being made on the assumption that it's largely false.


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