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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Ignoring IQ, HBD suggests that the structure of the human mind is structured to adapt to a particular culture and environment, a la Joseph Heinrich’s WEIRD research. If evolution doesn’t work above the neck, culture has to do everything. This theoretical Homo Universalis doesn’t have instincts towards face reading or language, and has to cludge stuff together using very fragile chains of heritage. They probably don’t crack large social organization and remain as small tribes of mutually unintelligible hunter-gatherers.

An alternative frame would be that people have ‘souls’. At a certain level of cognitive capacity beings tap into some implicit structure in the universe that allows for all the things people do, like some more ornate version of math or game theory. Any particular instance might have local variation but is basically the same as every other instance in structure if not in content. Now that I spell this out, this sounds pretty similar to bog-standard Christian philosophy.

If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.

I would even say that the changes in which societies are hovels and which are not, such as the shift in the center of civilization from the Muslim world to Europe over the past several centuries, are too fast to explain with HBD.

I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers, but if I remember correctly, if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence, then Africa would be a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

HBD people often claim that the flynn effect happened and was very strong, and indeed at least half if not more of the africa / US IQ difference today are environmental - but things like the internet, mass education, libraries, and cheap goods and modern life generally smooths out environmental differences like access to education and supplementation and industrial food and malaria, so the remaining differences in the US are mostly genetic. Like, if there's a lot of environmental and genetic variation, and then we get rally good at dealing with the environmental variation ...

However many of them also claim Africa is a society of actually retarded and functionally disabled people who are 70IQ, and, yeah, it isn't. But HBD people being puerile, bigoted racists doesn't make HBD false, lots of correct things were historically believed by disgusting bigots first.

Certain genetic changes can occur quickly, suppose you have many inbred groups, and due to something (easier transportation, cultural bans on incest) it can change in 1 generation. Some countries are still noticeably inbred.

To add to others said, reduced pathogen load compared to 100 years ago (due to vaccines and hygiene) also probably improved IQs too.

if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence

The most common estimate held in HBD is that black Africans IQ would improve by 10-15 points if living standards improved to that 1st world has.

a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

In what sense?

They live lives, make social bonds, love, children, you don't need high intelligence for that.

If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.

Do you feel changes in diet couldn't explain much of the difference? To pick just one example, we know iodine deficiency during pregnancy results in adult IQ for the child almost a standard deviation lower than pregnancy without iodine deficiency.

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food, and thus be close to their maximum genetic potential, while peasants would frequently have vitamin deficiencies and have their height and IQ stunted. Then industrialization and the scientific revolution happen, humans figure out most of the food problem and figure out how to address the most important vitamin deficiencies in the population, and you see the Flynn Effect for several generations, which eventually tops out at the point where people's natural genetic potential lies.

If this explanation is true, it would be very easy to try to hypothesize something like: black people tend to not absorb certain vitamins as well as white people, so many of them might have deficiencies that go unnoticed that lead to lower IQ. I tend to recall looking at data for iodine levels in black mothers in the modern US, and they have the lowest levels of any ethnic group - though still above what is considered adequate for the IQ effects. It doesn't require that many epicycles to propose the hypothesis that what is adequate iodine for other groups might not be adequte iodine for black mothers - or that the scientists got the initial number wrong, and more iodine is needed to make up for the deficit.

And even without such speculation, it would be very simple to speculate about vitamin deficiencies in general in the US black population. This would allow for a "cultural" explanation for low black IQ that has a "biological" solution (force black people to eat different food/offer some product that has bioavailable versions of the missing vitamins.)

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food

even if this was true, random drift would sort things. But give 'joe the plumber' person a lot of iodine and he's not gonna become einstein. There certainly were a lot of people in the past who were very smart but, by chance, were peasants. But that doesn't mean the elite weren't very sorted for genetics of various sorts!

The explanation might not be iodine. Black people have high rates of vitamin D deficiency, for example.

there would be no Flynn Effect

This is way bigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem

if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence, then Africa would be a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

This is such an annoying and ignorant argument. Clinical retardation is not just the condition of having low IQ.

HBD is not the claim that environment has no effect on IQ. A 50% environment, 50% genetics model to explain IQ variation is a pro HBD position

That's a good point I hadn't thought and I take back the first paragraph I wrote.

No it isn't. HBD as typically sold by its advocates requires genetics to be the dominant factor.

If you read a review article on behavioral genetics, i'd recommend this, iirc one of the things it initially emphasizes is that heritability is entirely a contextual thing. The heritability of a trait just tries to measure the extent that it, in a specific population under the myriad conditions and complex causation within it, a trait is caused by genes, in the sense that individuals with shared genes are, ceteris paribus, all else equal, more likely to share the trait. But this could entirely depend on environment - 'arm count' is much less heritable in an environment where people get their arms cut off at random and .1% of the population has a gene that sometimes causes arm malformation, vs an environment where nobodys arms get cut off and 50% of the population has a gene that reliably causes arms to not develop in utero. Despite the genes involved being the same!

Similarly, the HBD argument is - in the past, environment was dominant, and IQ had a much lower "heritability" if one could measure it - malaria? mauled by tiger? intestinal parasites? bad weather causes crops to fail? All random factors lowering IQ. Sure, a smarter person can avoid those a bit better, but not enough. But now modern society is very good at eliminating all of those - industrial food production, modern medicine, society, hygiene, education, travel, internet - and most of the variation left is genetic. HBD generally claims that within america, genetics is dominant - but not for instance between africa and america, or historical america and america.

In The Bell Curve, which I think can safely be called one of the seminal works in HBD discourse, Charles Murray states that evidence shows intelligence is between 40-80% heritable, and he puts his personal estimation in the middle at 60%. HBD as usually presented does not require that heritability be the dominant factor in determining intelligence, just a major component. If it's 40% heritable, that still has significant explanatory power.

That's the motte the bailey is when the same poster comes back 20 minutes later askings stupid questions like; If HBD is false what were Africa and Latin America were doing while the whites and Asians were duking it out for world supremacy?

You're the one who is engaging in strategic equivocation here, and being a veteran of the old atheism wars myself I see little to be gained by getting drawn into a Gish gallop with you.

Obviously if HBD were not true, the Jews of Europe would be basket cases after the holocaust suffering under incalculable intergenerational trauma.

Israel would not have been found-able, and we'd see natural forming Ghettos where jews drink themselves to death, abuse heroin at insane rates, have rates of teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and incest vastly worse than even the most remote indigenous communities in north america, test scores that are barely measurable, single digit high-school graduation rates... and a double digit percentage of them wracking up felony convictions often before they can legally drink.

Instead of criticizing their apartheid regime against palestinians or lamenting the Casualties of Isreals various wars we'd be etternally wringing our hands that the Nuremburg laws never ended, that the French and German carceral states were the new face of the holocaust and that european civilization is eternally National Socialist in character... angry students would confront university presidents demanding he answer if he is a nazi, and in his political correctness he'd be unable to deny it... to keep his jo he'd have to weep and lament that jews remain so underpresented, and their graduation rate so abysmal, that an inescapable Nazism must pervade his campus and that he is trying to learn to defeat the hitler in his heart (much as the president of Evergreen didn't feel he could deny he was a white supremacist, but had to make weeping apologies for a white supremacy he would not endorse but could not deny being part of)

The film and entertainment industry would be desperate to shoehorn jewish actors and characters into traditionally white and black roles... and every year at the oscars holywood would make a big show of how many more jews they nominated for high awards... though the more critical commentators would point out they were still underrepresented in the behind the scenes money making positions, and regularly missed top billing.

I think you're conflating being Jewish with being from Toronto.

What does this even mean?

Yes Torontonians are vastly overrepresented in the film industry... (tax credits and architecture that easily plays NYC)... also if you imply Torontonians run Hollywood, then they won't let you work until you apologize for this obviously absurd statement.

Wait, Torotonians are definitionally from Canada, doesn't that mean they should be the ones apologizing?

beautiful

Please do not post low-effort one-word comments.

Whatever your opinion on HBD may be, what do you believe the world would look like if the opposite were true

Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black. The internet would've led to a wave of achievement from all races and genders. Scott Alexander, who we know because he's intelligent and blogs, wouldn't be jewish - someone of a uniformly distributed race would've done something else instead. Same for Big Yud. Also, intelligence would be less obviously heritable and cluster in families, as it clearly does from any amount of personal experience.

Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black.

Can you explain why you think a world where HBD wasn't true would be one with a more equal distribution of Nobel Prize Winners?

There are five Nobel Prizes given out: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. I'm going to omit the latter two, because they seem highly subjective and more likely to purely be used as political tools (hence Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush.) So that leaves: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Medicine.

Suppose that the Nobel committee is good at awarding genuinely meritorious advances in all of those fields - that everyone who "deserves" such a prize gets one. What needs to be true in order for a person to earn their prize?

Well, first they would need to enter one of those fields of science. I could easily imagine an HBD-less world where an accident of history resulted in black people having a learned, cultural obsession with math, and as a result when a black person is really smart, they almost all go into the field of math and rarely cross over into the Nobel fields. This obviously isn't the case in our world, but I think the basic format of "Black culture pushes all smart black people towards fields A, B and C, which are not among the Nobel fields" is a legitimate answer one could give here.

There's also the component of being able to go to school to become a scientist in the first place. Prior to the GI Bill, only 10% of Americans attended college. Nowadays ~30-40% of people have 4-year degrees. But this shift after the GI Bill didn't lift all boats equally. Many black WWII veterans did not benefit from the GI Bill due to Jim Crow laws, since the program was administered by individual states and those in the South didn't want Black people to benefit. So just as the shift from 10% to 30% of Americans getting college degrees was happening, white people benefited and black people were often denied such benefits. That was 1944 - not that long ago.

It is not that hard to tell a story, where the first generation of "more people going to college" excluded black people, and black people today are still a generation or more behind white people as a result (but look much worse than even that, because they have to compete with white people who have cultivated a "college culture" for two or more generations already.) If one didn't believe in HBD, and leaned more towards cultural explanations, this doesn't seem that far fetched to me - though obviously it would need epicycles to explain black kids adopted by white kids having worse performance, etc.

In any case, I feel like the causal pipeline towards becoming a Nobel prize winner in a world without HBD has to be some combination of:

  • Good genetic endowments (individual variance not group variance - ignore the various paradoxes people bring up)

  • Good fetal environment (no fetal alcohol syndrome, etc., stunting intellectual growth)

  • Good diet (no vitamin deficiencies that stunt intellectual growth, etc.)

  • Good pollution/contaminant levels (no lead poisoning, etc. - I know the "lead poisoning" hypothesis took a blow somewhat recently, but it is illustrative of a possible class of explanations for lack of success)

  • A culture that pushes one towards the Nobel prize fields

  • The ability to receive an education that puts one on the cutting edge of the Nobel prize fields

  • Luck (being in the right time and right place as the questions that lead to an important insight in science finally get asked)

I think there are so many factors that go into all of those that it is hard to make the case that we should see more of this or that group as Nobel prize winners. The US started adding iodine to salt in 1924 (iodine deficiency in pregnant mothers results in lower adult IQ in children), so I don't find it hard to sketch an explanation like:

  • Prior to 1924, black people disproportionately suffered from iodine deficiency, explaining why they weren't Nobel prize winners.

  • In 1923, leaded gasoline was introduced to the market, and not completely phased out in favor of unleaded gasoline until 1996, with black people disproportionately living in cities that ended up in the most contaminated areas due to red-lining.

Leaving the only period where black people might have had a "fair shot" from 1997-2023, and that's assuming we actually did something about environmental lead poisoning. Do you think these explanations are insufficient?

(Obviously, the above has been all very US-centric. But Americans have won about 40% of all Nobel prizes, so the above explanation surely explains some of the gap in Nobel prize achievement. I'm sure the rest of the argument writes itself for people familiar with non-HBD attempts to explain ethnic IQ gaps around the world.)

Can you explain why you think a world where HBD wasn't true would be one with a more equal distribution of Nobel Prize Winners?

Briefly: Because academia and industry were quite meritocratic - in order to effectively discover things or invent things or make profit - and this has led to, in large part, those who are smartest and most capable succeeding. In math, you really do, in large part, just need to be very smart and prove impressive things to become a famous mathematician. Even if you're an indian, or asian, or brown, disabled, etc. And at points in history libraries, the internet, mail, international travel, and the modern economy has made it very possible for someone to, just by virtue of intelligence or capability, succeed on one's own by using resources available to anyone, or changing circumstances, location, company one keeps, etc.

I could easily imagine an HBD-less world where an accident of history resulted in black people having a learned, cultural obsession with math, and as a result when a black person is really smart, they almost all go into the field of math and rarely cross over into the Nobel fields

Right, but this didn't happen to f.ex jews - they're uniformly successful across chem, physics, math, bio, etc. And - how would this happen? You're "black", but you ... work at a university, in the mixed racial environment, you marry an asian uni professor, your kids go to the local school, maybe the local "good" school... and it's gone quickly. Similarly for jewish culture! Yet atheist jews continue to succeed everywhere.

Many black WWII veterans did not benefit from the GI Bill due to Jim Crow laws

But the GI bill isn't why 20-30% of americans today go to college! And those blacks could just go to the library, self-study, or make friends with like-minded coders on the internet. I've become good friends with many extremely smart people just by shared interest in complex topics. I don't know any mottizens particularly well, but themotte is another example - smarter people congregate here out of desire to do specific things with other intelligent people.

Prior to 1924, black people disproportionately suffered from iodine deficiency, explaining why they weren't Nobel prize winners.

How disproportionately? Even if 80% of blacks had so much iodine deficiency they were retarded, that'd still not help the argument, the other 20% could still win nobel prizes - and, they aren't. (obviously, segregation and slavery etc are factors then, it's much easier to argue about the state of the present day)

with black people disproportionately living in cities that ended up in the most contaminated areas due to red-lining

Again, how disproportionately? That's at most gonna be like a 30% effect, and many jews living in lead-infused cities still won nobel prizes. (Which is a confusing thing about lead poisoning, what exactly are its effects on intelligence given that so many smart people coexisted with it? Obviously there were smart people in 1500 and there was a lot more bringing down intelligence then than just lead, so lead def has a negative effect, but interesting)

Anyway, the main thrust of my argument for HBD here was jewish overrepresentation, not black underrepresentation.

(also, it doesn't make much sense that you'd have such stark differences in genetic iq within populations, visible ... i mean compare you and your parents to joe the plumber and his parents, pretty clear, also plenty of heritablity studies and GWASes ... and then for that to not transfer to larger-scale populations over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution)

where the first generation of "more people going to college" excluded black people, and black people today are still a generation or more behind white people as a result

I know people whose grandparents were exclusively impoverished farmers running from conflict, and their parents immigrated to the Us / europe / their countries sped through industry, and their parents succeeded in school and industry just by being smart, and now they're incredibly smart as well.

Ordinarily I'd just report you for being a low-effort/single-issue troll * and move on but seeing as I don't expect the mods to actually do about this I'm going to go against my own advice and feed the troll, because like @FCfromSSC I find that preferable to ceding this space to the enemy with out a fight.

So, to answer your question, two things spring immediately to mind.

First is the issue @Evinceo raises, if things like intelligence and personal discipline are primarily genetic why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts. This isn't a recent development either Strong man builds a grand empire, or sucessful empire only for his kids to piss it all away has been recurring theme throughout human history.

Second, the axis would have won WWII. The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents. If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory. Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents. As much as Weebs fetishize the IJNS Yamato but the historical truth is that the one time she actually fought enemy surface ships for real, she and her accompanying task force got thrashed by a by a squadron of 4 escort ships that collectively weighed less than Yamato's main armament. That sort of thing doesn't happen in a sane world run by math and autistic notions of genetic destiny.

* 2/3rds of BorfRebus' total posts have been abpout race/hbd

  • -11

I had never heard of HBD before showing up at the SSC sub in my lurking days, and it was the very poor quality of the opposition there that first clued me in that the advocates must be on to something.

This was my exact experience as well. I subconsciously held that evolution stopped at the neck but ones the arguments and evidence were laid out the idea seemed to me completely absurd.

I don't think race or warrior spirit or anything like that really factors into WWII. Much like WWI, what arguably won WWII was just being able to crank out More Stuff, with the occasional piece of Better Tech moving the needle here and there.

I don't think race or warrior spirit or anything like that really factors into WWII.

I agree, it doesn't factor in because we live in the counter-factual. IE a world where the things like culture, geography, economics, and blind luck matter a whole lot more than the perceived superiority or inferiority of a given genetic phenotype.

Case in point, the Eastern Front, where Hitler himself expressed his astonishment at the sheer scale of Soviet manufacturing (of course, bolstered by Lend-Lease; but let us not diminish this achievement).

Which makes me want to pick on this in the main comment:

Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents.

This really undersells how much of the European theatre, for most of the time, was really the Eastern Front.

Ordinarily I'd just report you for being a low-effort/single-issue troll * and move on but seeing as I don't expect the mods to actually do about this *

Would you please articulate exactly what set of rules we should adopt such that we'd ban someone for being a likely witch with an agenda? Do you want us to outright ban HBD posters? Holocaust deniers? Accelerationists? Anyone who shows wokeness? And if the answer to that is no, then please stop griping about how we don't ban everyone you'd ban because you'd arbitrarily ban anyone who rubs you the wrong way.

Yes, we see the people showing up to test the waters and see if they can turn this place into Stormfront. Unless you are advocating for a blanket content-based ban, we will continue to do what we're doing and enforce the tone rules stringently and allow people to trot out their witchiest hot takes if they can express them in a compliant manner.

We've been over this before, heck Zorba and I argued back and forth about it pretty much from TheMotte's founding the moment I stepped down.

Zorba, Cheeze, Et AL say "you can't just ban someone for consistently bringing the conversation down" and I reply that "consistently bringing the conversation down is pretty much the only valid reason to ban someone". Letter of the law vs the spirit and all that. This is further compounded by the fact that the values of accountability and due process are fundamentally incompatible with the desire for anonymity. You shouldn't be thinking of internet accounts as people. You should be looking at them as disposable personas.

This doesn't actually answer the question. We do ban people for "consistently bringing the conversation down," but to reach that level, they have to be "consistently" doing it, not just posting one or two bad posts. But you want us to pull the trigger as soon as we see one of those bad posts.

You are, in fact, arguing for a content-based ban. If someone trots out HBD theory, we should ban them. If someone starts posting about Da Joos, we should ban them. If someone questions age of consent laws, we should ban them. Whether you admit it or not, you're basically arguing that we should place certain topics off-limits.

You shouldn't be thinking of internet accounts as people. You should be looking at them as disposable personas.

On a purely practical level, have you considered that all this does is multiply our work because half our time will be spent whacking ItsDaJoosPoster#173?

And speaking for myself, no, I actually think the "disposable personas" attitude is toxic. Obviously many identities here are just disposable personas, but much of the reason Internet discourse tends to be low value is because of attitudes like that, that you aren't actually arguing with a person, you're arguing with a "disposable persona," and therefore Internet arguments are not interactions with other people, but essentially you firing off pixelated missiles at a row of Space Invaders. I am aware many people see it that way, but when I know I'm dealing with someone who treats discussions like that, I consider it little different than arguing with a sociopath; there's really no point.

I've answerd the question as best I can. And no I'm not arguing for a content-based ban. What I'm arguing for is consideration of an account's history in the decision, and that contrary to rationalist norms where in assumptions of trust and good faith are the default, a lack of history should instead be interpreted as evidence of bad faith. Especially when that new account displays prior knowledge. As I have tried to explain to you before; theMotte is a fringe offshoot of a fringe offshoot, it's pretty damn rare that someone just wanders in here off the street. I'm saying that theMotte has enemies, that we've had users flat out admit that they were here to radicalize people, to farm lolcows for /r/drama, and to get us driven off reddit. and that it is foolish to forget/ignore this.

When a new user with no prior established history starts pressing the sort of buttons that draw outside scrutiny, your first thought should be that "this guy is up to something". To the degree that an internet persona has value at all it is in it's established history. A persona without an established history has no value and can be disposed of without thought. This dehumanization is price one pays for anonymity, because humanity and anonymity are mutually exclusive.

Remember that as a moderator your job is not that of a cop or a lawyer, you are not here to enforce rules. You are a janitor, you are a shit filter, you are here to clean up messes.

With that in mind, remember I have been in your shoes. When you complain about half your time spending half your time slapping down throwaway accounts and my reply is "half? try closer to 2/3rds. what exactly did you think I was doing during my tenure?"

and that contrary to rationalist norms where in assumptions of trust and good faith are the default

Well, see, I don't actually consider myself a rationalist, and I don't assume trust and good faith from new posters.

As I have tried to explain to you before; theMotte is a fringe offshoot of a fringe offshoot, it's pretty damn rare that someone just wanders in here off the street.

And as I have told you before, we know this. Like JC man, I know you think we're quokkas but I wish you wouldn't keep assuming we're stupid.

I'm saying that theMotte has enemies, that we've had users flat out admit that they were here to radicalize people, to farm lolcows for /r/drama, and to get us driven off reddit. and that it is foolish to forget/ignore this.

Okay, and being off reddit, a major part of that concern is now obviated. I am not sure how much we should actually care about being being "farmed for drama" anymore, and as for the agenda posters, yes, they're here.

If we're being honest, given my druthers I probably would shoot from the hip more often (though not as often as you). You are right that the latest iteration of "Hello fellow kids what do you think of HBD, pretty spicy stuff huh? Also, what about those Jews?" could probably be summarily banned with nothing of value lost. I think the place where I agree more with Zorba and less with you is that as a community, the norms established by moderation are important, and being seen as impartial and giving everyone enough rope to hang themselves is more valuable than being perceived as capricious and banhappy where any mod can just ban anyone who raises our hackles.

I don't assume trust and good faith from new posters.

Then you're in the minority and are truly my spiritual successor. ;-)

I wish you wouldn't keep assuming we're stupid.

I'm not assuming that anyone is stupid, i am remembering old arguments and projecting the results forward. Arguments that I will concede that I lost, but I still don't think I was necessarily wrong. Shoot from the hip and let the cards fall where they may. The worst that can happen is not bad at all.

This is further compounded by the fact that the values of accountability and due process are fundamentally incompatible with the desire for anonymity. You shouldn't be thinking of internet accounts as people. You should be looking at them as disposable personas.

Doing this while also maintaining a stance against ban evasion just provides perverse incentives. The decent person who gets banned because they got hotheaded once too often is gone forever at the drop of a hat; the asshole coming in to disrupt just spins up a new account.

On the contrary the assholes, will spin new accounts regardless and that's exactly why I believe Zorba's policy of giving every new account "the benefit of the doubt" and "time to acclimitze to our norms" even when they had usernames like "rape_all_n1gg3rs, "throwaway[numberstring]", and "youburdensomecunt" was so misguided. We lost a number of valued posters over the years (Yodacrist, McJunker, Iprayiam, to name a few) to the 1st Geek Social Fallacy. Namely the unwillingness ostracize the bad actor and instead attempt to moderate other users' reactions to them.

The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents.

OK, stop there. The Japanese were a joke, technologically. They had a couple of goodies, like the Zero (which had 6 months of dominance before the Americans figured out how to fight it) but the rest of their military was terrible. They had no business declaring war. Their carriers were impressive right up until they took damage and blew up.

The Germans won their early victories with crappy Panzer I and II, and were heavily outclassed by French and British tanks of the era. What they did have were tactics, which the aristocratic Junkers of the Wehrmacht fought vociferously against. The likes of Guderian and von Rundstedt were saved only by the personal intervention of the autodidact Hitler.

utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

The Americans conquered an entire continent, and the British the world. But sure, they were lacking in warrior spirit.

proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood

You have accidentally stumbled on the correct answer: attrition. That's how the war was won. The Allies simply had more steel, more coal, and especially the banks were utterly dedicated to the cause (because the Germans weren't going to pay back all those loans made to Europe). When you have 1,000,000 men and the enemy has 500,000, and you force a battle where both of you lose half a million men, you win.

IJNS Yamato

The proper appellation is HIJMS Yamato.

OK, stop there. The Japanese were a joke, technologically. They had a couple of goodies, like the Zero (which had 6 months of dominance before the Americans figured out how to fight it) but the rest of their military was terrible. They had no business declaring war. Their carriers were impressive right up until they took damage and blew up.

But the Japanese did not start of attacking Pearl Harbor, they started off invading China 2 years before war kicked off in Europe; and they surely had an advantage in technology, organisation and training over the Chinese at the time. (The Chinese were an utter mess at this point.) The Japanese were shocked by the Chinese resistance after the initial advances, e.g. in Shanghai, because they expected Japan to steamroll over China in less than a year because they were Obviously Better, as evidenced in their surprise victory decades before in the First Sino-Japanese War (edit: and the Russo-Japanese war, and the occupation of Manchuria, etc, etc.)

The reason the US got roped into the war was in large part due to the US embargoing oil to Japan (in retaliation of Japanese activities in colonial southeast Asia, including actions made to secure resources for the mainland campaign and to cut off aid to China). If their technological and cultural advantage over the Chinese was sufficient to overpower China (the “substantial advantage in technology and training”), the US may not have been involved in the war after all, or at the very least, the timeline would be drastically different.

It isn’t much of an argument for HBD in any case. The Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger was always going to be a Herculean task, any technological advantages aside, and it wasn’t like China was working with sticks and stones. One would have to also ignore how the Chinese led the Japanese in social organisation and technology for history up until the Meiji restoration and conclude that actually, all of that was just luck, and only 1860s and after really counts.

Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger

The Quing conquered China, and Manchuria looks to only be ~2x the size of Japan at the beginning of their conquest

The Qing also helpfully had much of the Ming military defect to them (Wu Sangui opening Shanhai Pass being the most famous, but many of the most capable officers had already defected as early as 1620-1630) as the Ming collapsed and the Shun was ransacking Beijing. Most of the military used by the Qing to defeat the Ming (and the generals formulating strategy) were ethnic Han, not to mention specialised troops like artillerists that the Jurchens didn’t have institutions for. Even then it took some 30 odd years from the unification of the Jurchens and conquest of Manchuria to the subjugation of the entire Chinese mainland, excepting remnants and Taiwan. (The Three Feudatories revolt shortly after was also an existential crisis for the Qing.)

It’s not really comparable.

What's the actual HBD prediction, though? Can it actually be used to check against previous data?

Japanese are high-IQ, right? So why were they behind technologically? And sure, there's a whopping huge cultural explanation available, the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before... but claiming that "HBD is decisive except when it isn't" isn't actually all that useful. All the excuses for why cultural factors predominated seem entirely relevant, but then we're supposed to discard similar cultural factors from our current situation?

If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?

I actually think it's considerably more likely than not that HBD is true. I continue to argue that it isn't useful, because it doesn't generate novel predictions. I don't need an HBD thesis to tell me that Blacks Less Likely; I can just look at fifty years of data from previous interventions to see that's clearly the most likely outcome from future interventions, especially if those interventions limit themselves to a particular cluster in theoretical space.

I don't need an HBD thesis to tell me that Blacks Less Likely; I can just look at fifty years of data from previous interventions to see that's clearly the most likely outcome

This is the way of scientific hypotheses. I don't need a theory of gravity to tell me that things will fall when dropped; I can just look at the history of things having fallen when dropped. But people want to know why.

Sure. But part of the "why" is definately environmental, because we can see significant short-term changes correlating with attempted interventions. Black marriage outcomes really did crater starting in the 60s. The black murder rate really has skyrocketed post-2020. If policies can make things worse, then fixing those policies can probably ameliorate the harm they caused, and that would be an improvement over the current state.

Scientific theories are useful when they give us actionable predictions. "If you do this, such and such will happen". It seems to me that HBD is short on actionable predictions, at least under anything approaching the existing situation. It gives us no constructive path forward, only a whole lot more conflict. Black people aren't going away, we do actually have to figure out how to share the country with them, and they are never going to accept permanent underclass status with no hope of a solution. I actually think that a lot of their problems are self-inflicted, and a lot more are caused by misguided Blue attempts at helping. But the "your racist" meme is, at this point, simply an axiom, and appeals to HBD won't fix that, so I think we're better off focusing on the way bad interventions have made things worse than on genetic explanations we can't actually do anything about.

HBD is absolutely necessary to respond to the Norwegian Prisons argument, i.e. the claim that disproportionate outcomes are proof of discrimination, and that category of argument can swallow the whole world if it does not have a ready response. That is more than ample justification for believing in HBD and promulgating its truth.

the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before

This far overstates the case (and makes the extraordinary Meiji restoration even more incredible). We usually put the end of the Iron Age with the start of historiography, and Japan has had a tradition of organized states and written records for a good long while at that point.

Japan was also no stranger to gunpowder. the late Warring States period leading to the Tokugawa shogunate saw extensive and innovative use of guns; both the Ming and the Japanese under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, when fighting over Korea at the end of the 16th century, were well-armed with muskets, and both sides had understanding of tactics like volley fire.

That American gunboats far outstripped anything the Japanese had seen previously doesn’t mean they didn’t know what a gun was, just a recognition that their military technology is some two centuries dated.

All solid points. I guess a fairer comparison would be something like the renaissance, or perhaps the age of pike and shot?

Pike and shot would be fair, yeah.

If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?

Because it was a desperate, last-gasp gamble for both of them. Starting a war usually is (unless you're a neocon).

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

Hitler considered that there were too many Germans and not enough food to feed them. The soil was giving out, and what would happen then? Germany must rely on imports, and hence become yet another slave of the western bankers. Hitler always felt himself racing against time, and needed to strike quickly. Imagine if he wasn't so hasty and had an army of Tiger tanks and V2 rockets to start with.

This just seems to kick it back up a layer. Why did they find themselves in such a position? Why did the Japanese egg on the ultranationalists? Why didn't Hitler dedicate himself to, I don't know, fertilizer research, or try literally any other solution than aggressive war against an unbeatable enemy? Or just mortgage himself to the gills to the bankers, who if memory serves didn't have much of a problem with him pre-war, use the money to finish climbing the tech tree, and THEN go all Mongol horde on his creditors?

And this presumes they thought the war was unwinnable, which is really not the impression I've gotten from what history I've read.

This requires a broader understanding of how both theatres were going, and more importantly, the political climates that led Germany and Japan to war in the first place. I will mainly talk about Japan here, as I think someone else can probably do a better job illustrating the particulars of Hitler’s views on lebensraum.

The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.

In an attempt to be concise:

  • The Japanese civilian government has had been dominated by the IJA/IJN at that point, especially after the perceived failure of Taisho democracy in the early 1930s. This was not helped with the many assassinations (and many more attempted assassinations) of civilian officeholders by military staff; most notably, of PM Inukai in 1932 in the May 15th Incident. Further background to this: the Meiji restoration was led mainly by the daimyo and samurai military classes, and only were (relatively) discredited by the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war in the 1900s, which saw Japan winning but with the public broadly dissatisfied with its gains; as such, liberal-democratic norms in Japan were relatively superficial. This was exacerbated by (among many, many other things) that the Army and Navy had zero civilian oversight; the chain of command went straight to the Emperor, bypassing any civilian decision-making. The initial invasion of China was essentially a unilateral escalation by the IJA, with the civilian administration in Tokyo reluctantly being dragged along. (Conversely, the Army and Navy were also entirely separate from each other, and often at each others’ throats as well - each side would frequently assassinate officers and civilian supporters of the other side. Naturally, they also had different approaches to the war; the Army wanted to expand north into Siberia, while the Navy wanted to expand south.) In short, Japan’s militarists egged themselves on, no second party necessary.

  • Japan had been at war with China for more than 4 years at the point of the attack at Pearl Harbor; the principle reason for Japan to extend the war to Southeast Asian were to 1) block aid to China, and 2) procure resources for its war on the mainland. (They started by occupying French Indochina, which Vichy France under Nazi control ceded to Japan.) When the US retaliated by embargoing oil, the Japanese war machine (esp. navy) was stuck: they only had a very limited amount of oil left, and had to get it from somewhere (I believe the Manchurian deposits were not known at the time). One of the least bad ways they could think of out of the situation was to try to hamstring American force projection in the region, quickly occupy SEA, then hopefully try to sue for peace with the non-interventionist US; if that didn’t work out, at least it would have bought them time to dig in in the region. As far as desperate plans go it at least made sense for the IJN.

  • The Japanese war command, in its hubris (but also due to not really having suffered defeats at any point, and having already occupied Manchuria), really didn’t expect to be that bogged down in China. They expected the war to be over in a year with Chinese resistance collapsing quickly; instead they were stuck in a long, protracted war where they had trouble extending their control beyond the coast plus some supply lines into the interior.

  • The Japanese also thought that due to irreconcilable regional interests in Southeast Asia, the US, Britain, and Japan would have to come to blows at some point anyway, as Japan expanded its colonial empire.

Edit:formatting

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

They aren't any moreso than anyone else - there are a lot of poor drug addicts, being smart doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a drug addict, and the high levels of intelligence require a lot of randomness / non-additive genetic variation / other unknown (non-shared-environment) factors, so children of the smartest aren't as good on average, even though they're still smart. Coming apart at the tails etc, once you've milked all you can from currently-existing additive variation you can only get a lot better with something else.

I generics wasn’t heritable then we would see far more failed sons then we do now. General mean reversion in genetics explains the sons failure properly. If the son was just average ability like IQ 105 instead of mean reversion from a high ability person then we would see the son fail 99% of the time. Instead we have a lot of successful sons.

So agreeing with you and don’t believe his anecdotes makes any sense. Or his German argument since America was a similar race.

I generics wasn’t heritable then we would see far more failed sons then we do now.

Why? Almost no-one disputes that outcomes are fairly heritable, many (including myself) would simply argue that it's mostly the advantages of a privileged upbringing that makes those outcomes heritable.

Well people disagree with that. That gets into the genetics versus heritable debate.

If natural IQ is the dominant factor in success and if IQ wasn’t heritable then there would be more failed sons. If an IQ 140 person was not heritable at all then on average their children would be IQ 105 and wouldn’t come close to parents achievements. Instead most believe in mean reversion and IQ 140 on average would be 130 on average and the sons would be accomplished on average but to a lesser degree.

Well that first part is a pretty crucial leg to the argument that you didn't mention. So in fact, we needn't necessarily see more failed sons is genetics had little to do with IQ, that's only true if one further concedes that there is such a thing as 'natural' IQ and that it is the dominant factor in success.

It seems likely traits are heritable. I don’t see evidence that it is false. While IQ is difficult to measure directly there are no doubt studies on height that show strong heritable in well fed populations.

I don’t see evidence that it is false

Well two can play at that game, I don't see evidence that it's true.

height that show strong heritable in well fed populations.

So? Just because one characteristic is heritable, that doesn't imply that they all are. Especially when comparing something so clear cut as 'height' to something so murky and vague as 'intelligence'.

I don't think genetic differences in race would mean that the Germans and Japanese would have to win. It's a factor that can help them, not a guarantee.

Besides, the argument obviously fails for Germans, because they killed or drove out their Jews. Jews have a high IQ and HBD would tell you that getting rid of them is a bad idea.

Jews have a high IQ and HBD would tell you that getting rid of them is a bad idea.

Would it? Of course it was an evil thing to do for other reasons, but the Nazis didn't persecute the Jews because they thought they were stupid, they did it because they considered them to be dangerous. Jews showing smarts could only make them seem more threatening.

At least make your argument internally consistent. Hitler considered the Anglos to be cousins from a common Germanic stock, i.e.:

Friendly relations continued between the two countries the next year with former prime minister David Lloyd George visiting the Fuhrer at his Bavarian retreat in September 1936. Lloyd George was very impressed with the very pro-English Hitler. He claimed that, “Germany does not want war and she is afraid of an attack by Russia”, something that many British politicians were also concerned about. He practically apologised for the First World War and said, “There is a profound desire that the tragic circumstances of 1914 should never be repeated”.

This was music to Hitler’s ears. More than anything else he dreamed of an alliance with Saxon England. A nation, he believed, that was made up of and run by people of “excellent Germanic stock”. He was not too sure about the Celtic races that made up the rest of Britain though, and always referred to the UK as “England”. Hitler proclaimed that, “the English nation will have to be considered the most valuable ally in the world”. He added, “England was a natural ally for Germany and an enemy of France”, plus the latter’s communist friends in Russia, no doubt. Relations became even more cordial with the Fuhrer, referring to ‘Mein Kampf’ and other publications of his, when he asserted that the English are, “our brothers, why fight our brothers?”.

So those "Mongrel Sons of Quakers", as I remember you calling them awhile ago when explaining the pleasure you took from thinking about German cities being firebombed by the Allies, were of a very similar racial stock as the Germans.

The Anglos and Russians beating the Axis powers is not exactly an indictment of HBD. Unless you're trying to presuppose the History Channel level of analysis which may suggest that the Allies won the war because of the Tuskegee airmen or something.

Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents.

They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.

Germany and Japan are relatively tiny, with few natural resources. The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder, while the US and the British Empire combined had essentially limitless natural resources. Any war becomes a war of attrition if it goes on long enough. As the Finns also found when fighting the Russians, you can kill the enemy ten to one, but that's no good if the enemy always has an eleventh man.

As far as HBD is concerned, Germany's biggest blunder was an anti-IQ move. The persecution of the Jews caused a huge brain drain, both of e.g. Jewish professors and intellectuals themselves and of their colleagues, long before the Holocaust proper started. The Nazis kicked out people like Albert Einstein, who went over to the US. It's thanks to the smarts of people like those, that the US managed to develop the nuclear bomb and force Japan to surrender. Without it, it would certainly have taken a lot longer.

They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher.

Russia is not part of "the anglosphere."

Further, all war since the industrial revolution has been trending against the concept of numerical superiority. "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not." Modern warfare has repeatedly generated completely lopsided kill ratios.

China evidently does real well in the IQ games, and they didn't have the disadvantage of discovering the industrial revolution fifty years late. Yet they were a complete basket-case, and spent world war 2 primarily in the role of "victim". Japan does real well in the IQ games, and they got absolutely wrecked. India has no shortage of high-IQ individuals, but their society was a mess then and is still quite a mess now.

IQ: "70% of the time, it works every time." Is that meant to be the takeaway? It's decisive except in those situations where it isn't decisive which can't be predicted in advance?

Further, all war since the industrial revolution has been trending against the concept of numerical superiority.

Sorry, what? Mass production of guns is what enables mass armies, it's a lot faster to learn to use gun than sword or bow (which required life dedication to efficiently use).

Completely lopsided kill ratios existed well before Maxium gun. Historically horses chariots were a big game changer too. Battle of Otumba, etc.

The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder

that's both unkind and untrue. The Soviets had numerical advantage but not that much. 170 million USSR in 1939 vs 80 million Third Reich (and what if you count only ethnic Russians)? . Considering how much better was German war machine than Soviet (in part, because of Stalin cleansed nearly all military leadership and officers) it wasn't impossible target.

India has no shortage of high-IQ individuals

For country of 1.5 billion, they do have a shortage.

Sorry, what? Mass production of guns is what enables mass armies, it's a lot faster to learn to use gun than sword or bow (which required life dedication to efficiently use).

Mass armies matter when you have rough parity in technology and tactics. Sure, lopsided victories have existed for much of human history, but the industrial revolution really turbocharged the process to an absurd degree. Notably, technology and tactics are areas where we would naively expect IQ to deliver outsized results.

that's both unkind and untrue.

...It also doesn't seem to be a claim I made. The post above was conflating "The Allies" with "The Anglosphere", as though the former were equivalent to the later.

For country of 1.5 billion, they do have a shortage.

Is the per-capita number what's important, or the absolute numbers?

They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.

Yes they did. "Especially on the Eastern front" is woefully underselling things, half a million US casualties and another million from the British commonwealth is a drop in the bucket compared to the 8 - 12 million soviets (depending on who's numbers we trust), and the question must be asked just how many of those death's were a product of the Soviet Union's rather "cavalier" attitude towards spending human lives.

if things like intelligence and personal discipline are primarily genetic why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).

Second, it must also be shown that the process of becoming an «elite», i.e. a member of the political class, is substantially meritocratic. Perhaps political animals pass through some other pipeline than one requiring merit of the kind incompatible with drug addiction and stupidity. I do not observe high rates of idiocy and drug addiction among the progeny of liberal academic elite you love to sneer at so much; rather, children of tenured math profs tend to become math adjuncts or maybe quants at Jane Street, as the regression to the mean predicts. And they do more to build up a great nation than Bidens and Trumps.

Second, the axis would have won WWII. The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents.

Lmao no they didn't, and that's not starting to discuss industrial capacity and, more to the point, general human capital.

You are an undisciplined thinker, which I suppose is in your eyes a fair tradeoff for another kind of discipline. You seem to equate HBD with particular self-serving German National Socialist beliefs, which irrationally posited superiority of German stock over other peoples of the world (and Yamato subjects had their own sort of racial hubris, grounded more in their legitimate successes in recent major wars than in some theoretic HBD scholarship). By the end of the war Germans have «discovered» that not only are Anglos perfectly capable of matching their Teutonic spirit or whatever, but that even Slavs aren't inept Mongoloids like they came to believe.

Here's Himmler whining about it:

Then you hear the next prayer. This goes: "We were wrong about the Russians." This song is usually sung by men from some eastern province, who were over there in their youth, some of whom have written very good books and had a Russian mother, too, and now they tell stories. It is also sung by the little political vagabonds whom we first came to know in the eastern struggle against Poland, whom we rejected at home, and who have now been drafted as soldiers, officers and majors, and are still peddling their intellectual poison under cover of the uniform of our decent German army. Goaded on by this propaganda tendency -- I can't call it anything else -- they tell you so many stories, or write them home by military post (and the stories then trickle down from top to bottom): "Yes, we were wrong about the Russians. The Russians are not at all the robots" (this is the expression used most frequently) "that we thought they were in 1941. Now that we're over here in the East, our eyes have been opened. The Russians are a noble people”, and so on and so forth, “a collection of all virtues. We just have to educate them as National Socialists, the best thing would be to create a NSRAP or something similar. Then they would" -- this is the next bit -- "form the army of liberation under General Vlasov".

You're straight up wrong. Like the Nazis were.

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate

Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

Come on now, this is peak PoMo. Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.

P.S. How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?

P.P.S. A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.

I'm afraid Hlynka still doesn't understand regression to mean

First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).

Jeb Bush, Matthew Yglasias, Liz Cheney, and yes Hunter Biden. When comparing the current scion of a political dynasty to that dynasty's founder there is rarely any comparison. And for what it's worth "elites" being selected on something other than intelligence as you suggest here would itself be a body blow to the HBD advocates' claims.

Lmao no they didn't

Yes they, they kind of did. On the German side in the Autumn of 1939 the BF-109 and FW-190s were qualitatively superior to any fighter available to the opposition ditto the Panzer IIIs and IVs on the ground. Further more Germany's professional NCO and JO Corps (inherited from the Prussians) meant that their crews generally had far more time and practice in their vehicles than their mostly conscripted opponents. They also enjoyed an approximate parity in numbers. Likewise on the Japanese side the A6M was easily the match of anything the Americans or Brits could field in the winter of '41 and the US Pacific Fleet had rather famously (infamously) allowed things like live fire training and regular testing/maintenance of equipment to slide in favor of "looking pretty on parade", leading to notable under-performance in the early phases of the war even if we discount the "sucker punch" effect of Pearl Harbor.

Here's Himmler whining about it.

What Himmler seems to be whinging about, is the Nazis' inability to keep up the façade.

In other words he's complaining whinging about guys like me being proven right. "Culture", "grit", and "General Motors" really do matter more than your old-world notions of racial purity/destiny.

Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.

The Woke conflate diversity of skin color with diversity of opinion, background, class, etc... because their whole ideology is built around their belief in the maximal importance of race. This is why when a hard-core progressive get's red-pilled they have a tendency turn into whacky ethno-nationalists like Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, or our very own @SecureSignals, than anything resembling a republican. Being as deeply ensconced in the progressive bubble as they are, they simply lack the historical and cultural context to truly free their minds from the woke matrix.

How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?

Putin and his Vatniks are mid-20th-century fascists in all but name and they are loosing for the same reason. They put way too much stock in thier own perceived superiority and their opponents perceived weakness, and now they are paying for it in blood.

A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.

I am merely repeating what others have said about us. And on one hand they are correct, there is nothing in my ancestry that compare to the centuries long traditions of the Japanese Samurai or the Prussian Army, that said what we do have is a history of irrational defiance.

edit: fixed image link

What are you talking about? Pz 3&4 were worse than T-34 and they were unable to penetrate armor of KV-1 heavy tanks, Germany started to use heavy tanks noticeably later and in small quantities because they were overengineered. The only thing better was radios, and that every tank was equipped with it rather than select ones (in Soviets).

Americans didn't need to put much effort in tanks because tanks weren't useful in terrain where they fought Japanese.

Should be fixed now.

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

Do have evidence that they're disproportionately idiots and drug addicts? I strongly expect the opposite.

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory

The Allies had more than double the GDP of the Axis powers every year of the war. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that racial differences (if they exist) can trump a 2x advantage in production. It was even more lopsided regarding raw population counts. Even beyond that you're attempting to infer causation (or lack thereof) based on a correlation of n=2. That's absurd.

Re intelligence, the difference between the average SAT score from the poorest families and the richest families is about 2 z-scores - ditto for parental educational attainment. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ, so the idea that the children of elites are idiots seems obviously false.

Re drugs - I did some googling:

tl;dr - among teens/young adults

  • low SES predicts more smoking

  • high SES predicts more alcohol and marijuana

  • the evidence is unclear for harder drugs

A 2009 meta-analysis found

There was consistent evidence to support an association between lower childhood SES and later drug use, primarily cannabis use. However, few studies examined cannabis dependence, and studies of more problematic forms of drug use gave contradictory results

A 2010 study found

Higher parental education is associated with higher rates of binge drinking, marijuana and cocaine use in early adulthood. Higher parental income is associated with higher rates of binge drinking and marijuana use. No statistically significant results are found for crystal methamphetamine or other drug use. Results are not sensitive to the inclusion of college attendance by young adulthood as a sensitivity analysis.

A 2012 study found

Smoking in young adulthood was associated with lower childhood family SES, although the association was explained by demographic and social role covariates. Alcohol use and marijuana use in young adulthood were associated with higher childhood family SES, even after controlling for covariates.

Another 2012 study found

Except for alcohol abuse, substance use rates were systematically higher in individuals with low, rather than intermediate/high, socioeconomic position (age and sex-adjusted ORs from 1.75 for cannabis use to 2.11 for tobacco smoking and 2.44 for problematic cannabis use)

If racial purity is supposed to lead to superior intelligence and intelligence is supposed to result in greater production (amongst other things) what does Germany and Japan falling way behind on production tell us?

If being a superior athlete and cross-country runner is supposed to result in higher speeds, why do I outperform Usain Bolt whenever I hop into my car and drive? What does it tell us that despite Usain Bolt having a significant genetic advantage when it comes to athletic performance, he falls way behind on speed compared to me?

If you think that the HBD position is that higher average IQ for a given ethnicity is enough to overcome any and all other differences in context then I think you need to go and do some more research before you can credibly claim to understand the position you're arguing against.

You keep strawmanning your opponents with an appeal to the Nazi-esque notion of racial purity. Maybe it has place in your internal version of ye Olde Worlde intellectuals. Maybe it even has merit. But it's a misrepresentation. Nobody here, far as I can tell, cares much for purity per se; HBD of the sort discussed in this thread is about quality (or rather, quantitative measures of specific qualities), and quality can be found in any race (albeit to unequal extent), and does not disappear upon admixture. Germano-Japanese mixes wouldn't have been inferior to the real unspoiled deal any more than your Anglo-Germanic pals proved to be. In fact one needs no genetics to recognize this truth.

You keep strawmanning your opponents with an appeal to the Nazi-esque notion of racial purity.

I don't think it's a strawman at all. I think that "intelligence is heritable from parent to child" is the proverbial motte and that "and that's why we need to do away with all this anti-scientific nonsense about all men being created equal and replace it with the 14 words" is the bailey and that the vast majority of the HBD advocates here on the motte are very much in the baily.

  • -13

Has it ever occurred to you that you're just paranoid? «IQ is heritable from parent to child and this is why we need to brain drain East Asia, also my wife is Han Chinese» sounds more like it.

It's not "paranoia" if there are lions about.

There's two parts to your position, ironically a sort of Motte-and-Bailey in itself. Part 1 is that you suspect that HBD is a slippery slope to Nazism, not too crazy a concern. Part 2 is that you suspect that virtually all HBD proponents here are already nearing the bottom of said slope, which is where the conflict reaches flashpoint. Part 1 is at least intuitively, directionally correct. Part 2 is the part that is in dispute because it's underdetermined.

For what it's worth, I think we could do with less drum-beating about HBD here. I think it doesn't matter a super-ton in the end, only that it appears that way because our institutions have somehow managed to 50-Stalins themselves about Affirmative Action and equality-of-opportunity. When that sort of thing happens, especially somewhere like America, it's perhaps all too easy to subscribe to a theory that tells you that the entire human race is throwing itself off a cliff. What I would give to learn how the Second and Third Worlds perceive these First World developments.

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They were not way behind on production per person, which really ought to be the far more relevant metric to evaluating HBD.

But this is all moot, because, again, you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation, and you are using n=2. That is sloppy reasoning and can't let you draw any conclusions.

Sorry I'm muddying your rigorous analysis with silly things like logic.

you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation

Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. While correlation does not prove causation, causation requires correlation, which is why the two are so often conflated.

In symbolic terms; if A is always found in the presence of B, this does not prove that A causes B. B could instead cause A, or both B and A could be a product of a third unidentified factor C. However if A does in fact cause B, "If A then B" will be a logically true statement, and thus lack of correlation (IE A in the absence of B) is actually very strong evidence against causation.

Wrong.

Causation does not require correlation.

Consider the causal network

B = A

C = -A

D = B+C

There will be no correlation between B and D, even though B causes D.

An HBD advocate might say IQ causes greater output/capita but fewer people (via lower birth rates). This would cause an unknown correlation between IQ and total GDP.

Moreover, again, a correlation with n=2 is not even good evidence of correlation - especially when you are literally cherrypicking to prove your point.

even though B causes D.

This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication, and implications are not commutative.

That said I think I understand what you're trying to say and I don't think it matters. As like I said to @sansampersamp by acknowledging the presence of a 3rd unidentified factor that can overpower heritability you've effectively falsified the the bulk of the HBD-advocate's claims and rendered their policy proscriptions moot.

This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication

In the above, I'm using equality in the way typical in programming, not mathematics. Setting B = A, then setting C = -A, then setting D = B+C. In this way, any change to B causes a change to D. This is one of the two most common ways to use the "=" symbol across countries and languages.

Indeed, it's probably worth pointing out that causation is not an implication - a distinction you seem unclear on.

acknowledging the presence of a 3rd unidentified factor that can overpower heritability you've effectively falsified the the bulk of the HBD-advocate's claims

Even ceding everything else, how can the mere existence of a factor that can occasionally have a larger effect than genes, "falsify" HBD? Like, an HBD-advocate might think a black man will statistically beat an asian man in a fight due to being geneticlly stronger. If you give an asian man a gun and they shoot a black man, how exactly have you disproven HBD?

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As a formal note, causation does not require correlation. Consider speed as a function of how much a car's accelerator pedal is depressed, and look at someone going up and down hills while keeping to the speed limit. The car's speed is not correlated to how much the pedal is depressed despite the obvious causal link.

Slope of the road in this case would be the third unidentified factor C. And in any case the a third factor having a greater effect than genetics does infact prove the HBD advocates wrong.

Nope, it doesn't.

Suppose (numbers random for sake of example)

QoL depends on phenotypic IQ & how good government is. Phenotypic IQ depends on genetic IQ and QOL.

PIQ = GIQ + QOL

QOL = 0.3 * PIQ + 0.7 * government quality

Yes government seems more important looking at coefficient, but ultimately government is function of genetic IQ too, just in more complex and indirect way.

I don't really want to weigh in on this actual debate one way or another, I just got nerd sniped via the all comments feed.

(note also that the third factor being the slope in the road is also not correlated with the speed, despite a causal link -- these self-regulating scenarios are common in biology, signals, etc, think body temperature)

Same answer as before: 1) It helps, but it doesn't magically overcome all other difficulties, and 2) Jews are high IQ and the Germans got rid of them.

troll accusations

Typically meaningless tactic for dismissing points you don’t like. A lot of whining

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

I would be very, very surprised by this. Is this actually true? Are children of the top 10% actually lower IQ and more frequently addicted to drugs than the bottom decile?

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory

I don’t think any HBD advocate claims that by accepting HBD you automatically win all wars regardless of other factors

Typically meaningless tactic for dismissing points you don’t like. A lot of whining

That doesn't necessarily make the accusation false.

I would be very, very surprised by this. Is this actually true? Are children of the top 10% actually lower IQ and more frequently addicted to drugs than the bottom decile?

From my experience the children of the top 10% are generally no smarter than anyone else and substantially more likely to be drug users of some kind, though how much of this is simple availability + opportunity is unclear.

In any case you don't need to compare them to the bottom decile to falsify HBD, just the decile immediately below them if genetics really does have a far greater effect than culture, upbringing, geography, etc... we should see a substantial difference between the children of the top 10% and the top 20% and that's not something anyone has been able to demonstrate.

I don’t think any HBD advocate claims that by accepting HBD you automatically win all wars regardless of other factors

No they claim that racial purity and homogeneity lead to superior outcomes and then get pissy when you point out historical counter-examples.

  • -10

No they claim that racial purity

HBD advocates claim that if you mix two populations of same size, IQ of mix would be very close to average of these ancestral populations. Don't they? What does this have to do with racial purity?

"Lead to superior outcomes" means "lead to superior outcomes, compared to not having it". It doesn't mean "leads to superior outcomes compared to everything, all the time." And racial purity is not HBD. Nazis killing Jews is "racial purity", but HBD says not to do that.

Equivocation. The HBD advocates central claim that heritability/genetics trumps culture, economics, geography etc... is falsified if it doesn't actually trump culture, economics, geography etc...

The HBD advocates central claim that heritability/genetics trumps culture, economics, geography etc...

No, they don't. This is a strawman (or maybe a weakman if you can find one guy on Twitter who says it).

And your idea that HBD is okay with getting rid of Jews, who are high IQ, is bizarre. HBD isn't actually racial purity, and this is one of the differences between it and racial purity.

You're conflating the rationalists' fetishization of IQ with HBD, they are two seperate premises.

That is not "the HBD advocates central claim". The central claim is that human subpopulations differ in their distribution of various phenotypical characteristics besides superficial physical ones, most notably intelligence. And that these subpopulations are meaningfully broken up along gross racial lines.

You're wrong, This is absolutely the median HBD advocate's on theMotte's central claim. It's why you think it's racist to suggest that black couples should stay together for the sake of their kids, and why the OP is going on about "failed attempts at uplift".

Those who believe that it is racist to suggest that black couples should stay together for the sake of their kids are not HBD advocates. They are progressive Democrats. They are the ones who determine what is considered "racist" in the US today, however. As for "failed attempts at uplift"... the phrasing is obnoxious to the point of trollish, if you're familiar with Brin's "Uplift" series. But that attempts have been made to improve the outcomes of the American black population and nearly all have failed miserably is plain fact.

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I believe racial groups have different mean IQs and that some of these differences could be partially explained by genetics. I guess that puts me in the HBD camp.

If HBD weren't real, I don't think I'd expect any major differences between countries. Asia and Africa would still be held back by poor institutions. The fact that the middle-IQ group dominated both the lower and higher IQ groups leads me to believe group IQ differences didn't have a high first-order impact on history. I think the biggest differences would be within countries. I'd expect to see more black and fewer jewish scientists, engineers, CEOs, etc. Racism would still exist on a similar scale. We'd worry less about economic disparities, but still worry about representational disparities. American "guilt" towards blacks would more closely resemble european guilt towards jews.

There's another aspect of HBD which proposes that, although men and women have the same mean IQs, men have higher variance than women. Whether that's true or not, I think the counterfactual would be of higher consequence.

In the world as it is now, you have situations like "kids with fetal alcohol syndrome are more likely to grow up to abuse alcohol, and thus to abuse alcohol during pregnancy, and thus to have kids with FAS". Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

A world that resembles our own in which HBD is entirely false could look like one where there were many behaviors that were passed down in that way. We would expect to see substantial differences in outcomes within different subcultures of the same group in such a world, but I don't have a rigorous idea of how much more than one where the heritability of outcome-correlated stuff is due to genetics vs behavior.

Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

Pretty sure that's zero heritibility, using the technical definition.

Indeed, Falconer's formula would give an estimate of 0 for heritability in the above situation.

So I suppose the concrete answer to "what does the world in which genetics don't play a significant role in determining outcomes look like" is

  1. The children of alcohol abusers are more likely to abuse alcohol themselves

  2. This remains true even if the children are adopted at birth.

  3. The correlation in the rate of alcohol abuse is the same between identical and fraternal twins.

3 is something that it should at least in principle be possible to check in our world. At the very least I would be surprised if nobody has done it for height and BMI.

That is quite a clever metric, thanks for pointing it out.

I have been convinced of the truth of HBD mostly by 1) first-hand exposure to stereotype accuracy, i.e. life experience 2) reading scientific papers 3) appreciating the sheer intellectual vacuity of blank slatist rhetoric. That isn't, truth be told, knockdown evidence to any but a very scrupulous observer with a good eye for inconsistency. In principle, human societies are dysfunctional enough that we could be missing trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk, neglecting low-hanging fruits of environmental interventions that semi-randomly and without notable spikes in investment produce outstanding talent; the world could, in broad strokes, look very similarly to how it looks and yet not work according to theories of hereditarians. (Ironically, the near-universal institutional HBD denial despite widespread, traditional conviction that children inherit traits of their parents is evidence enough of our societies being too dumb and diseased to figure out good policies).

Still, if we do not assume a hopeless scenario of that sort, I'd have expected:

  • Very efficient interventions that are surprisingly simple, like drinking deionized water or never calling your child a dumb little shit once. Probably only practiced in closed elite environments (and kept secret/discouraged for plebs).

  • Following from that, stronger and increasing correlation of class and intelligence, as well-off people (who are already motivated to force their children into grueling training, IME) figure out the best regimens to get their dynasty an edge over competitors. After all, my main reasons to not be a hereditarian had been anecdotes about early life training leading to eminence in adulthood (Polgar! Sidis! Wiener! Mill! Mozart!) – surely with modern data and scientific methodology something better could be found.

  • Far different distributions of traits: lack of positive manifold, strong culture-bound (and ethnicity-blind) talent density, and more «comic book» style individuals with specific hyperdeveloped abilities.

All in all it'd be a pretty optimistic world – one where we're close to figuring a somewhat cheap method of universal cognitive and physical enhancement. It's a wooey world of the psychedelic revolution. I'd not be against living there.

Very efficient interventions that are surprisingly simple, like drinking deionized water

Why? As far as I know that's only going to destroy your teeth.

Duh, that's what the elites want you to think!

I was a birdbrain and didn’t actually read the context for some reason, haha.

I’m mildly pro HBD in that I think it’s real but is overstated in terms of explanatory power.

So, what would I expect to be different if HBD weren’t true at all? I would expect South Africa to be far more functional and probably wealthier, and Uruguay and Costa Rica to be less so.

If HBD explanatory power was understated, on the other hand, I would expect to see a wealthier North Korea and China, and probably a somewhat less developed Spain and Argentina.

I don't think "more" or "less" propositions like that really answer this question.

If you believe there is no such thing as lucky people

A world with where some people are luckier than others would be like this world but with more wealth disparity

If you believe

If you believe there is no such thing as luck

A world with where some people are luckier than others would be like this world but with less wealth disparity

This tells you nothing about what predictions these models are making that are coming (or failing to come) true.

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

We would not exist. God would be real. Cartesianism would be accurate. At the most basic level, it is extremely difficult to put "HBD is fake" and "evolution and scientific materialism is real" into the same boxes of reality.

From the pro-HBD side: Please clarify where you want the historical starting point for this uniformity. If it's far enough back, I'd expect that such differences would gradually evolve.

If HBD was an explanation for the distribution of wealth and power, for one thing, I would expect people with wealth and positions of power to be significantly smarter than they are.

But they are quite smart? Musk, bezos, gates, ellison, zuck are all quite smart. People who have power in politics are also often smart - random example, Thomas massie, who I'd only known as 'republican who posts very dumb things on twitter' (universal in both parties ofc), apparently "also ran a start-up company based in Massachusetts, where he previously studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).. They may be dumb liberals or dumb conservatives, but plenty of extremely smart people can have dumb political beliefs, and smart people are also capable of running 'dysfunctional institutions'.

For every Zuck there's a whole lot of Biden, Trump, etc. The number of highly influential inventor types is very low compared to, say, total Ivy League Graduates who I would estimate are, on average, 1000x more personally powerful than the average competent technologist.

how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

I would assume that genetics are playing a much smaller role in human physiology in general. So if the differences in cognition were nonexistent or weren't due to pure genes/biology, then we would have to assume most other human traits were not due to them either.

So I would expect to see:

The winners of most events centered around running would be a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, rather than, say, Marathon winners being almost exclusively from Kenya

I'd expect that height would be evenly distributed amongst ethnicities, rather than being dominated by the Dutch. Along with this, I'd expect much greater Asian representation in the NBA and NFL. Pygmy peoples, likewise, would be an even greater anomaly than they are now.

We'd also want to figure out what was in the water in Hungary that it produced so many ridiculous geniuses born around the turn of the 19th century, if there isn't a large genetic component. Alternatively, we'd expect to see groundbreaking physicists and mathematicians produced at similar rates by all countries, and not so heavily representing Asheknazis.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait, and that interventions in culture, diet, and SES would lead to rapid changes (not necessarily improvements) in those traits without seeing major changes in their genetic code.

Rather than taking hundreds of generations to produce helpful adaptations.

If there is no Human Biodiverisity, then there must only be Human Sociodiversity or Human Cultural Diversity, and in that sort of world it should be much easier to manipulate human traits/outcomes at the national population level.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait

I don't think we would expect that. If there are other factors, including randomness, which contribute at all, the sum of the effect of the known sources of variance will be less than the observed variance.

From whence comes the randomness, though?

In genetics, we know how mutations can arise and accumulate over time. Radiation, toxins, and transcription errors during cellular replication are often random themselves, and thus the genes that survive won't be completely random, but at least we can see where the randomness arises from.

If genetics aren't determining outcomes, then we must be talking about inputs of randomness from the environment, instead, and that is comparatively simple to control and reduce.

Randomness in biological development? Even as things are, with HBD, there's a lot of effects that look like randomness in non-additive genetic variation.

Yes, environmental stuff would be the rest. Controlling for environmental stuff is actually very very hard - that's why for science where we actually try to be correct instead of trying to appear to try to be correct (e.g. medicine), the gold standard is randomized controlled trials rather than observational studies.

That's not to say it's always impossible to get useful information from observational data. For example, there's clever stuff like this. Still, if you take the social science approach of "lol just control for a couple things, if it's good enough to get published it's definitely correct" your results will not be very robust.

But what sources of randomness in local environment would trigger differences in long-term outcomes in the absence of genetic influence?

Getting in a car crash, winning the lottery, making friends with the right people... all the stuff we call "luck".

That sounds like it explains individual outcomes, and can be mitigated through social policy.

Group outcomes are made of individual outcomes. Particularly in cases like "making friends with the right people", those individual outcomes may be correlated.

Not that "early luck compounded into long-term differences" can't be mitigated through social policy, but doing so transparently and fairly and in a principled manner is hard for the same reason that "controlling for" stuff in studies is hard.

Not who you're arguing with but the first example that comes to mind is the influence of the uterine environment. There's a plausible argument that the uterine environment has an impact on a lot of different areas in life (birth order effects, FAS, etc) and there's a whole galaxy of potential interactions there.

There we go.

Would this cause us to see significant differences between population groups?

It would, but those differences would not be the ones we see in the world we live in and they would respond differently to testing.

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

You mean if those differences weren't even partially explained by genetics, right?

Well, we'd need heavy handed intervention in underperforming communities to bring them up to scratch, I suppose. The civilising hand of the Asian man, most likely. Obviously some people are just better/worse at forming communities and those that are worse should learn from those who are better.

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

This would be a world very different than our own. But efforts to completely eradicate the culture of failing communities would be one obvious direction.

I'm mostly agnostic on HBD (though I lean pro) precisely because I don't believe the world would look all that differently if it went one way or another. My is that the majority of issues in poor minority groups are caused by culture: a lack of respect for education, marriage, rule of law, and unselfish cooperation with each other, and that these cultural elements are self-perpetuating and economically crippling. While innate intelligence does play some role in influencing whether a person will abandon or change these cultural elements, it's a minor role. People with a genetic predisposition for high IQ but a bad culture frequently end up in bad outcomes because they fail to learn or care about learning and never rise to their true potential. Similarly, low IQ people with a good culture often become productive workers and good people and beneficial to their community because they work hard and care about people. IQ plays some role, but culture plays a much larger role.

Society is filled with selfish intelligent people and kind unintelligent people of all races. But they tend to come in clusters, as culture perpetuates these traits separately from genetics (though still tending to run in families), so you see disproportionate amounts of selfishness and other negative cultural traits among certain races. Heritabile =/= Genetic, and the distinction is important because culture can change, while genes can't.

a lack of respect for education

I don't think jews have any more respect for education, marriage, rule of law, or unselfish cooperation (in fact, the stereotype, although not that accurate, is that they're selfish), yet they are nobel prize winners or accomplished mathematicians at 10x the rate of whites or asians.

Really? Because the stereotypes I'm familiar with involve Jewish mothers hounding their kids to excel and overachieve and never being satisfied with mediocre or average results (maybe I'm mixing this one up with Asian stereotypes, but I think it's true here to a lesser extent). Also, intellectual arguments and thought experiments about Jewish law, and respect for cleverness. And rather than being purely selfish, the stereotype I usually hear is that Jews are selfish in dealings with gentiles, but friendly with other Jews, preferentially hiring each other due to a sense of shared culture and nepotism. Which is probably even more beneficial for a subculture with enough power than general unselfishness would be. I don't know how truthful these stereotypes are, but to the extent they are true I would predict that they would lead to above average success.

I probably should've said elite whites and asians.

Jewish mothers hounding their kids to excel and overachieve

Is this more true for jews than asians, though? Because jews are much more overrepresented than asians in nobel prizes in comparison to global population.

Also, intellectual arguments and thought experiments about Jewish law, and respect for cleverness.

Second-generation atheist jews are still very intelligent, despite no jewish law. "Respect for cleverness" seems wishywashy.

the stereotype I usually hear is that Jews are selfish in dealings with gentiles, but friendly with other Jews

Friendlier, yeah, but not unselfish, the 'stereotypical jew' still screws over other stereotypical jews.

Like, none of what you claimed makes any sense in explaining '30% of technical nobel prizes despite 2% of us population / .2% of global population'.

You always have to be careful about controlling for confounders, but there's enough evidence in the same direction that I generally buy it. HBD is probably true, but my argument is that its effect is significantly smaller than the effect from culture, so it's not an important priority for addressing or using to explain gaps. It's not as simple as reasoning "Median househould income is $77k for white people and $46k for black people, but white people are smarter so everything is fine". If HBD is false then with equal cultures, and absent racism, the median income for black people would also be $77k. If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former. The gap is caused by multiple factors, and there is significant progress that can be made, and most but not all of the gap could theoretically be closed. If HBD is true, then it will eventually be important to acknowledge as true so that someday if we reach the equilibrium we don't keep endlessly looking for racists and/or cultural issues, because the gap can't ever be closed completely. But at the moment there's so much other stuff going on that it's only a small piece of the pie.

If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former.

It could be lower than $46k, if black culture was (before equalization) better than white culture, so equalizing.

But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

While it's true that disentangling cultural factors is difficult when trying to explain the overall success of a group, it's a very big mistake to take this as active evidence against culture's importance. I'd also put myself into the "mostly cultural, somewhat genetic" camp. To me, none of the current evidence can plausibly refute the existence possibility (edit) of a society with a common culture in which no genetic group is far more or less successful than the others, with the genetic factors only showing up as numerical discrepancies.

In other words, under this model, even if pure HBD explains some differences in group outcomes, it does not explain the vast differences in poverty, criminality, etc., seen in our current society. Explanations based on cultural coincidence have plenty of well-known justifications for these, such as past prejudice resulting in persistent negative outcomes, or groups facing hardship becoming more successful through cultural selection. Why shouldn't the pro-HBD crowd have to similarly justify its position that higher a higher-IQ population (either on average or on the upper tail) will almost invariably result in a far more successful culture?

To me, none of the current evidence can plausibly refute the existence of a society with a common culture in which no genetic group is far more or less successful than the others, with the genetic factors only showing up as numerical discrepancies.

There's no need to "refute" the existence of such a society, because it does not exist, by observation.

In other words, under this model, even if pure HBD explains some differences in group outcomes, it does not explain the vast differences in poverty, criminality, etc., seen in our current society.

This model seems to be multiplying entities unnecessarily.

Explanations based on cultural coincidence have plenty of well-known justifications for these, such as past prejudice resulting in persistent negative outcomes, or groups facing hardship becoming more successful through cultural selection.

Not only do the two well-known justifications you just mentioned argue against each other, they also fail to conform with the observable outcomes. We know that some groups have bad outcomes whether being actively discriminated against or "helped". We know that other groups have bad outcomes when actively discriminated against and do much better when they no longer are.

There's no need to "refute" the existence of such a society, because it does not exist, by observation.

My apologies, I misworded that. I meant to express the possibility of such a society.

This model seems to be multiplying entities unnecessarily.

Occam's razor is a principle: it is not a universal law, especially in the social sciences with their confounders upon confounders. The simplest possible strawman HBD model of "higher IQ invariably implies greater relative success" can be easily refuted by the various pre-industrial empires that rose and fell from environmental factors, such as ancient Egypt, which could repeatedly reform around the Nile valley even when the government collapsed, or dynastic China, which couldn't survive contact with the industrialized West, or the Central and South American empires, which couldn't prove themselves one way or another before getting decimated by smallpox.

I'll admit that there haven't been so many clear counterexamples to the "naive HBD" model following the Industrial Revolution in Europe, although it would predict that China and/or Japan will ultimately prevail over the West. The cultural model would attribute the Industrial Revolution to the combination of an environment demanding industrial solutions and a society stable enough to develop them, where the societal stability came from historical and cultural happenstance rather than being predetermined by HBD factors.

Not only do the two well-known justifications you just mentioned argue against each other, they also fail to conform with the observable outcomes. We know that some groups have bad outcomes whether being actively discriminated against or "helped". We know that other groups have bad outcomes when actively discriminated against and do much better when they no longer are.

The two justifications can be aligned pretty easily with a basic path-dependence model: when one cultural group is threatened by another, it either fails to defend itself and becomes persistently unsuccessful, or defends itself becomes persistently successful, and this initial failure or success can be attributed to temporary environmental, military, or political conditions. Under this model, even if an unsuccessful group receives political or economic "help", it cannot become inherently successful unless its culture changes. (Thus leading to the old debate over whether and how culture can be intentionally changed.)

Occam's razor is a principle: it is not a universal law, especially in the social sciences with their confounders upon confounders.

It's not. Nevertheless, when you're willing to give yourself as many entities as you need to save your theory, you add nothing to the world's store of knowledge.

The two justifications can be aligned pretty easily with a basic path-dependence model: when one cultural group is threatened by another, it either fails to defend itself and becomes persistently unsuccessful, or defends itself becomes persistently successful, and this initial failure or success can be attributed to temporary environmental, military, or political conditions. Under this model, even if an unsuccessful group receives political or economic "help", it cannot become inherently successful unless its culture changes. (Thus leading to the old debate over whether and how culture can be intentionally changed.)

Yes, you can make this model. Can you, in principle, back it or refute it with evidence? If not, the model is vacuous. If you can.... well, does it fit with the evidence? I think it does not.

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But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

That sword cuts both ways you know. I don't think it's any coincidence that the HBD and CRT appear to be two sides of the same coin, progressives, be they blue-pilled or red-pilled, will ties themselves in knots to avoid conceding that culture actually matters.

I think it's a lot duller on one side. Progressives who deny HBD are also adamantly against doing anything about black culture, and they'll deny culture as a factor except occasionally as a last-gasp defense against HBD. HBDers, on the other hand, have evidence that it isn't shared environment (which would include culture), though that evidence may not be as strong as they like.

I think HBD is true and relevant. If you want to blame culture, though, be my guest, as long as the suggested interventions are along the lines of "change the bad culture or remove people from it" and not "blame whitey for the bad culture and force him to prop it up".

Even though the modern progressive "blame Whiteness" position is full of holes, there's still plenty of room open for "cultural improvement" positions (which I am somewhat partial to myself), before going for the full HBD explanation. In the American context, positions in that direction have been espoused by both the black conservatives and the classical Marxists. Naturally, the big difference is in their prescriptions: the former call for the black population to adopt diligence and responsibility to lift itself up, while the latter consider the original prejudice, the current top-down progressive overtures, and the calls for "rugged individualism" to all be tricks to distract the oppressed from rising up against their real oppressors (i.e., the stupidpol position, although I've heard similar things independently from a vocal Marxist friend).

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