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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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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