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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.
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.
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.
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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