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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32945 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.

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.

True, the cultural model has plenty of free variables around the creation, transmission, evolution, and effects of cultural factors, as well as their importance relative to temporary environmental factors. But while the HBD model of IQ as a driver of success focuses more on individuals, it has its own free variables around the mechanism of how general intelligence produces pro-social behavior. That is, since a society made entirely of high-IQ Machiavellian schemers wouldn't last very long, it requires that general intelligence tends to amplify a population's positive traits over its negative traits.

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.

I'd argue that such a cultural model of societal success is no less vacuous than the HBD model, since both can plausibly explain the historical evidence: neither kind of model has truly been tested to an extent that it has made falsifiable predictions.

Regardless, the question we're trying to ask is, "Is it possible for a human cultural group to become persistently more or less successful than would be predicted from its members' IQ distribution, in the absence of some massive redistribution scheme (e.g., widespread affirmative action) biasing the results?" The cultural model would affirm this, and the stronger HBD models (that I'm aware of) would deny this.

The most direct experiment, of course, would be to abduct a random selection of infants from different genetic groups and get surrogate parents from different cultures to raise them in isolation from the outside world, wait a few generations to see whether the different cultures can maintain their success independently from the genetic groups, and repeat ad nauseam to account for random variation. But this is unethical and would take far more time than most of us would care to spend.

Perhaps a more plausible experiment to affirm the cultural model would be to find a cultural intervention to improve the success of some underperforming genetic group, then successfully implement it in the real world. Then, the question comes down to whether such an effective intervention exists and is practical. As I mentioned, the conservatives and Marxists in the U.S. have their own ideas of a proper intervention, but neither has been able to successfully implement it. A strong HBD model would deny that such an intervention exists, but the cultural model would be consistent with such an intervention existing but being impractical to implement. So an HBD model would have to take the position of the null hypothesis in such an experiment. But due to the sheer number of potential cultural interventions, it would take a lot of failed attempts to provide strong evidence in favor of an HBD model.

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