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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I just created an account on The Motte to PM someone a question, and afterwards I started browsing through some links and found this post in the vault: Belief Against an Intelligence Gap / Why the Woke Won't Argue: A look at Turkheimer and HBD research.

Now, a year ago or so, I would probably have strongly agreed with this post. But recently, I've come to a totally different conclusion: HBDers tend to totally refuse to engage with basic principles of the debate. I say that as an HBDer who has started interacting with other HBDers, and correcting when they make mistakes. Two core examples I have in mind:

  1. Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis. You often see HBDers declare success when yet another twin study shows that yet another variable is highly heritable, or that there is a genetic correlation between two variables which are usually suggested to be causally linked to each other. In the latter case, I often see HBDers act as if the genetic correlation proves that there is genetic confounding between the two variables, which is a ridiculous suggestion if you think through the actual math. It's perfectly reasonable to say that the debate struggles with progressing because anti-HBDers aren't properly engaging with HBDers, but it would be a lie to also pretend that HBDers aren't also guilty of lack of thought and engagement.

  2. HBDers often signal-boost nonserious or dishonest studies. My go-to example of this is this study on effort and IQ, which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense, and indeed when I took a quick look at the study, its data actually totally supported the notion that effort matters for IQ, and it's merely that the researcher (who is a well-respected leading IQ researcher!) analyzed it wrong (see my analysis in the thread, or perform the analysis for yourself). The researcher still has not changed his mind on the flaws of it, and I regularly see the study pop up on my timeline. If HBDers are going to boost these kinds of studies and ignore critique of them, then why should anyone listen to HBDers?

So, what view would I suggest? A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality. There's some honest people on either side who have been swept up in the drama, but in terms of the direction of the energy which drives the whole debate, this is what lies underneath it.

As a leftist who believes in IQ heritability; ya'll need to clean up your argumentation so I can come at it from the other side.

The leftist debate bro rat types who actually engage with HBD topics have all debated HBD types, and complete, utterly smashed them on the rhetoric and the facts when it comes to racial IQ gaps, but have all retreated on the heritability of IQ.

The thing is, the (! MAJORITY OF !)argumentation by the right HBD crowed is so rickety and echo-chamber adapted that it instantly falls apart under any amount of hostile attention and also looks really bad, so it drags down my beloved IQ heritability by making dumb unsupportable racialized arguments instead of sticking to easy population arguments.

  • -17

utterly smashed them on the rhetoric and the facts when it comes to racial IQ gaps

Uh, what ? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, please link at least one such 'smashing' that isn't the blank-slater just declaring IQ is fake and refusing to address the gap merely waving around vaguely.

Yeah, Ezra Klein embarrassed himself in his discussion with Sam Harris who isn't even that well versed or even slightly ideologically committed. Same with Raj Chetty last time I saw him in the wild.

The leftist debate bro rat types who actually engage with HBD topics have all debated HBD types, and complete, utterly smashed them on the rhetoric and the facts when it comes to racial IQ gaps, but have all retreated on the heritability of IQ.

I've yet to see this happen even once.

As someone who believes that the racial IQ gaps are innate but who is wondering just how deep the rabbit hole of HBD incompetence goes, I would be interested in hearing more. What's the best case that it is due to environmental factors?

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