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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:
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.
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.
Don't you arrive at these desires merely by adopting meritocracy as a core value? (In addition to different beliefs on the object-level question of whether or not racial differences in outcomes are primarily the organic results of natural differences in group abilities or primarily the result of societal oppression)
Are you suggesting that meritocracy is fundamentally a dishonest viewpoint? Or are you suggesting that most proponents of blank slatism vs HBD are not arguing as a result of an innate desire to see people justly compensation for their work? (If so, why? Isn't it just as infuriating to see people being unfairly elevated/oppressed from either point of view?)
If merit is heritable, then at some point we are rewarding the luck of being born to the right parents. There's nothing wrong to owning up to it and saying we are rewarding people based on how much their existence benefits the society, but the other side of the coin means there are people who are a net drain on the society.
Would it be any less a matter of luck if intelligence and personality was entirely determined by your kindergarten teacher, your pregnant mother's folate consumption, the people you happened to make friends with in school, and whether your parents read to you as a child? It seems like the only advantage of environmental explanations in this matter is obscurantism, it seems less like luck if you can't name the exact mechanism. But regardless of specifics the kind of person you are is going to be 100% luck by definition, because the only things we don't define as luck are the products of the choices you make, and your choices are in turn determined and preceded by the kind of person you are.
Even if the way personality worked was at the age of 18 you pressed a button to choose either "I want to spend the rest of my life intelligent and highly-motivated" or "I want to be stupid and lazy", it would still be 100% "luck" determining the social/genetic/coincidental factors that made you choose one button or the other. It would be good due to more people pressing the first button and all the very real benefits that would bring to humanity, in the same way that a successful genetic-enhancement/embryo-selection/sperm-donation/lead-abatement program would be good, but it wouldn't stop your nature from being a matter of "luck".
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'rewarding' puts a moralistic spin on it, when really it's just about maximizing efficiency.
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I would make this argument.
Here's a trope of environmentalist interventions. There's a hypothesis that some part of a selection process is preventing people from being justly compensated for their work. Then we directly fix that process by modifying it so that bias can't enter, and it has no effect or even makes the gaps bigger. The blank slatists then get angry and, if it turns out bias went the opposite way, advocate against fixing it.
Examples:
Gender blind hiring in Australia is scrapped after it turns out people were biased in favor of women rather than against.
Similar results in tech, and now gender blind hiring is out of favor. Ideology tests during the interview are popular, however.
SAT was originally meant to (and did!) nullify the bias inherent in high school grades. What if teachers were biased against lower classes, colored people, Jews, etc? They might give lower subjective grades and the SAT could find hidden talent. It worked great, but the hidden talent is predominantly Asian so now they want to scrap it.
Leftists oppose civil service tests of by the book firefighting skills, because blacks don't pass them. Instead they favor an oral exam where bias could creep in. ("By the book" means "according to the firefighter manual, which saw blade should be used to cut concrete". To be fair, the test in New Haven was badly copied from the NYC test and included a few questions about NYC geography which I guess is racist and invalidates the test somehow?)
There are a huge number of cases where leftists directly oppose changes that result in people being more justly compensated when that results in selecting fewer members of their favored groups. I can't think of any cases where they support it. Can you?
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Well so here are two models:
People start with meritocracy as a value and then try to figure out the factual questions about how abilities work.
People start with some policy opinions or alliances or something and then work to rationalize those.
Model 1 is debunked because if people were trying to figure out the factual questions, they would take basic concepts like the phenotypic null hypothesis into account, and they would be upset about having signal-boosted terrible studies like the IQ/effort one. It's possible that there is some alternative to model 2 that people follow, in which case you should feel encouraged to share what that alternative is.
No, model 1 isn't "debunked" and shouting "phenotypic null hypothesis" isn't the argument winner you seem to think it is.
The phrase "phenotypic null hypothesis" captures a point that is critically important to understand in these sorts of discussions. It can definitely be misused, shouting "phenotypic null hypothesis" is definitely necessary in contexts where people aren't taking it into account. If there are any of my tweets where you feel like I've abused it then feel free to point at them.
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