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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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For those worried about HBD and optics or HBD being the majority, I have observed that HBD to some extent has fallen out of favor among the the right, even here. It's has sorta become the 'new atheism' but for 2021-2022 instead of 2011-2012 and for a much smaller audience. Something that was cool or trendy to believe, but has since fallen out of favor. Maybe it suffered from the same flaw of atheism, being that those who expounded it tended to be stereotyped as 'being on the spectrum', so to say, and thus were not good advocates for their cause. Maybe other reasons too...intellectual fads come and go for reasons that are hard to explicate.

Most «HBDers» are the opposite: laymen beliefs both in the heritability of human behavioral traits and in between-group differences owing to genetics overwhelmingly come from raw life experience, not from data analysis and literature; approval of papers is driven by priors and the general vibe.

pretty much, but I don't think it's laymen vs expert framing. I think it's that people accept HBD as broadly true yet make exceptions to it at the same time.

I remember 2 months ago making a post here, when this website first launched, arguing that kids who are slow in elementary school tend to be slow in adulthood too, which got -3 votes, but I am sure in 2017-2019 on the old site would have gotten at least +10; I know so because I made such posts in the past. People gave their anecdotal evidence of doing poorly in elementary school and then excelling in high school or college, and I argued that members of TheMotte, who tend to be high IQ based on numerous surveys by Scott and shared readership, are not at all representative of the 'general population'. HBD is about making population-wide inferences based on large quantities of data; individual exceptions do not disprove it.

But I have also seen the a third position, that being rejecting blank slate but still rejecting some aspects of HBD or that IQ is a signifier of human worth. There is also the the issue that being pro-HBD is possibly a stand-in for opposing the education system in America, which is based on the blank slate orthodoxy. The one-size-fits-all approach to America's education system education is wrong, but HBD is in part about trying to fit people to molds. I can see how these would conflict.

Who has HBD fallen out of favor for on the far right? They may be posting detailed IQ analyses less, but not because of any disbelief that blacks are lower iq or do more crime bc genes

Those called by far right usually don't like East Asian getting higher IQs, ditto Jews.

IIRC most are fine with east asian IQ and just deny jewish IQ, but they are still very interested in low black and asian IQ.