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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

This is related to why 'account nags' are so persistent - having an account really does lead to using the platform more! (it also hands over your email for marketing spam).

Most HBDers do misrepresent studies, and misunderstand a lot of the data they use, and make poor arguments with poor conclusions. AFAICT this is universal in academia though. That's not to say that it's fine when HBDers do it, or minimize it at all - it is incredibly awful, disgusting, etc when anyone does it, and it's pathetic how universal it is. But it's not like "both sides really want a position to be true, so they push their side" is the only reason the "science" is shit. Priming wasn't better, much of psychology is still not better. Many HBDers really did think equality was true before they looked at the data or society, and both sides genuinely do believe their side to be true and have all sorts of justifications for it.

If we look at individuals instead of races, there's a reason scott alexander's father was a smart doctor, his brother was a gifted pianist who "... was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there ... a little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there ... one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation".

One of the funnier parts of HBD is ... if we should act on heritable intellectual differences between races in any way, we should probably do so for heritable intellectual differences between individuals too. And the latter clearly exist, and are critical drivers of all existing talent. IQ-selective immigration when? Well, that's not flying with the voters. An extra hundred million 100iq people isn't quite as useful as an extra 100k 140iq people.

Also, there's a reason yud and scott are jewish. How does that happen if race isn't related to heritable intelligence? 30% of nobel prize winners in math and hard sciences, etc

So "HBD" in that sense is still accurate? A liar may still tell truths, dirt may cover otherwise-pristine marble, etc.