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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.
Hi again. You may not know it, but the author of the text in the vault, JB, is a bit of a meme here, an avatar of pig-headed intransigence and hubris, which lends credence to your words. Nevertheless, I can't see how your arguments justify disagreeing with him on this issue and indeed coming to a «totally different conclusion».
To begin with: because for most would-be listeners, supporting the opposite camp equals approval of one's family and one's people getting discriminated against (the nigh-inevitable alternative to HBD being acceptance of unredeemed racial guilt). Some are turned off by this; others are quite happy.
And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.»
HBD/Blank Slate is a political question more than it's a scientific one, a question of whether a civic religion founded on this stated promise of equal innate potential (or at least absence of substantial between-group differences) is needed for the prosperity of a polity and reduction in individual suffering; it's a question of oughts. Turkheimer et al. wear their oughts on their sleeves, adversarially, so it's a bit of a double standard to dunk on HBDers for failing or refusing to understand a peripheral aspect of «is».
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. I have read a decent amount of your writing on the topic today, debate and adjacent content; the more I was reading, the stronger was the feeling that this'll be a fruitless debate. Your writing over the last year displays a trend towards isolated demands for rigor against HBD outlook (for unknown reasons that I assume, for now, are self-preservation and career strategy, a la Abdel The Backstabber, but might be just autistic perfectionism and purity spiraling; take your pick at which is less charitable). Your two examples aren't damning.
Your thread on effort and application of instrumental variables seems to sidestep the problem of scores influencing perception of effort, and anyway it doesn't affect the debate in absence of good evidence for differences in incentives&effort (and, well, whatever happens with low-stakes online IQ testing, people try «as hard as they can» in contexts relevant for long-term life outcomes or even on serious IQ tests).
Your triumphant post on the environmental null hypothesis is… inconclusive, since it doesn't bother comparing models following from theories on their predictive merits (and also other twins and pedigree schemes). You can't just «call» ENH like you so often do on Twitter, and certainly can't just assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, that all causal effects will generate genetic correlations, and thus that the usual HBDer touting of gen correlations/gen confounding is invalid. Take any actually published model emphasizing environment (i.e. an X factor creating race differences – I mean, okay, the gay-bullying-mental illness stuff at least proposes a half-legible causal pathway), and subject it to scrutiny next to a genetics-first one – most likely, it'll fall apart first.
Like Bryan Pesta's career did: it took years of digging by concerned people, but this HBDer got caught on a technicality and made unemployable. He had tenure, too. As for the non-tenured faculty, we can have Turkheimer spell it out. Like Bird says, there is reason to be optimistic about the eventual result of such policies:
So there's no money in it; databases are getting closed off too; getting published is near-impossible (note that all those would-be publications deal with weaknesses of HBD research program that you lament). The paradigm is shriveling up and dying (though Hyde would beg to differ). HBDers' incompetence is the intended outcome of censorship. In time, you'll have every self-respecting scientist firmly in the blank slate camp; forget structural equation modeling, unrepentant HBDers won't understand trivial correlation coefficients, and will be wholly undeserving of attention. Won't this make your argument so much stronger? And I think this means your argument is ultimately uninteresting, as far as science or policy are concerned.
You seem to use a coarse-grained notion of politics involved, in stark contrast to your (not necessarily correct but hard-to-critique*) analysis of the technical side. 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. Likewise comes the understanding of political implications; the sense of unfairness in this debate; and the will to signal-boost arguments-like-soldiers of your allies. This sounds low-IQ, and it is, but consilience can be pretty powerful, and HBD is anything if not consilient; so they're justified in not worrying a lot about minor nitpicks.
As for what happens on the other side – let's say that your model doesn't follow from your text and may conflict with the data. Emil sums it up nicely:
Call me a misanthrope, but it's a priori implausible for people en masse to have consistent abstract preferences such as «equality» and «inequality». Equality is an obvious compromise; beyond that, people just root for the team and want their side to be on top or at least not trampled upon. Bluntly, white «rightists» want to not be punished for the underperformance of Blacks, and thus prefer an HBD narrative that puts them solidly below some groups, above others, and absolves them of their purported sin of systemic racism. «Leftists» have other ideas, so they obstruct research into between-groups genetic differences and enforce the conclusion of racism being the leading causal explanation by fiat.
But this obstruction, when perpetrated by knowledgeable people such as Kaplan or Turkheimer or Rutherford, is telling enough, and cancels out all incompetence HBDers and even run-of-the-mill racists may show.
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.
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.
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