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Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.
I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.
So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.
Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.
If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.
I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)
So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.
Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.
The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.
If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.
So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.
As I understand, your political concerns and goals include: white racial consciousness, racial solidarity in the face of upcoming geopolitical pressures, unified opposition to invaders especially as we get demographic explosions in the global south over the next century. All of which I agree with. Do you think Jews have thus far been constructive or deconstructive in these goals?
If you think they have been deconstructive towards those goals, and if you are DR-adjacent I have you think you agree that they have been highly destructive to those ends in the ongoing culture war, why do you expect them to change?
The Anglos built a beautiful bridge for Jews to cross into American culture and intellectual life. If that extreme act of good will and equality given by the Anglos to the Jews has only resulted in the current state of culture-war and the role of Jewish influence with it, how can you accuse the DR burning that bridge? If America couldn't make them allies- in the sense of Jewish racial solidarity with Aryans, then what will? A migrant crisis? Does recent history support that hope or prove how backwards it actually is?
And it's the DR who is the most open to that sort of cooperation with the Arab world. They broadly support Assad precisely because they view the Arab world as gatekeepers to mass migration (a role which has explicitly been acknowledged by Arab leaders). But there is a group that would never allow such an alliance, and has its own interest in destabilizing all these Arab regimes which are a bulwark against mass migration... And you know as well as I do who ends up with the refugees. It's the European world, with Jewish interests exerting heavy political and cultural influence in the European sphere to compel them to accept these migrants.
I do not know either. All I can do is look at the current state of the world and set my expectations based on that. If you do that, where do you land on the question? Do you expect the next migrant crisis to elicit Jewish racial solidarity with Aryans, and for them use their considerable talents for the well-being of the white world? I do not. All indications are that the present course is accelerating.
I don't necessarily disagree with the points you are making... The Catholic/Protestant dynamic is another expression of ethnic differences resulting in macro-impacts on American culture.
Assigning retrospective blame isn't even the most important question. It's how we should move forward. If you think that a level of white racial consciousness and solidarity is going to be necessary to maintain (or ideally, rejuvenate) Western civilization, then you have to identify potential allies and potential adversaries in moving towards that end. Would you identify Jews as being a potential ally or potential adversary in realizing that significant change in public consciousness?
There is very little evidence that Jews have any interest whatsoever in nurturing white racial solidarity. As part of that UCLA "Initiative to Study Hate":
The Protestant/Catholic dynamic is real. But it's not exactly a mystery why WNs see the above as overtly hostile and a far greater threat to their project than Irish Catholics.
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I think you're completely understating the Jewish role in immigration reform. E.A. Ross wrote how Jews, even before the 1920s immigration restrictions, were by far the most fervent supporters of immigration into the US. He complained that their advocacy for immigration was letting in non-Jewish undesirables from Eastern Europe, saying "the brightest of the Semites are keeping our doors open to the dullest of the Aryans!" In contrast, he blames the Irish for ruining city governments, but not for open borders advocacy.
When it comes to Philip Hart and Ted Kennedy, that bill you're referring to was introduced to the house by (Jewish) Emmanuel Celler. It had not been passed under the Kennedy administration (who won only about half of NYC Irish voters, maybe less) because of the resistance of (Irish) Michael Feighan, who controlled the immigration committee in the House. And considering that even the most fervent Anglo-American nativists accepted Catholic Irish and Germans as assimilable and good immigrants nearly equal to the founding stock, the idea that "Catholics are more responsible for the death of Anglo-America than anyone else" is questionable.
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I think that the Anglosphere had better institutions of the type Jews are very common in compared to the hispanosphere historically and that this fact is obvious, but it does not to me seem well established that this is true in comparison to France or Germany.
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I'm curious about how likely you think it might be that they'd see themselves as white. There are many factors which might ask them to see themselves as Jewish first and white second, not the least of which is that there's an entire nation which will take them in, no questions asked, if they're kicked out from elsewhere.
I have my doubts about the long-term viability and security of Israel, given its extremely unfavorable geographic position, surrounded by nations whose enmity toward it shows no signs of abating. Now, I know it will never happen, but I’d be open to inviting all the Israeli Jews to basically take over the New York City metro area and turn that into the New Israel, if I wasn’t still wary about the long-term prospects of a détente between gentile Whites and Jews.
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These classifications seem so bizarre. Like, I get why the term 'white' replaced English, German, French etc in the new world as the settler groups admixed. But if you define white as a literal skin colour, them surely you don't need to classify different ethnic groups, you can just look at them?
And if 'white' means European, then in what world are the French somehow more European than the Italians?
If you're trying to classify European ethnic groups, it would be better to think like a European and not an American. 'White' is not a meaningful category in this context.
The rule for white in American history is that you look around the room and figure out what is the minimum number of people you need to classify as white to have a sufficient (loyal) white majority in numbers/money/power to oppress the non-white, then inventing the rule that will deliver this majority with the minimum number of extraneous inclusions.
That's how you get from ilforte's quote from Ben Franklin excluding most of Germany to "idk, maybe we count the Jews and the Japanese and some Indians and throw in Persians too and see how the math comes out?" You go from needing only the English/Scots/some Germans to have a supermajority, to needing all the Germans and the Swedes and French, to needing the Irish, to needing Italians, etc. That's why Mexicans went from being considered white in Texas before sufficient quantities of outside European immigrants had shown up, to Mexicans briefly "Losing" their white status after enough European immigrants made Texas majority non-hispanic white, to now having their white status "restored" as white Texans need the numbers.
White has no functional definition outside of that algo, everything else is backwards rationalisation to justify and give credibility to what the rule spat out as the line that would give "whites" a majority and exclude someone else. OP's concentric circles of whiteness are just different solutions to the same problem.
'White is the minimum number of ethnic groups needed to do racial oppression' does not seem like it would pass the ideological Turing test, at all.
How about 'white' means 'assimilated into Anglo-American culture'?
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I think whiteness is about not standing out because of your appearance to euro-americans. Under this definition there are large swathes of south european people who would not pass because you could tell them apart based on their appearance but its fuzzy because race is not a discrete thing.
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There are some distinct cultural traits with the English, French, and Germans that southern Italians don't share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
Very loosely, under Manorialism a couple could get a chunk of farmland to work by presenting themselves to the lord as honest, hardworking, and not a source of trouble. It lead to more atomic family structures and smaller families.
It replaced a clan centric system, where individuals had to preserve the honour and reputation of their clan. Tolerating an insult could lead outsiders to think that your clan would tolerate injuries. So it was critical that everyone understood that they should not mess with your clan.
For instance the Scotch-Irish were famous for feuds like the Hatfields & McCoys.
There's also a zero-sum aspect to altruism where the more you care about your extended relatives the less you care about your unrelated neighbours.
So for a traditional resident of small town America it's expected that they would help their old school friends and neighbours before their second cousins.
That's not going to be the case for more clannish societies.
There's no good name for "within Hajnal" societies but it's generally what people are thinking.
Your certainly right, but to classify people north of the hajnal line as 'more white' doesn't make any more sense than classifying them as 'more redheaded'.
'More outbred' would be more accurate, and actually hint to what you are taking about.
Although I doubt OP was talking about outbreeding, nuclear families and manorialism. I'm pretty sure they were awkwardly trying to apply idiosyncratic American ethnic terms to a world where the terms make no sense.
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Yeah, but white southerners are mostly scotch-irish by extraction and these people consider them white.
Hajnal put all of Scotland inside the line. I have seen arguments that the Scottish Highlands were actually transHajnal, but my understanding was that the Borderers (from whom most of the Scots Irish are descended) were clearly inside it.
The traditional Irish culture is also transHajnal, but the Scots Irish put a LOT of effort into not assimilating into it.
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I am trying to promote the terms "cisHajnal" and "transHajnal".
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In fairness, colorism is a bit of a strawman promoted by people who oppose racial perspective and seek to make it appear more ridiculous. When Anglo racists with above room temp IQs say that Eastern Slavs are not white, they aren't literally trying to compete on fair pigmentation (and by the way Turks can have very Aryan skull shapes)... it's an unfortunate conflation of terms.
The fact that it's not a strong argument in favor of HBD does not make it a "straw man".
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So a question I had originally asked was, slightly paraphrased, "To what extent does being pro-white ALSO require you to be anti-semetic?"
Your answer here seems to be "it doesn't, unless the Jews ever become a threat to the interests of whites."
Is that a fair restatement?
Do you believes that Jews, in aggregate, are a threat to the interests of whites?
I think that Jews are White, but that the organized political and economic wing of international Jewry does not see itself that way, and is acting against the interests of White people. This isn’t true only of Jews, though; they have (inexplicably) found eager allies and collaborators among a certain subset of gentile Whites, who are working hand-in-hand with them in the dispossession of Whites. Part of having White racial consciousness is, as far as I’m concerned, wanting to safeguard the welfare even of White people who don’t want the help. Rescuing wayward, confused Whites is non-negotiably important, in my opinion - saving Whites from themselves and opening their eyes to what has been done to them with their own ostensible (if compromised) consent. Basically I think that a great number of Jews fall into that category of “wayward Whites who can still be brought back into the fold before it’s too late”, although my confidence in that proposition continues to waver.
Good luck with this.
The best and brightest of Whites clearly see that "whiteness" is lost cause and are leaving the sinking ship ASAP to join the winning side.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/joe-biden-s-very-jewish-family-1.508420
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2014-09-28/ty-article/charlotte-clinton-mezvinsky-jew-or-not-jew/0000017f-dbff-df9c-a17f-ffff53ee0000
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3097352/meet-donald-trumps-grandchildren-arabella-joseph-and
This is something I’ve certainly thought about. What if instead of absorbing Jews into Whiteness, the only really viable long-term hope is to absorb Whites into Jewishness, through a calculated long-term campaign of intermarriage? It’s not something I currently advocate, nor do I have any hope of it getting off the ground as a widely-accepted cultural program, but it’s not clear to me right now whether or not it would be a bad thing.
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Do you believe that, when searching for a husband, someone like Chelsea Clinton really went "hmm, whiteness is a losing cause; I better find a Jewish husband to ensure that my child is not white"? Especially considering that the recent events have, indeed, demonstrated that antisemitism continues to exist - such as in the way that one of the most major musical artists, if not the most major, of the recent decades is willing to go to major medias to express clearly antisemitic views?
And what, you think this is muh IQ and education?
«Sinking ship» may be too strong a phrase but Jewishness does carry social benefits that Whiteness does not, namely access to resources and authority of an ethnic corporation. Can you imagine the reverse of Kanye's case, with some guy calling on Whites to drop Kanye or Nick Cannon?
People do care about ethnic and caste-based in-groups, even if Hajnal whites are on average a bit defective in this respect – even they can adapt. It is historically normal for upper-class (but not necessarily high income) people to think dynastically and seek to marry off their children into a higher-potential, better-protected, well-networked ethnically distinct demographic at the top of the current social hierarchy; this needn't be explained by random, thoughtless romance-driven breeding mechanics characteristic of plebs. Ambitious Jews did that as well when entering Anglo and German higher society, the result being many newly made Baron families mixing with Lutherans and e.g. Rothschilds all but dissolving among the British aristocracy. Now Clintons and Trumps may prosper in a way Kennedys have not, and Pelosis have a stake in the future too.
In fact I contend that for some families this is can be understood as a reward, a result of proving one's dedication over multiple generations. Trump's father had been desperate to demonstrate his and now Ivanka, after converting to Judaism, has become just about worthy of being accepted into the family of a mediocre convicted felon. Pelosi boasts of her father having been a shabbos goy; now some of Pelosi's grandchildren will have a solid defense if anyone calls them Nazi, Racist or Fascist. The story of Clintons and Bidens is probably similar.
That's a breathtaking spin on a man with maximally high social capital getting deplatformed in real time. Everything else aside, do you honestly think Kanye's case reinforces your point? What could even have been evidence in favor of the opposite that you'd accept – antisemitism not existing, all antisemites having been rounded up and shot? Literally insane ultra-rich and confident men knowing better than to speak ill of Jews, or Kanye getting quartered in public?
Or are you also building your credentials with conspicuous gullibility, at Eetan's expense?
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Well that actually clears things up even if I find the point of view to be almost unrelatable.
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I have suspicion Jews, in aggregate, are disproportionately threatening to everyone including themselves. They have a so called 'verbal tilt', they are far more likely to have a high verbal IQ than visual.
This gives them a superpower of being able to rationalise absolutely anything, and are thus a ready source and a readier vector of all kinds of hazardous ideologies, primarily left-wing ones because those are intrinsically more appealing on account of almost always being about overthrowing existing order and replacing it with your own that's clearly going to be faultless.
If you propose to do so out of pure self-interest, you won't get as many helpers as if you dress it up as trying to bring about heaven on earth, etc.
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My thoughts on this: Much words, little heat, little light. I suspect you'll be modded for "phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap."
Why do you think these "concentric circles" of whiteness are categories worth maintaining and considering morally relevant? I'm sympathetic to The Great Replacement hand-wringing because a group of people (both white and not) are going extinct. This process is, as far as I can tell, being defended because addressing it would gore sacred cows. As for other downsides, it's possible that the nature of replacement will cause institutions and culture to change unpleasantly.
Besides those two issues, why do you care if natives are being replaced by slavs or mestizos or han chinese or sikhs? They're being replaced, the same. The human organisms who live in the West (I mean by broad definition, including Japan) are endangered one way or another. And their culture, if you care about that.
To wit, you want to form an alliance with the "fourth circlers" to prevent "nineteenth circlers" from taking over. Why was it worth fighting with fourth circlers to begin with?
I'm imagining an alternate universe where you are posting about how people with Type I Diabetes must not burn bridges with people with Hypothyroidism to defend themselves from the rising Type II Diabetes menace.
I've never seen any coherent evidence that the over-representation of jews in powerful positions compared to anglos/germans/latins/slavs is any different from the whites being over-represented compared to blacks. The far-right, in a way, forms a carnival mirror to BLM. They search for a conspiracy, ingroup bias, or systematic oppression to answer what boils down to simple capacity.
/images/16670693929262843.webp
But, the link you post does not show that. The "no migration" line shows white British at 75% of the population in 2021. That does not indicate a race to extinction, even if in relative terms the percent will be 20% if the "standard projection"* Nothing in the link implies that the white British pop will decline at all in absolute terms.
*Which for all I know is completely bogus, since there is no source cited
Nothing in the link, no. But as the TFR of the UK is 1.56, thus below replacement, without immigration the total population would decrease.
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I don't think the argument is over capacity. Everyone knows Jews are smart. The questions are, are they nepotistic? Do they agitate as a class?
I think they do. I think they behave the exact way wokes claim whites do (but whites don't).
I don't have much in the way of an anti-Jew bias and don't care about it very much. But I think it's interesting, especially after seeing what happened to Kanye for being, essentially, the modern equivalent to Marilyn Manson (Kanye is as much a genuine Nazi as Manson was a genuine satanist).
Per Pew, "Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried." That indicates a low level of in-group solidarity.
Not necessarily. A jew marrying a gentile can still be excessively ethnocentric in all matter besides marital. Similar to how an anti-immigration forklift operator can have an asian wife. .
No, of course not necessarily. it is a single data point (albeit one more than provided by the OP). And, yes, an anti-immigrant forklift operator have an immigrant* wife, but how many do?
*I am assuming that not all anti-immigrant forklift operators have antipathy for Asian-Americans who were born here.
I should have clarified, an 'imported' or foreign born asian wife. What I was saying is that this single data point doesn't necessarily point in the direction you need it to. It's not a matter of how many, it's a matter of recognizing that the course of your life and your expressed political beliefs don't always line up 100%. And just because they don't doesn't mean you don't feel how you feel regarding politics and your in and outgroups.
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I'm not sure how much you can draw from that... Given how integrated Jews are and how much a minority they are in absolute terms (1.8%), a 39% intra-racial preference would represent an EXTREME ingroup preference over what we'd expect if they just considered themselves interchangeably white.
Like do you think American's of German Descent would in-marry at 39% in a random segment of America where they're 1.8% of the population? or do you think it'd very quickly approach the random rate of 1.8%?
You overstate your case a bit; in places were most Jewish people actually live, they make up more than 1.8% of the pop. Moreover, given the trend toward college educated persons rarely marrying those without a college education, the relevant pct is probably the Jewish pct of college students, which in the regions in which Jewish students attend college, is a substantial pct. And note that about 30% of Jews have graduate or professional degrees - they are even more unlikely to be in the marriage market.
As for German-Americans, when it comes to marriage, religion is obviously a more important determinant than ancestry, and apparently 76 percent of married Catholics with children are married to other Catholics, though perhaps the numbers for married Catholics w/o kids is lower.
Most importantly, the question is not, "do Jewish people exhibit more in-group preference than German-Americans or whatever." That is a red herring. The question is, is the in-group preference of Jewish people high enough that it is a threat of some sort, as the OP claimed? The outmarriage rates are a data point that tends to indicate not (Note, btw, that in general intermarriage rates
PS: Here is another data point: Jewish Americans are less likely than Americans of other religions to say that religion is very important to them, and more likely (44%) to say it is not too or not at all important
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Obviously endogamy and in-group solidarity are not the same thing, although it's reasonable to assume a correlation.
But we're having this exact conversation every four-six months. The question always is, what's the baseline for comparison? Jews constitute 2.4% of the US as per your source; even adjusted for SES, they are outnumbered by non-Jewish peers in every stratum. Choosing Jews as marriage partners even 39% of the time suggests some preference for endogamy. This is measured by odds ratios in the relevant literature, as described here by, appropriately, Rosenfeld.
New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States, Phillips 2013 in Contemporary Jewry explains further:
And there's the issue of, well, Jews not really constituting a homogenous demographic. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly marry and even befriend each other.
Religious affiliation, unsurprisingly, interacts with descent.
Endogamy values for [non-Hispanic] Whites are not provided and are a PITA to calculate.
P.S.
As noted in my response to KulakRevolt, the 2% number is not the relevant one; the relevant pct is the pct of Jews among college educated Americans who live in the few metro areas where Jewish people live -- the article you cite notes that "Americans overwhelmingly marry within [their] educational level.
So, mixed-ancestry Jews are more likely to intermarry, while single-ancestry Jews are less likely to intermarry. What does that say about Jews overall? And note that Orthodox Jews are very much a minority
More importantly, They have some preference for edogamy" is a far, far cry from "they exhibit dangerous levels of in-group preference." The bottom line is that most Jewish marriages since 2010 have been to non-Jews. That is evidence that in-group bias is not very strong.
Note also that Pew reports that "U.S. Jews are also less likely than the overall U.S. public to say religion is “very important” to them (21% vs. 41%). Slightly more than half of Jews say religion is “not too” or “not at all important” in their lives, compared with one-third of Americans overall who say the same." and that "bout half of Orthodox Jews in the U.S. say they have “not much” (23%) or “nothing at all” (26%) in common with Reform Jews, and a majority of Reform Jews reciprocate those feelings: 39% say they have “not much” in common with the Orthodox and 21% say they have “nothing at all” in common. Just 9% of Orthodox Jews feel they have “a lot” in common with Reform Jews and vice versa."
So, all the actual evidence presented so far seems to refute the claim
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I don't believe in some grand Jewish conspiracy. I would expect them to interbreed with white elites. As Yarvin says, the story of Jews in America is a story of assimilation, not domination.
But the upper crust whites are a hell of a lot more Jewish than the bottom tier. And as such, they have more power. And because of the Holocaust/Jewish advocacy, they're still capable of agitating as a class when they want, in a way that upper crust whites can't or won't.
"They interbreed with other elites" isn't much of a gotcha for what I'm saying.
But why do we care that they are capable of agitating as a class? That is true of lots of economic, social, ethnic, etc (eg: AARP), groups, including groups with a lot more political power.
They are more effective at it. But I'm not saying that we have to care. I don't really care.
I doubt that they, or anyone,is as effective as AARP.
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I'd be open to evidence for this, but I've never seen it. The argument that jews are "parasite ethnicity" that silently coordinates to weaken its host country is cogent. (So is Critical Race Theory's description of systematic racism.) And it seems to match history the demographics of power. (So does Critical Race Theory.)
I need evidence — for example, some study showing off-the-charts Jewish ingroup bias — to take it more seriously than other just-so stories about the world.
There are plenty of examples of Jewish intellectuals explicitly agitating for the interests of the Jewish community in ways that would render an analogous white person unfit for polite company. There are NGOs that exist explicitly to further Jewish interests, and there is even an explicit Jewish ethnostate. Jewish people network with other Jewish people through their synagogues and holidays, Jewish parents often encourage their children to marry within the faith, and I doubt you could find many Jewish people who would deny that their social circles are disproportionately Jewish.
What manner of further evidence are you looking for? A survey in which Jewish hiring managers obliviously admit to giving Jewish applicants an unfair advantage? If something along those lines is your requirement, then you have constructed an epistemological fortress.
To make my own position clear, I acknowledge and respect the innate intellectual advantage of the Jewish population (although I vaguely suspect one could slice the "white" community in America more finely to derive a genetic cluster among white people who are equally performant and equally sizeable, if one had the inclination and data to do so), and do not view them as parasitic in any way. Their achievements in science, technology, art and business are genuine and mostly work to everyone's immense benefit. We would all be impoverished if Einstein had never existed, and ten thousand more lesser known exceptional individuals like him in every walk of life, none of whom can be explained by nepotism.
I do take exception to the Jewish community's unnecessary persistence in maintaining a parallel culture within America, conceptualizing and advocating for its interests as distinct from the white population. Intentionally resisting assimilation and pursuing exclusive ethnic interests is a defection in a multiethnic society, and it is toxic for the country in similar fashion to white identity politics. Antisemitism is in part a response to this defection, and not entirely unjustified.
The analogy I draw is to Survivor. In Survivor, one of the most powerful tactics in the chaotic early game is to form a rock-solid two-person alliance, because two strategically aligned votes make a powerful coalition in an unorganized field of monads. Thus the rational play in the early game is to seek out and punish players who have formed such a two-person alliance, as a means of defense against their manipulations.
Likewise if an ethnicity organizes and advocates for its interests, one should expect other ethnic groups to recognize the inherent division in loyalty and to object, reactively (in this case with antisemitism) or proactively (via an exclusive ethnogenesis of their own, e.g. white identity politics). The salience of whether "Jews are white" is likely a product of these reactive and proactive responses to a recognition of an ethnic group's defection.
My impression is that you object to not just Jewish ethnic identity, but Judaism as a religion. Is there any way Jews could "assimilate" into American society without completely abandoning their religion? And why doesn't this standard also apply to, say, Catholics?
I don't think assimilation necessarily requires abandoning a religion. Catholics have assimilated without abandoning their religion. It has just become less central to their identity over time.
Do American Catholics not network with other Catholics through churches and holidays, and even Catholic social organizations like the Knights of Columbus? Do Catholic parents not encourage their children to marry within the faith?
I don't see how American Jews have failed to assimilate beyond remaining religiously Jewish.
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I don't believe the parasite class weakening the host shit.
I think they are a group of high achievers that agitate effectively as a class, and may preferentially hire other Jews.
Nothing more, nothing less
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I don't have any statistics, but I think Jews having outsized power in certain areas (Hollywood, banking) is fairly obvious.
I believe that Jews preferentially hire other Jews, but I don't have stats.
It also seems obvious that Jews agitate as a class.
Kanye has said a lot of crazy shit about a lot of people and groups, but look what happened when he went against Jews. They coordinated against him, and hurt him more effectively than any other group has been capable of.
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"Studies show" isn't the be all end all of certainty (effectiveness of parachutes, etc). It's an open secret that Indians in management at many large tech firms in America preferentially hire other Indians to such a degree that entire departments become Indian, often of specific castes (probably eliding some nuance here but I'm sure some of our resident Indian longposters will show up to nitpick).
How many studies on Indians preferentially hiring other Indians are there? A quick search came up with a ton of studies about Indians and Pakistanis getting discriminated against but zilch on Indian nepotism in U.S. tech hubs, so by your standards anyone who disagrees ought not trust their own lying eyes. Studying hiring practices of brown people (Indians) that disadvantage mostly white and Asian candidates in gauche so it is just not done.
So it goes with overrepresentation of Jews. Can you imagine a serious academic discussion about the topic, not to mention any affirmative action to correct the I can't because it would be immediately rejected, the researcher blacklisted as an "anti-Semite" (what does that even mean anymore), and discussion in the public fear quashed.
Here's the part where I have to prove my bona fides lest I get accused of being a 4chan pol poster. I don't think there's an international Jewish conspiracy or even a national one. The vast majority of Jews don't coordinate outside of their immediate networks, just like most people. There is however a "perfect storm" (for lack of a positive term) of factors that lead to Jewish overrepresentation. Like Indians, Chinese, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and many other communities with a strong group identity, they feel warmly towards and elevate their own (this is a good thing IMO). But, they also have a siege mentality that strengthens these feelings, cultural traits that happen to make one more successful in the modern information age, and higher IQs on average.
So there's no mass Jewish conspiracy, it's just a lucky confluence of genetic and historic factors, but AA proponents are still hypocritical for ignoring it, and whites should not be scolded for Jewish success by statistically aggregating the two.
And finally (and perhaps most controversially) the suppression of any "noticing" of this fact is extremely creepy. Wouldn't most people be concerned if there was massive overrepresentation of Scientologists, or Iranians, or [insert your favorite identity group] in positions of power? It would demand an explanation.
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Not everyone who is anti-semitic is a Nazi. Kanye is getting his talking points from the Nation of Islam and Black Israelites. That strain of black thought is deeply anti-semitic (and also believes some hilariously-improbable conspiracy theories). But he is also a bipolar guy off his meds, who is building conspiracies in his head surrounding his divorce, and is really mad at some Jewish lawyers that represented his wife, among a whole bunch of other things.
Kanye has said a lot of wild shit about a lot of different groups. But when he went after Jews, everything changed. They rapidly coordinated against him, and took him from billionaire to millionaire over night.
Hilariously, even his bank kicked him out. And his talent agency. I'm sure that will go a long way in terms of proving that Jews don't have disproportionate power in Hollywood, banking and law.
Do women or black people control the NFL? No. It’s owned by old white guys. But Jon Gruden isn’t coaching anymore.
Did Jewish people just start working in the entertainment industry? Ice Cube appearing on the cover of the Nation of Islam’s rabidly anti-semitic newspaper ‘The Final Call’, years after his previous controversy surrounding his lyrics, didn’t keep him from being cast in family comedies.
I sincerely think you would like Farrakhan’s book where he cherry picks which Jewish bankers helped finance the slave trade, ignoring all the gentiles that did as well, and everyone else involved, and paints it as a coordinated “Jewish” effort.
You're misreading me. I don't really care that Jews agitate very effectively as a class, and have an outsized influence in some industries. But they do.
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In absolute numbers, Anglos are ahead, but in relative numbers, Jews are overrepresented.
Yes, but jews are significantly smarter than anglos. You would expect them to be overrepresented compared to anglos, just as anglos are overepresented compared to blacks. The IQ gaps between the three groups are roughly equidistant.
Looking at jewish IQ and the total number of jewish people in the entire world, any high IQ jew would be outnumbered by a similar IQ Anglo, in the US alone, by a factor of 6.
No, looking at the tail ends the total number of jews is too low to account for the overrepresentation. At the elite level jews are outnumbered 6 to 1.
Considering that most people in these institutions are not 155+ IQ, no the situation does not make sense. You have to crank the dial on the IQ score all the way up to get a number that doesn't betray the glaring obviousness of jewish overrepresentation. Which is why when the claim is 115 for jewish IQ, the IQ barometer is set at 145 or 140, and when we lower the jewish IQ score, the barometer for IQ goes up accordingly. I don't think this is a game worth playing and it becomes obvious how ridiculous it is when looking at the actual IQ scores of jews.
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Ashkenazim seem pretty similar, group IQ-wise, to Japanese. Are they similarly overrepresented among powerful positions, or moreso?
112 is the upper estimate
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Out of curiosity, where are you getting your figures? Google and DDG are not especially friendly to these queries anymore.
Yeah I tried to double check it because I thought I remembered Asian-Americans had higher average IQ's than Asian-Asians(like in the 110 range, which is more roughly comparable to the Ashkenazi 112 than 104), but google won't return anything. I will accept that the Ashkenazi have a group IQ advantage over Japanese or Chinese Americans in the absence of evidence. The only other group I can think of as having a group IQ similar to the Ashkenazi is Tamil Brahmins, and they're similarly overrepresented among scientific achievement(I feel safe in saying that at least literary/cultural advantage to Jews over Tamils is probably due to circumstances/culture).
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Japan's National IQ is about 105; European jews are 115. Additionally, there are five times as many jews as japanese in the US, and European jews had a dramatically lower cultural and linquistic hurdle to clear on immigrating.
I'd say those factors can plausibly explain the gap.
European jews don't have an IQ of 115. At best you have an upper bound estimate at around 109. Lower bound being 104.
They can cite higher numbers if they want, just like I can cite numbers that say the average IQ of a fieldworker in China is 122. That doesn't mean its very smart to do so. Considering that looking at a small sample of jewish children from high achieving families might skew the data. Similarly to how only looking at test takers from elite universities in Beijing might.
Lynn looked at vocabulary scores of jews living in the US as a proxy for IQ and saw that in that category they had an advantage that ultimately translates to 7 points. Considering that jews, in every study I've seen, are carried by their verbal score, but lag behind in other scores, such as spatial memory, I'd consider 104 to be a reasonable lower estimate, and considering I could be wrong somewhere, a 109 is a reasonable upper estimate.
I don't know why you think Lynn is such a bad researcher. He generated a lot of controversy with his rough estimates for IQ for areas that did not have much data. But it's not like he didn't know that these were rough estimates. The controversy was, as far as I could tell, carried nigh entirely by hysterics from people who did not belong at the table of psychometric research in the first place.
If most HBD figures cited an inflated Chinese IQ score they would be wrong as well. I don't understand this authority worship here. Looking at studies on jewish IQ in the US, most focus on children and/or unrepresentative samples. I see no reason to look at the aggregate of bad studies over a single decent one regardless of what 'leading figures' have to say. If this is what they say I don't see a reason to consider them leading on the topic. Nor do I consider the disagreement between us to be on an equal level.
I don't understand your last paragraph. I'm not saying that it's a myth that jews are overrepresented where they are. I just hazard a guess to say that they are where they are, on top of everything you laid out, because of heavily expressed ingroup bias. Or, for a lack of a better term, nepotism. And I am sure that this is an inherited trait like all psychological traits are.
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According to Nisbett, who probably isn't popular here, yes. He argues that Jewish accomplishment (measured by Nobel Prize winners, Ivy Leaguers, Supreme Court clerks, and professors at top colleges) outstrips even an average IQ of 115. He, of course, favors a cultural explanation, referring to the differences between Italian/English and Arab/European accomplishment during different centuries, but does not deny that Ashkenazim seem to be 7-15 IQ points higher than white gentiles.
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I dunno, Jewish noses seem to stand out an awful lot.
I mean, I get it's not more distinctive than dutch eyebrows or french jawlines or whatever, but to claim Jews don't have an obvious phenotype doesn't seem true to me.
And shaving your head might get the meth head electrician to think you're a fellow skinhead, especially if you have visible tattoos.
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Even in the case of "DEFINITELY A JEW level Jewish looking," I find it hard to argue that such a person isn't white. Ashkenazi Jews are members of a pale-skinned European ethnicity, and if Southern Italians are white without even having pale skin, then Jews are definitely white. Most Jews are whiter than Jim Croce, who is white.
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This is the biggest issue I have with your piece. It is my it's own definition muddled. The Iberians you talk about are just normal early European farmers like the ones in central Europe or France. The Bell Beakers are already almost 50% EEF before they invade Britain.
I don't know what you consider being white? Is it only Yamna like ancestry? Does Caucasus hunter gather like ancestry count more or less than western European hunter gatherer ancestry? Does the question of whether people descended from those Caucasus hunter gatherers were actually the proto-Indo Europeans like the literature is converging on make a difference? Does the fact that your ancestors were, back in those ancient days very swarthy somehow taint your blood? Should the blue eyes of the western European hunter gatherers count more or less than their dark skin? Did you know western European hunter gatherer ancestry is correlated, both with darker skin and bluer eyes in European individuals?
I think they're saying not that pre-"White" Iberians were not "White", but that the modern Iberians have some admixture from non-"White" groups. And it is true that there is a lot of North African and even some sub-Saharan African admixture in southern Iberia.
So, Galatians are fine then? Iberians means people from Iberia. I assume that means actual native Iberians as opposed to the invading Bell Beaker and Urnfield cultures, or later North Africans. Also, the North African admixture is low; since, so many were expelled after the Reconquista and the western North Africans have large Early European Farmer admixture already anyway.
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Can someone explain this thread to a confused Slav? I thought "are Slavs white" question was just an expression of good old-fashioned Anglo supremacism. And that it was aimed at our culture. But people here seem to be seriously discussing whether we are white, in literal terms.
What does it mean? Personally I am probably paler than most Anglos. Most people in my country are paler than Italians or Spaniards. What's going on?
In WN circles I have never seen anyone suggest slavs are not white. Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.
No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.
With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.
This is not true. The so-called "Hunger Plan" is yet another fabrication that takes a grain of truth and spins it into a plan of genocide. That so-called "plan" just referred to an estimate for the number of deaths of starvation that would happen as a consequence of German occupation of Soviet territory until the end of the war.
This starvation was estimated as a consequence of provisioning their own army through the end of the war. For example, from the wikipedia article:
This is not even close to some secret plan to exterminate the Slavs because they were not considered Aryan. It was an estimate of the effect of provisioning their army to continue the war.
Edit: There is also the fact that the Germans fielded one of the largest volunteer foreign armies in history, composed predominantly of Slavs. The volunteer rate of Ukranians to the German side rivaled the volunteer rate of British for the war effort. I know it's fashionable to think that the Germans had plans to turn around and genocide the people that were helping them, but there's no evidence for that. The best the mainstream narrative can do is misrepresent things like the "hunger plan" to assert genocidal plans that did not exist.
IIRC the definition of "aryan" was flexible and tended to widen over time, with groups that exhibited good military performance usually being defined as Aryan.
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Are you seriously claiming that reaching an agreement to not supply cca thirty million people with any food because it might inconvenience your homeland and bring back memories of WW1 rationing & recognizing this would cause these people to die isn't planning mass murder ?
The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs. Those documents do not support that conclusion. It shows that the Germans considered mass starvation as a dilemma to provisioning their army to continue the war. You can say they should have surrendered and they are murderers for continuing the war. That's fine. But to say that this estimate was part of a secret scheme to genocide the Slavs is just not true.
There was mass starvation in India and Greece as a result of Allied blockades and diversions of food resources. Nobody would call that a planned genocide, even if you want to call it murder.
I never said that.
What they had a plan was for killing millions of conquered Soviet urban dwellers on account of the tight food supply.
It wasn't 'secret' in the slightest. Maybe not discussed in public or propagandised much, but forced population expulsions of Slavs and Germanisation of the more Aryan looking ones was a plan.
Come on. This is exactly what you said:
You said:
They had a plan to assimilate the Aryan looking ones and exterminate the rest of the Slavs.
As part of that plan, they planned to use hunger as the extermination method to achieve their goals.
The plan wasn't carried out due to lower level officers not following orders.
None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative. This assessment soberly predicted mass starvation and regarded the situation as catastrophic. You can say that the Germans should have prioritized feeding the locals above feeding their army. Or that they should have surrendered at this point upon realizing the human cost of continuing the war. But that is all very different from the ahistorical claims you have made in your post.
These documents that historians use to spin a "Hunger plan" actually described the pragmatic concerns of the food situation rather than an implementation of some plan to exterminate the Slavs.
Lastly, Germany prioritized feeding locals based on those employed in the German war effort. Your notion that they went around giving food to those they thought looked Aryan enough and let the rest starve in order to exterminate them is a testament to the abysmal failure of mainstream historiography to move beyond ethnic hatred in interpreting history.
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Bullshit. Was their army powered by corpses? They (would have) died because the germans wanted them to die.
You’re doing a bait-and-switch by focussing on motive, as if a ridiculously small legitimate benefit makes the murder incidental and exonerates the murderer. ‘I didn’t kill him out of hate, he had 10 dollars in his wallet, so I had no choice’.
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No, they definitely were not. Most Slavs were planned to be exterminated. The Nazis were even surprised at the number of Poles who looked "Aryan", and assumed that all of them were really just Polonized Germans.
The so-called "Generalplan Ost" referred to around 5 different iterations for plans of resettlement after German victory. Similar mass resettlements of ethnic Germans in areas conquered by the Allies also followed German defeat. None of these plans called for the extermination of the Slavs and none of those plans moved beyond the ideation stage. The mainstream historiographical interpretation of "Generalplan Ost" is one of many fabrications made by the Allies to post-hoc justify the destruction of Europe and Soviet conquests.
Alfred Rosenberg comes to mind as perhaps the most prominent Nazi racial theorist, and he regarded Slavs as Aryan. Slavs were even acknowledged as Aryan in law, i.e. in German racial laws:
Two Slavic groups are used as examples of Aryan in the racial law: Czechs and Poles.
There is a popular lie that "Aryan" only referred to the blonde haired and blue eyed phenotype. The lie that "Aryan" only included ethnic Germans is just a weaker version of the same lie made for the same reasons as the other lie.
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This is where I begin to question your white nationalist credentials.
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People attempting to carve reality at the joints, using the idea that race is both genetic and cultural and pretending it’s just genetic.
As someone who identifies as American, only belatedly and reluctantly as white, and not at all as White, I am grateful for this peek inside the racial mind in its attempt to steelman and convince. To quote Ayn Rand in her essay on racism:
I have a working theory that the reason that rootless cosmopolitans, late-stage capitalists', and various other flavors of socially atomized WERIDo seem to gravitate toward racialism, (be it of the CRT or HBD variety) is that they lack a sense of culture. They compare a McDonalds in Tokyo to a McDonalds in Manhattan and conclude that the differences between the US and Japan are superficial because they lack any wider frame of reference. They judge on skin color because skin color is easy to see/measure. It's the old streetlight fallacy.
This doesn't make sense. A racialist would interpret far deeper meaning to the differences between a McDonalds in Tokyo and a McDonalds in Manhattan than a liberal would.
Yes, that is what I said.
The reason that socially-atomized young progressive urbanites such as yourself gravitate towards racialism (be it of the CRT, HBD, or WN variety) is that race is visible, and being socially atomized they have no real sense of culture. They ascribe outsize importance to superficial details like race because, true cultural differences (IE a city without a McDonalds) is completely beyond their ken.
To clarify, the entire rest of the world places profound emphasis on racial differences, both implicitly and explicitly. You are one of the very few who can claim to not place strong emphasis on racial differences and treat them as superficial. You can let that be your legacy and cling to it until the bitter end, if you want.
Incorrect
The vast majority of the world places the primary emphasis on language/culture first with genealogy a distant second but you mistake it it for race because you can't see the cultural issues that underpin it. As other users have noted both Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa considered Japanese to be "white" which is nonsensical from a genetic stand point but makes perfect sense in a culture first model.
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This is almost certainly true. In my experience, they compare their WEIRD acquaintances with WEIRD-mindcolonized non-Westerners and conclude that because everyone cares about Ukraine and climate change and reads and agrees with the NYT, regardless of nationality or race, we must all be the same on the inside. Next time you talk to someone who has "lived in China" or "worked in Tokyo for 5 years" consider that they may have never left their foreigner bubble or, even if they have, they spent time around non-Westerners who were Western-educated and, importantly, were the kind of people who preferred to hang around with Western foreigners.
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It's almost as if culture matters.
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Well, for one thing, right from the "concentric circle 2", I quite wonder why I am supposed to sympathize with white nationalism at all, considering the stakes, if I'm not firmly within the circle 1, "whites in every situation".
More to the point, though, these sort of of ponderings demonstrate, more than anything else, that race is indeed socially constructed, at least in large part and perhaps the most important part. If one was to consider human race on a firmly biological basis, it would probably be based on human genetic clustering studies like the one which procuded this image, I'm pretty sure everyone here has seen it. Yet, those clustering studies tend to demonstrate that Europeans and Middle Easterners are indeed closely very genetically related compared to other major continental subpopulations (and what else would you use as a comparison); of course you could divide those clusters to more and more groups to get the result where Europeans and Middle Easterners show more as distinct populations, but at some point it just becomes p-hacking. If we consider Europeans and Middle Easterners as a part of the same population, then surely ethnic Jews, who tend to in roughly 50 % European and 50 % Middle Easterners, are very firmly a part of that cluster.
And yet white nationalists tend to talk about Jews as wholly and unambiguously nonwhite and the migration of Syrians, Turks and Algerians as race replacement. This is one mystery that I've never quite seen firmly answered. Of course one might say that they are not white-white because they are Jewish and Muslim and so on, or because they don't identify as white themselves, but then you just prove more firmly the (partially, and perhaps the most importantly) socially constructed basis of race.
The alternative is being firmly a second class citizen in our current regime of constantly expanding affirmative action. I'd take a situation where I'm second best over one where I'm explicitly and constantly reminded that I'm the worst race.
In practice, in the insanely unlikely event that white nationalists take over the US I expect they would use an expansive definition of white if only because half of them are hispanic.
The history of explicitly racist regimes suggests that the definition of the favored race tends to widen over time. Apartheid famously counted Japanese people as white, for example, and the history of Latin American racism is mostly the blood purity requirements to be considered white being loosened and not tightened.
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Do you live in the US?
If you answer no; you need not care about WNs at all. Europeans have their own problems, namely, excluding non-European migrants from the continent on account of it being mostly fiscal suicide unless we talk Chinese, educated Indians or similar Americans.
Of course there is some need for me to care about intellectual movements in America, even fringe ones, since their developments will inevitably show up in European discourses in some ways.
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I have to say that any faux-biological definition of "white" that leaves out the country with one of the highest rate of blonde hair and the whitest skin tone is pretty suspect to begin with. You could make such division, but calling it "white" would be pretty stupid.
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Your perspective is interesting, but speaking of own-goals, your categorization of different circles of "whiteness" which basically boils down to "People who kinda look white and include people I respect like Tchaikovsky," where the Romans were definitely white but Italians are iffy, reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.
Basically, you count the swarthy Mediterranean peoples and the pale-faced Slavs as more or less white because they are definitely European and they fought Muslims, and Japanese and Persians can count as kinda sorta white because you admire them and you'd like to have them as allies. This was almost comical back when apartheid South Africa classified Japanese as "white" as it exposed how absurd any claims of basing white supremacy on actual genetics were.
I am not surprised that, balking at classifying Jews as malignant foes because you actually know and like Jews, you find yourself in an uncomfortable spot with your fellow white nationalists. You clearly struggle with having wholeheartedly embraced HBD where blacks are concerned, yet being aware that your allies include people who really do want to commit genocide and are motivated by racial animus, not a calculated and rationalist desire to optimize the most benevolent traits of Western civilization. I'd wish you luck in squaring that circle, but I don't actually wish you luck in finding a group of "white nationalists but without the literal Nazis."
You can call it comical if you like, but perhaps white South Africans, due to their unique geographical circumstances, understood something about Whiteness which the rest of the White (and White-adjacent) world is only now beginning to grasp: that Whiteness is most useful as a way to exclude its opposite - Blackness. White as “not-Black” seems like a fairly important distinction, given the geopolitical and demographic outlook of the century to come.
I suspect you will have a hard time getting most of your fellow white nationalists to adopt your definition of "whiteness" as "Not black."
You know, @HlynkaCG sometimes goes on about how white nationalists are just leftist identitarians under the hood, and I never really saw it, but now I think there is something to it. One of the most amusing aspects of the woke terminology treadmill is how they keep inventing successively narrow terms - "PoC," "BIPOC," etc. - because at first they just meant "Not white", but then they needed to exclude Asians and/or Jews and/or wealthy Nigerians and/or Iberian Spaniards, etc. (Same thing in reverse with the ever-expanding "LGBTQBBQ++" acronym that basically means "anything as long as you're not 100% straight.")
And here you are doing the same thing. Just saying "I don't like blacks" is a little too on the nose, so you invent this whole taxonomy where you're defending "whiteness" but "whiteness" is "anyone who's not black" and then you get to have fun arguments with your fellow identitarians about whether Jews and Asians and Arabs and Indians get to join the club.
So yes, I call it comical, but moreover, I call it incoherent, at least if you're trying to justify your beliefs via genetics.
After some googling I can confidently say that POC and BIPOC refers to the same set of people, and it's identical to adding+ to LGBTQ.
BIPOC was basically created to exclude, or at least deemphasize, Asians.
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To the extent that White Nationalists resemble leftist identitarians, I think it’s because both camps understand the deep power and vital importance of coalition politics, structural power, and communitarian thinking. Critical race theorists are absolutely correct that White civilizations constructed hierarchies of values which were designed to reproduce hegemonic culture and distribute power and resources to those who were best able to embody and perform the roles valued by that culture. I just disagree with them about whether or not that’s a bad thing, and I recognize the central importance to me and my posterity of preserving the power structures put in place by my ancestors to benefit their descendants.
The endless salami-slicing of the BIPOC category has been a result of the fact that it was a coalition designed to center and empower blacks, but which created a network of power in which non-blacks quickly began to dominate the hierarchy, given their manifestly undeniable advantage over blacks in the sorts of traits and talents that allow one to accrue political and academic power. That’s why the artifice had to be abandoned so quickly; blacks tried to design a club where they could have pride of place, but chose to (or had to, or were manipulated into) opening the doors of that club up to people who were never going to accept taking a backseat to blacks. (Hell, the most persuasive argument against my attempts to welcome Jews back into the White fold is that by doing so Whites would be committing an identical act of self-sabotage, opening our club up to people who will quickly and comprehensively out-compete and marginalize us.)
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One can maybe charge early 20th century US laws with racism, but they're at least consistent. In 1922, when only "free white persons" and "persons of African nativity or persons of African descent" were allowed to naturalize, Ozawa Takao, an ethnic Japanese resident of the US for 20 years, sued to be considered white for this purpose. The US supreme unanimously decided that Mr. Ozawa wasn't a member of the Caucasian race and thus ineligible to gain citizenship by naturalization.
Edit: The following year Bhagat Singh Thind also desired to be seen as white in the eyes of US authorities. He made the case that since he was of high-caste and Aryan he was, by the contemporary anthropological defition, Caucasian. USSC again unanimously decided against the petitioner.
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That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.
In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".
I wouldn't disagree that racial categorization draws from both cultural attitudes and genetic facts. I'm not in the "race is 100% socially constructed" camp.
But I think the boundaries are much, much fuzzier than white nationalists and other racial identitarians want to admit. Hence their being just as willing as social justice activists to redraw the boundaries of "whiteness" to suit their agenda, without much regard to actual genetics and often without much regard to culture.
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I'm not sure exactly which reply in this chain sparked this thought, so I'm putting it here.
There's a thing I notice myself doing, where I sort of expand my sense of identity in a solidarity with Republicans, because they are the enemies of my enemies. By a decade of common ground in the culture wars and politics, I have come to kind of think of them as my ingroup. I cheer the successes. I lament and fear their failures. But that identification can easily fall apart when stressed in the right place. Bring up abortion, or Iraq, or the drug war, and suddenly I remember Actually, I'm A Libertarian. I've never been a member of the Republican party. I've voted for roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for significant offices, and more third party than either. To the extent that "Republican" is an identity, it is one I can detach like a lizard tail, when I need to do so to protect my ego.
When I see right-wingers complain about Jews, the usual context is pointing out that an ostensibly white writer talking about how America, or white people, or western civilization is terrible is actually Jewish.
As a demonstration and calibration, I quickly looked up I can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup. There's a section where Scott quickly lists 10 different articles purportedly showing intense, loathing criticisms of white people coming from white people. Two of the links seem dead, and 2-3 seem almost certainly gentile, but in less than 10 minutes of lazily Googling people who mostly don't have Wiki articles, I was able to find that Rebecca Schoenkopf and Jacob Weisberg are Jewish. Amusingly, Jacob is the only one with a Wikipedia article, and it doesn't have an early life section. It does mention his parents, and his mother is apparently a famous Jewish socialite from Chicago. So, minimum 25% Jewish rate.
I think a lot of what they're seeing is a phenomenon of Jewish people getting caught up in utopian purity spirals like wokeness, but having that ego-saving escape hatch allows them to go all-in harder. They're basically Motte-and-Bailey-ing their own identity, getting the kudos for vicious, scathing self-criticism while not actually taking any of that criticism to heart because it doesn't really apply to them.
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This is extremely innacurate; Jews were overrepresented in the hated professions of merchants, tax collectors and managers (for absentee landlords).
Rentiers are people living off land rents, and typically not ones with military obligations such as feudal lords, and really more of a modern era phenomenon.
Until cca 1930 medicine was more harmful than helpful; and I have no doubt a lot of people realised so in the middle ages, so, a big caveat.
Adding to this, in the middle ages there was a distinction between doctors, who worked off theory and may or may not actually treat any patients, and surgeons, who worked off of experience and accumulated knowledge and definitionally treated patients. While doctors- many of whom were academics who didn't even attempt to treat anybody- were usually more harmful than helpful, surgeons were much more of a mixed bag and good ones could be very good given the technological limitations of the day.
Ye olde battlefield surgeons were basically getting people from certain death to probable death.
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And worst case, if they botch your amputation, you get a discount on your next haircut.
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What does it matter if you or the rest of the dissident right deign to categorize Jews as your fellow Whites («enough»), if they are aware of still being Jews? Moreover, what do they gain from this recognition to consider accepting it? You say you're involved in WN circles. How much has changed since this 2011 note, sans the fact that Google doesn't find this page by its title now (even so, results are worth checking out)?
Arguments about definitions are usually interesting inasmuch as they reveal reasons people hold for drawing lines, or talking about those lines in public. It seems that most of the time questions about some group's Whiteness status on the far right are driven by two concerns.
The first is prestige; Whiteness is perceived as an elite club, or perhaps the preoccupation with its membership is meant to conjure this status into reality. A piece by a Cuban-Jewish-American M. Yglesias quoting Ben Franklin springs to mind:
What's that about? (Incidentally, an American has recently said that I'm one of «Literally the palest people I've ever seen!»). Let's be charitable and assume that Benjamin spoke not of the Asiatic admixture you hint at, but of some less trivial measure of racial quality. East Slavs are low-quality, low-prestige people. Putting Tchaikovsky in your camp is a no-brainer, but you would happily do without hundreds of millions of less illustrious Ruskies throughout history. Likewise, Indians are mostly «Pajeets» but Ramanujan is kinda cool And Pichai runs Google so eh, fellow upper caste Indo-Aryans can get a second-class seat. This kind of discussion makes for a genre of an intra-right status game, where one gets to boast of historical and anthropological erudition, magnanimity appropriate of a superior breed, and/or also condescension and intensity of disgust reaction. This is rather uninteresting to those of us of Swarthy and Tawny Races of the World who don't buy into the idea that the acknowledgement of racist Anglos is a worthwhile thing to pursue. (We're more into acknowledgement of Teutons).
The second angle is instrumental. «Can those people be of use to our White Nationalist cause, and will they?» The pan-White narrative serves to build a maximally broad camp.
The problem, of course, is that they have no reason to come into your camp. Not Arabs or Slavs, and particularly not the Jews.
To put it mildly, in the current year being White is uncool. On average, you get to have some advantages such as on the dating market, but they're not conferred on you by the identity or by group membership; every single way in which Whites have it good is a product of positive individual traits correlated with being White, perhaps to some meager extent of Bayesian priors various markets have due to distributions of those traits. Meanwhile, bad things are inherent to the identity in the social context. Whiteness in the US, and by implication elsewhere, is a construct tainted by the history of slavery and racism, not just due to propaganda or real events, but even simply because of self-sorting. If you want to be on the strong team, you have Civic Nationalism, and therefore identify as an American Patriot, maybe a MAGA Republican or a «degenerate mutt» like Hlynka. (Similar dynamics exist in other majority white states, e.g. France). If you want TRVDITION, you have actual national and ethnic cultures of your forefathers beginning in Europe, the more specific, the better; not long ago, this meant affirming Anglo-Saxon supremacy but nowadays only Putin uses the term seriously. You can also put some other facet of your identity in the first place: from a Trans person to an Eco-Activist, the world offers you many lauded options. Who the hell needs White Nationalism? Only people who have not managed to escape from sanctions levied on Whiteness, or who have deemed such an escape unseemly for ideological reasons. Those are not cool or powerful people. Many of them go so far in repudiating sanctions that they justify past evils.
And the sanctions are severe. One could say that «Whites» are de facto disenfranchised to an extent. They cannot organize, research and lobby explicitly for anything like common white interests, and it is illegitimate to even discuss such interests in the political realm. This is unpopular to notice, but immutable group membership plus the doctrine of group equality allow to smuggle in any kind of demand, including bald extortion under the guise of redistribution to right historical wrongs or straight-up prohibition on critique directed at members of a group. So Whites qua Whites are second-class citizens in their own countries: they do not possess a crucial right to agitate and lobby for their collective interests, and are forced to resort to humiliating roundabout stratagems like economic reforms with desired second-order effects, while inefficiently coordinating to pretend they favor those policies out of some lofty general principle. Jews, of course, enjoy the exact opposite position, because they can simultaneously be praised for stalwart Jewish nationalism and also have legal rights of regular citizens of Western countries, including the right to lobby. Why on earth would they want to be seen as White?
You try to sell the narrative of a common geopolitical enemy. Do Jews need to face those «common enemies»? I don't think so. In fact this is just a rehashing of Islam As The Civilizational Threat To Our Judeo-Christian Enlightenment, a neocon take obviously peddled by Israeli Nationalists to secure Israeli interests. And today Abraham Accords are signed, Israel is improving relations with Arab countries, Militant Islam isn't looking too hot, Iran is on its last legs (as are Jordan, Lebanon) so the question is moot. Africans, lol? What do Israelis care? In general, Israel positions itself as a no-bullshit self-interested Middle Eastern nation that happily deals with other non-Western states, including hostile ones like China and Russia (why not fight them, by the way?); they do not need to be inserted into anyone else's delusional fights. Frankly this search for a threat to unite against looks like desperation.
And one corollary of the above is that strongly identifying Jews who nevertheless grace White causes with their support will be fundamentally unserious about it. They may see value to the «White» civilization, but they know they have their own thing to retreat into if things go badly or their new friends are ungrateful, and that thing's on a much more solid footing. It's a bit of a game.
I believe that the appropriate answer is «What good would that do?»
The problem of WNs isn't that there are many Jews in positions of power. It's that Whites in similar positions have no agency, qua Whites. Chuck Schumer is a conscious, proud member of a millenia-old ethnoreligious community headquartered in Israel, and explicitly takes actions to advance their interests using his position as an American politician (including assistance in suppressing people who notice and take issue with this agenda). Mitch McConnell is just some turtle-looking Republican. If you remove Chuck, Mitch won't start caring about the continuity or glory of your race. Neither will Nancy.
What can be done with that? Not much, I'm afraid.
I wholeheartedly agree, any alternative solutions then? As it stands it seems like any (gentile) white person in the West with even a semblance of racial consciousness is basically dissident by definition. Converting to Judaism or trying to run back to my grandparents home country in Eastern Europe seem like the only viable options, but both seem incredibly foreign compared to my upbringing. I guess there’s always the Orthodox Church as well.
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Is there any reason to believe that when Iran overthrows the Mullahs, it's going to stop being staunchly racist and nationalist ? I've heard it said numerous times that Iranians are usually nice to foreign visitors but do not even hide their open contempt of Pakistanis, Afghans, to a lesser degree Arabs ?
Even if there was no religious or historical animus against Israel, Iran would still be a rival to Israel and of course Saudis.
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What could make rich well educated lawyer feel solidarity with poor illiterate peasants? When he is treated like one of them, when he is reminded he is the same dirty wog like they are.
Make sure Mitch McConnell is oppressed and persecuted like poor Appalachian whites are oppressed and persecuted, and he might reconsider too.
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This requires you to believe that banking and trading contribute no value to society. This was certainly a widespread view in the Middle Ages (and still is among Muslims), but it shouldn't affect objective retrospective assessments.
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I want to begin with the statement that I am not, by typical definition, racialist, although I accept a weak form of HBD, and that to me you are correct with the view that "who is white" is a question with by-definition fuzzy answers because the boundaries of any racial group are by definition fuzzy.
Now, to continue, "are Jews white", yes, depends on how you define it. Obviously by a historical geography definition Ashkenazim are as white as poles(that is to say, generally understood to be), and I don't care if they're technically semites or khazars or whatever. By a phenotype definition they're as white as Italians(that is to say, generally accepted as). By a genotype definition they're definitely mixed but Maronites and Eastern Europeans are both conventionally accepted as white, and they are both major contributors to Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.
By a sociological definition, "whiteness" has been redefined almost literally into a way to describe Jews without naming the Jew(while conveniently pinning the blame on Billy-Bob from Nowheresville, Indiana), so that describes Jews as white.
Instead I think you're referring to the cultural aspect, where "white" describes people of ethnic groups that were historically part of Christendom. So Armenians but not Persians or Turks, Maronites but not Alawites, Ossetians but not Tatars, Romanians but not Romani, Spaniards but not Sephardi. And this is a semi-useful definition because there are real differences between Christian and Jewish or pagan or Islamic cultures. To start with, Christian cultures are unlike other Abrahamaic-influenced cultures in generally having strong traditions of both musical and representative art, requiring the woman's consent for marriage and not just her father's, making use of both pork and alcohol in their cuisine, viewing slavery with greater discomfort, lacking a thorough religious dictation for basic legal principles, viewing dogs as high status animals, celibacy/chastity as a virtue, and generally not expecting clergy to hold either secular political or military roles. And these are extremely relevant distinctions that line up pretty well with the things that distinguish the west from the middle east. But it's more useful to describe them as "western", because those things also encompass lots of Latin Americans and African Americans who are obviously from looking at them nonwhite. And so I think it's best to use "white" in a phenotypic way that would encompass lots of Jews, Middle Easterners, etc. And, personally, I care a lot more about common cultural background than common skin color.
Imagine obsessing this fucking much about skin colour.
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This is the single best description of mostly-European Christian culture I’ve ever read. I have no idea how much the individual points are from barbaric cultures, but I do identify with this much more than the color of my skin, which I view as an accident.
I know it's more or less besides the point, but I can provide at least some evidence for any one of those things as being rooted in pre-enlightenment if not ancient Christianity. Yes, obviously current western views on consent or dog ownership or slavery or separation of church and state are more "postchristian" than "christian", but they more or less have to be postchristian and not postislamic or posthindu.
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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.
Are you suggesting that people are prone to bias in favor of their pre-existing beliefs? ;)
Not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a mere "bias in favor of their pre-existing beliefs". It's a fundamental failure to comprehend what is even being talked about. A failure to understand/accept it is just as bad as if a leftist considers inequality of outcome to be a proof of racism, and claims that inequality of outcome disproves genetic explanations.
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HBD is a useful scientific frame insofar as it goes against the default blank-statist universalism of academia writ large, but the number of people who truly give a shit about the phenotypic variance populations on psychometrics is a rounding error. The issue is that people like to make interventions which don’t do anything. We can quibble over effect sizes, but right now I could use embryo selection to get a marginally smarter child compared to controls. There isn’t any known environmental intervention that can more the dial on adult g.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to giving more credit to random noise, but nobody has time for the humility that would demand.
Just for context, is there some specific intervention Erik Turkheimer has endorsed that you are objecting to/which you think has been shown to be ineffective?
It’s unfortunately not explicit, but the subtext of of the thesis ‘the environment of poverty causes low IQ’ is that if we fix poverty we fix IQ. If you take Jensen seriously then you can (correctly) predict that anything short of explicit eugenics and/or gene modification is going to fail to move the needle.
On the margins there is plenty of room for serious scientists to argue about possibly meaningful effects here or there: the fact that income and wealth have very different relationships with heritability is definitely interesting. But we try to use truth to win social fights rather than pick our side based on truth unfortunately.
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HBD is very broad or like a spectrum. It can mean definite racial cognitive stratification, or that individual differences are inherently innate, but with race playing a smaller role. Even if some groups score higher on average, there is considerable overlap of the distribution of scores, so we cannot generalize at the individual level as easily, which is what Charles Murray himself said. Even if HBD does have flaws, it still seems to be better than the alternatives at explaining society.
Given how high stakes the LSATs and SATs are, who doesn't put maximal effort? Yet some people get way higher LSAT scores than others even though everyone is trying hard, suggesting innate differences still matter even if incentives also matter. Probably 100k+ people annually apply to top law & med schools, top colleges; I am sure most of them are putting in maximum effort on high-stakes tests such as the LSAT, GRE, ACT, SAT, MCAT, etc.
Part of the problem with a lot of HBD-dunking, such as by Taleb, is they fail to control for individual preferences. So in aggregate, correlations between innate qualities and outcomes are low, but you are not accounting for individual preferences, not that genes do not matter. Most >120 IQ people do not work at a high-paying tech companies, but having a high IQ is highly predictive of who gets those jobs.
Neither I nor the person who did the study were making a claim about the SAT, we were considering a setting where people fill out surveys for pay on the internet.
I didn't say effort was the determining factor, I said that it mattered, with natural variation in effort covering maybe slightly less than 10% of the variance (so if you go from slacking to max effort, maybe that gets you a bit more than a standard deviation of score).
Much of individual preferences are heritable too, but yes I agree that group-level differences are much less "noisy" than individual-level differences.
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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.
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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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.
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I've yet to see this happen even once.
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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.
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"phenotypic null hypothesis", according to Google Ngram, does not appear before 2002 and it's usage going after 2010. It's a neologism.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=phenotypic+null+hypothesis&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cphenotypic%20null%20hypothesis%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cphenotypic%20null%20hypothesis%3B%2Cc0
And disingenious one. For testing medications, null hypothesis "it doesn't work" is useful because we have voluminous history of ineffective medications. We don't have prior history of controlled experiments on population IQ differences. It's like theists requiring atheists to prove.
Jack and Jane both collected some stones on beach. Compute average size of stone each of them collected. Must they be same, exactly to 10-digit after comma, unless proved otherwise?
As been said, it is looking at rightists under leftists theory of universe. What about "rightists don't want certain kind of government-mandated redistribution which give a net harm to society" or "rightists don't want their bikes stolen"?
Now I am going to violate rules and say that intelligence is clearly biological. It's not controversial to say that fish are smarter than jellyfish, and crocodiles are smarter than fish, and rats are smarter than crocodiles. It's only when feelings are hurt it requires some "phenotypic null hypothesis". Yes, intelligence has long causal chain, but so are many biological phenomena.
Your
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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?)
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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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.
'rewarding' puts a moralistic spin on it, when really it's just about maximizing efficiency.
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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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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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I think HBD conversations would improve if focus were to shift from cognitive factors to athletic factors. For example, are the extraordinary accomplishments of recent-African-heritage sprinters in international track & field competitions attributable to genetic factors that are relevant at the population level? If we can't make progress on this question, then how can we hope to make progress on (far harder) questions about cognitive factors?
Racial differences in sports accomplishment sound likely due to bodily differences in sports abilities. Next question please.
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Probably there is less attention about athletic differences because the stakes are lower and it applies to fewer people. Being a top 5% sprinter confers nothing (you need to be among the best in the world to make a living at it), but being in the top 25% of achievement is the difference between middle and lower class.
That is exactly why I think that it could make for more productive conversation.
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Conversations probably would improve, because doing so would move us out of the territory of policy.
Few people care about sprinters enough to legislate their immigration, or to Just Ask Questions about sprinter culture, or to try and hint that exhorting/suppressing sprinting is a moral imperative. Intelligence, on the other hand, has higher stakes. The fact that it ought to be a much harder question pales in comparison to the increased benefits for "winning" that argument.
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There has been plenty of progress on questions like differences in BMI, running ability and such. Scott even posted a link years ago to a study on genetic causes of BMI differences (which he used to vaguely hint on his beliefs about IQ differences). Genome wide association studies have been done and are being done on all these questions. To quote Joe Rogan, "You haven't been paying attention to the literature."
I think you're suggesting that there's a widespread academic consensus that, e.g., genetic factors significantly explain part of the observed population differences in high-level sports achievements. But I'm skeptical that such a consensus exists. Off my head, I can't think of any mainstream American academic who has endorsed something like this position publicly.
Maybe the consensus exists, but it's considered tasteless to discuss the question in polite company? In any case, are there prominent experts who argue that HBD (largely) explains differences in high-level athletics achievement, but doesn't explain differences in (e.g.) high-level math achievement? I would be interested in seeing how they thread this needle.
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It's kind of weird to treat an empirical question as a competition and focusing on the sportsmanship and conduct of each side. Ultimately the tactics used in various debates have no effect on the underlying reality. The earth orbits the sun with no regard to the good or bad conduct of people who profess heliocentrism or geocentrism.
I just want to know the truth and for the truth to be known. I want policy arguments built on false factual premises to fail, and I want policies built on true factual premises to succeed. But your characterization affords no place for genuine epistemic rationalists; it assumes that everyone is a contestant in some kind of dumb zero-sum game, engaging in that game only as a means of influencing policy in their favored direction.
🤷 I also want to know the truth; what triggered this discussion was mainly that the other post had been placed in the best-of section of this website. Take it up with the moderators if you think the conduct of each side is irrelevant.
Though I don't think the conduct is irrelevant, because of Aumann's agreement theorem. If there was a side that conducted itself well, you could just copy your opinion from what they say. Because they're not behaving well, you can't do that. That seems like important information to know.
Also I wouldn't say I don't have any space for people who want to know the truth:
Can you give an example of an issue that is the subject of ongoing political controversy in which you believe the assumptions of Aumann's agreement theorem are satisfied?
Disagreements where Aumann's agreement theorem's assumptions are satisfied rapidly disappear, so whenever you talk about persistent controversies, they will not be satisfied. However, it is still relevant for me to know whether they fail to be satisfied because one side if obstinate, or because both sides are bad, as if it's only one side that's bad then I can just copy my views from the other side.
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So, first off, thank you for posting, and apologies in advance if the criticism I'll give comes across as too harsh. You seem to be trying to get more seen and read, so I'm going to try to help.
First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.
Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).
In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.
Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.
I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.
You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).
So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here
Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.
Also, as per the community rules, "don't attempt to build consensus", as you do when you write "... which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense,"
No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do). Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment? I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).
I can't really comment on your main article, because I don't understand it beyond "assigning causation back to genes is tricky", which, I agree with, but, if that is your point, isn't a very exciting one, nor is the the pwn you seem to think it is. But if you have a different point, please state it clearly and simply, with a concrete example, and I'll try to address it.
Here are some examples of places where I'd bring it up on twitter:
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1582021910853926914
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1475441032292667394
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1469700585691750403
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1501945959487393805
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1308739838045282304
The post comes from frustration with these sorts of situations. Importantly, it's not the specific interactions but instead that they are repeated and that often not much update happens. This seems like a point that should get signal-boosted more in a healthy community.
Yes, frequently scroll through my twitter and just fire of random quick tweets that debunk random social science studies. And I don't trust any social science studies until I've checked the methodology myself.
You're making assumptions about my ingroups/outgroups that aren't necessarily true. E.g. I've spent tons of money on HBD-aligned research, partly for motivations similar to what you describe here.
I was under the impression that the test-retest reliability of IQ tests is 0.85? If we assume that the test-retest reliability of effort is 50% (I suspect it's higher, but let's be generous to your side), and we go by the estimate that 8% of variance in IQ is down to effort, then that would mean that effort would introduce an unreliability of 50%*8%=4% to IQ tests. This is considerably less than the 15% unreliability that I've commonly seen, so I don't see how your argument is even halfway close to working out here.
Isn't the item level of IQ tests (which seems like the closest analogy to intellectual leaps to me) dominated by noise? So I'd say noise, not g or effort.
Also even if we ignore the item noise point, by the numbers I'm giving, test effort would only be 8% of the explanation for test underperformance.
It sounds to me that you are granting the basic point (effort plays some role), but then acting like you are disagreeing anyway? Is it a quantitative disagreement? If so, what is your estimate for the quantitative effect that effort plays?
Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).
I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. As I think you say, accounting for 8% variance would be not too far from noise. That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort' but would think to myself -- "whatever, if you want to believe that, go ahead it doesn't seem wrong enough to be worth fighting over". What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.
FWIW, I expect a very asymptotic-type curve, that rises extremely sharply from [answered questions at random without reading them] to [did test pretty normally], and then is pretty flat. It's like (but not quite as extreme) saying the kind of pen you use matters, because if yours is broken, or breaks half-way through, you'll get a lower score. So effort is not very interesting. But sure somehow accounting for 4% of the variance is plausible (sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'). You seemed to be implying that means IQ tests are meaningless (and apologies if I misread it, again, please stately plainly your point so that doesn't happen as often), which that doesn't seem like a strong argument for. If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?
I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.
Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.
🤷♀️ I just went with whatever quantification chosen by the leading IQ researcher whose study got signal-boosted. It's quite possible it's bad as I didn't look into it in detail, but if it is bad then I feel like that also reflects badly on HBDers for signal-boosting a study that uses a bad measure.
Those might be correlated with effort. Mood in particular seems likely mediated by effort.
I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?
My point in bringing up effort is that I was scrolling through my twitter timeline that is filled with social science, and then I saw all the HBDers I followed praising this guy for debunking the notion that IQ is affected by effort. And then I thought, hm, that sounds implausible, I should double-check the statistics, and it turned out the statistics were wrong and actually effort is affected by IQ.
I don't want to replace leftists lying to me about racial difference in g in order to rationalize racial equality with rightists lying to me about effort in IQ tests in order to rationalize racial inequality. I don't think I need special justification for wanting to know the truth about each question in a decoupled way from everything else. But if we absolutely should justify it by practical means, then a straightforward justification would be that this directly contradicts people's experience when filling out tests, and therefore looks delusional to insist on, presumably on the margin reducing the number of people sympathetic to HBD.
Write it here, clearly, and I will. Don't send me to Twitter, or your blog (or do, but realize you've lost much of your audience). Reading this, I think you would be better off if you spent less time on Twitter (well, I think that goes for just about everyone...)
I don't think people would conclude that, and I don't think you proved that in this thread. You remind me of the XKCD about using language in a very non-standard way and then feeling clever that they didn't understand you.
I get the concept of effort, but I think it's difficult to turn into something where you can say you're giving 20%, 50% 80% effort. But it's a minor point.
I feel like you're not listening to me, and I assume you're feeling the same about me. I think we've both reached our limits of what we think we can convey to the other. I wish you luck and success in better understanding g, IQ tests, HBD, and conservatives in general. My final two requests: work on writing more clearly, and listen more with the intent of understanding, rather than proving why you're right. (I will try to do the same!)
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I'm basing my experience more on the Twitter debates that hover around Erik Turkheimer than I am on the discussions that happen on The Motte, as I don't have much experience with The Motte. It's quite possible that The Motte is different.
I think if you're innumerate you should just not rely on quantitative studies such as twin studies because they require numeracy to interpret.
I mean I can try, but I already wrote an explanation in my blog post, so I'm not sure how much more I can say about it. Is there some specific part of my linked post that you find confusing?
I've seen HBDers point out that there is a genetic correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, and use this as an argument that homosexuality and mental illness are innately related, as a counterargument against e.g. homosexuals being bullied and becoming mentally ill as a result of that. (I've also seen lots of other examples, but this was one of the key examples that made me decide to write the post.)
If a genetic correlation referred to a genetic confounding aka horizontal pleiotropy aka "one gene has two unrelated effects", then that counterargument would make sense. The bullying theory of gay mental illness doesn't predict that there is a biological connection between homosexuality and mental illness.
However, genetic correlation actually refers to something more subtle. Two variables are genetically correlated if genetic factors that contribute to one variable also contribute to the other variable. So for instance, intelligence and education are genetically correlated, because genes that contribute intelligence makes people better able to pass exams etc., which unlocks better educational opportunities. In this case, intelligence and education are not genetically confounded; rather they are just ordinarily causally related, and this makes them genetically correlated, just as it makes them ordinarily correlated.
Your example seems pretty easy to test. There are lots of twin pairs where one is homosexual and one isn't the heritability is only 30%. You could just see if the non-homosexual identical twins have the same rates of mental illness as the homosexual ones.
Yes, this is called environmental correlations, it is correct that the phenotypic null hypothesis also predicts the environmental correlation to be high whereas the genetic confounding hypothesis doesn't predict that. (Specifically, the phenotypic null hypothesis predicts every variance component to be correlated, whereas confounding hypotheses only predicts confounded variance components to be correlated.)
Some of the studies on homosexuality and mental illness finds the environmental correlation to be zero, which supports the genetic confounding view. I have at times acknowledged that/pointed that out. I also address the concept in my linked post.
The thing that bothers me is not the conclusion but instead the argument: WHY would HBDers make the argument with genetic correlations in the first place, when clearly it is the environmental correlations that are the key question? Because they don't know the phenotypic null hypothesis. But WHY would HBDers not know the phenotypic null hypothesis when it is such a basic concept for heritability? Because the phenotypic null hypothesis is anmoying and sounds like an outgroup thing, is my hypothesis.
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This is mostly it, with one major point:
If the basketball skill is an effect of height, then height and basketball skill will be genetically correlated. (For basically the same reason that if basketball skill is an effect of height, then basketball skill and height will be ordinarily correlated.) Not "will be misestimated to be genetically correlated when they are actually environmentally correlated" - but instead "will genuinely be genetically correlated". This is because genetic correlation is not a measure of whether height is horizontally pleiotropic with good slam-dunk technique, but instead just a measure of whether height genes and basketball genes are overlapping, for whatever reason it might be.
If the basketball example doesn't fit, can you give a better example?
It totally does fit as an example, one just has to be careful what it is an example of.
Let me rephrase: Can you give an example of a trait correlated with basketball skill, which would be erronously found by genetic testing?
What do you mean by "erronously"?
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In the left-wing view, resources are by default abundant but production is fixed, so whoever has more than another must be "hoarding" it. It seems pre-agricultural. (Trees still grow fruit even if no one shows up to harvest it.)
In the right-wing view, resources are by default scarce, but production is highly changeable. This view is more industrial or agricultural. (Fields lie empty if no one plants for the next harvest.)
"Right-wingers want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes" presumes that they fundamentally believe in left-wing ideas but are just hoarding out of greed. That's not a symmetric view at all. It's just the left-wing view.
If everyone has the same economic production, but Italians are stealing a share from Frenchmen, then Frenchmen receiving a larger share will just make Italians worse off. If Frenchmen have a lower economic production than Italians, but Frenchman economic production increases, then the total output of the economy rises. Italians bid more for highly inelastic goods like land, but more elastic goods like potato chips or microchips may become cheaper, and depending on their preference the Italians may be better off overall.
It's a bit more complicated than this, but the big question is the same as it was 20 years ago - if you can make a social program to converge racial outcomes in the US by about 50% (putting e.g. black income around where hispanic income is now, which is about where white income is relative to asian income), where is that program?
I second that. I think that compassion to economic-poor and hate towards sexually-poor is because our morality lags economics and we're still think like hunter-gatherers do.
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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.
I think the honest way of addressing this is "fuck your anti-white racism", not coming up with elaborate justifications that were never epistemically serious to begin with.
This sounds like a scientific metapolitical question as much as it sounds like a political one. See the end of this book review for more discussion.
I don't think I have an isolated demand for rigor towards HBD. In other places than the linked ones I regularly challenge anti-HBD. The issue is that neither side wants to be rigorous aka both sides just want to make things up with studies that support their general vibe without checking whether those studies are actually of any evidentiary value.
If scores influence perception of effort, then it would lead to a downwards bias in the estimated effect, not an upwards bias. Also it is not really mathematically plausible that the direction of causality is reversed because that would require an effect size of around 2, whereas unless there are shenanigans going on they should only go up to 1.
And yes I agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the racial differences in IQ are due to differences in effort. The effect of effort is fairly small, so you would need a humongous difference in effort to cause it. The problem is that HBDers do not separate this question from the question of whether effort affects IQ scores, and so they say stupid things like that effort doesn't matter for IQ in order to protect the notion of race differences, when really the obvious answer should be "yes, effort matters but it doesn't explain race differences".
I don't believe that. I often didn't try as hard as I physically could on exams. For instance once I was done with exams I might leave earlier if allowed instead of checking over my answers for errors, where of course if I had checked over my answers I would inevitably have found some errors and thereby increased my scores. I also never really prepared for exams ahead of time.
First, it's phenotypic null hypothesis, not environmental null hypothesis, i.e. if someone is smarter due to having a bigger brain and this bigger brain makes them do better in exams and therefore get more education, then that would be weird to call "environmental"
Secondly, while I can't assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, I can assume that the overwhelming proportion of studies don't account for measurement error, because I've seen that they don't. For an example in the case of personality, see how this shows almost all twin studies on the heritability of personality to be wrong: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/02/getting-personality-right/
And I can totally assume that causal effects between individual difference variables generate genetic correlations between them (as long as they are heritable, but remember, everything is heritable). I gave you the theory and a simulation for why; if you disagree then show me a hypothetical counterexample where there is a causal effect but no induced genetic correlation. This is where I really consider it a big, damning fault, because this is really basic stuff.
A failure to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis is the same tier of error as an environmentalist who assumes that any difference in outcomes must prove that there is racial discrimination. No! Racial differences in abilities also predict racial differences in outcomes. Similarly, nonbiologically mediated/moderated causation predicts heritability and genetic correlations too, not as any sort of bias or measurement error or anything, but simply from the definition of what heritability is. If you don't accept this then you are not seriously engaging in the debate and no better than the environmentalists.
Now it's perfectly reasonable to raise questions about genetic confounding. It's just idiotic/dishonest/??? to say that genetic correlations prove genetic confounding.
I am not bringing up the phenotypic null hypothesis as being a debunking of the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence. I agree that it doesn't debunk the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence.
I am bringing it up as a basic fact about heritability how heritability works that HBDers fail to understand/fail to engage with.
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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.
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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*my impression of the topic is still best described in this quote:
Incidentally, this can no longer be found on the author's website.
The manner is recognizable enough, of course.
Phenotypic null hypothesis isn't an obscure methodological limitation, it is a fundamental property of concepts like "heritability" and "genetic correlation" which can easily be derived in simulation studies. If you don't understand how it works then you shouldn't use concepts like heritability and genetic correlation at all in the first place.
To be blunt: «Phenotypic null hypothesis [for the genetics of personality]» is a 2013 review paper by Eric Turkheimer, with 162 citations.
Turkheimer, like Lewontin before him with his «apportionment» and, more to the point, with his corn plants (cited by Ned Block here), is making a mountain out of a common-sensical molehill, in his case to bury the monster of HBD implications that have sprang forth (as he asserts, unreasonably) from his own First Law that he now seeks to reframe (as much is stated in the paper). Moreover, you both are sufficiently obscurantist and informal that it's hard to tell if you're gesturing at the same mountain:
vs yours:
Ok, and?
….The problem you talk about in your Substack post is real, although not nearly as damaging with regards to the sort of HBD beliefs most salient in the culture war and pro/anti-HBD debate (i.e. not the issue of bullied gays) as one could assume from careless reading of your initial post. (Besides, we have plenty of data such as admixture and, as of late, GWAS confirming simple additive model for the group difference – qualitatively similar to the case of height, not similar to gay-bullying and personality research). Measurement error is a fundamental problem; though as better-informed people remind us, there are methods, e.g. common pathway models, which help against it, and HBD research using those methods has yielded largely the same conclusions. It is also possible to directly test for AE vs ACE, precluding the sort of erroneous assumptions you warn against.
This is what is recommended is a textbook, literally, in crypto-HBDer Plomin's «Behavioral Genetics» 2012 edition (that is, anticipating Turkheimer's paper by a year). Consider p.157:
Or in a section about model fitting, pp. 380-390:
Plomin practices what he preaches, too – here's an example of a paper.
So yeah, those are real problems with real countermeasures. «Phenotypic null hypothesis» is a meme, and there are apparently only two people forcing this meme.
Again, what Turkheimer is doing here is not different from Lewontin's tricks, which are known to have been motivated by politics. It's uncanny how similar these situations are. In the entry-level «Making sense of Heritability, pp. 60:-62:
By all means, do promote statistical literacy and demand intellectual honesty among HBDers, do shame us for our sloppiness. Keep discussing this in terms of phenotypic null hypothesis, if you must. But do not gaslight. This argument, and in this specific formulation, is not Behavioral Genetics 101, but your recent contribution to the debate, and it's more of a rhetorical nature.
I'm not claiming it to be damaging to HBD beliefs, I'm claiming it to be damaging to certain types of arguments and findings HBDers often make. There can be bad arguments for correct conclusions, and people who make those arguments should stop making them because it introduces noise and makes it harder to find the good arguments.
Again I posted various examples of people not properly applying the phenotypic null hypothesis. Let's zoom into one of them to understand the problem:
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1475441032292667394
If one doesn't understand the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this is an exciting study. Researchers have shown jealousy and restricted sociosexuality to be genetic! And to be biologically linked to each other! In the past I would have been really interested in these sorts of results, as tying into all sorts of evo psych theories.
However, when appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis, it's a boring study. What are we even supposed to learn from it? Obviously these variables are going to be heritable and genetically correlated, but this doesn't really tell us much.
If you disagree with this notion, then feel encouraged to make your case for why this is such an important and meaningful finding.
I don't think Turkheimer is being an obscurantist here. He's a leading behavior geneticist and an editor for a behavior genetics journal; he has to deal with an endless stream of papers that proudly talk about how they've shown this and that to be genetic. He's got excellent reasons to try to make people accept the phenotypic null hypothesis, since it's a huge piece of missing knowledge.
But these models are rarely used. Even from the "better-informed people", I have had trouble getting it for e.g. testing the causal effect of g.
This is badly powered when C is smallish, e.g. try computing the power requirement for C^2=0.01.
I don't see how GWAS additivity defends personality research, can you expand? In particular I don't see how phenotypic null hypothesis predicts nonadditivity.
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Ok, so regarding this paper:
According to Plomin, the goal of the paper is to test the plausibility of evolutionary theories are about environmental sensitivity by using twin studies to look for heritability:
This is very much the sort of nonsense the phenotypic null hypothesis is an objection to. Everything is heritable, and we have good theoretical understanding of why that is. It is thus of no evidentiary value to find that things are heritable, and this shouldn't be treated as a confirmation of evolutionary theories, which destroys the whole point of the paper.
Not so relevant to the phenotypic null hypothesis and I haven't looked at this in detail as it's a citation of a different study, but the cited study makes me suspicious: They didn't find any main effect of the treatment, so this was a subgroup analysis of exactly the sort that Scott Alexander has warned me about.
I acknowledge that common pathway models/factor models can control for some types of measurement error in some scenarios, but it doesn't really seem to work for personality traits (and therefore not for HSC either, unless HSC is an unusual personality trait). The appropriate way to do this for personality data is multi-informant data, which tends to lead to way higher heritabilities for personality, indicating that a substantial proportion of the nonshared environment component is measurement error, even with naive common pathways.
Plomin finds that all the "good" personality traits are correlated, i.e. emotional stability, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness are all positively correlated with each other. The model he chooses to apply to those correlations assumes that these correlations are substantive, but I believe that is an inappropriate model.
Correlations between the Big Five personality traits within a single rater appear to reflect a "Halo"/"social desirability" bias factor. The way we can tell this is because it fails to correlate across informants. I.e. while it's true that you rating yourself as more extraverted correlates with you rating yourself as more conscientious, you rating yourself as more extraverted does not correlate with others rating you as more conscientious. See for instance this paper.
Also I believe it's well-established that the different subscales of HSC differ from each other in their correlations with the Big Five, and indeed he replicates that finding in the study. However, this pattern of correlations is incompatible with the notion that the correlations between HSC subscales and Big Five is mediated by the HSC common pathway, which makes his later models very strange.
In conclusion, the Plomin study you linked is a fractal of bad study design. In many ways it's a good example of the necessity to further popularize the phenotypic null hypothesis. However, the study also has severe flaws beyond the phenotypic null hypothesis. This is cruxy to me: if you can convince me that Plomin's study is good, then I will likely grant that I was wrong about my point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, but conversely I think Plomin's study is really bad and I think Turkheimer has to deal with an endless stream of studies that are equally as bad as Plomin's here, so I think this serves as an excellent case study that explains why Turkheimer is so bothered by behavioral genetics.
I rest my case.
Wait is the study even by Plomin? The authors listed are:
None of whom seem to be Plomin.
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I don't have time to respond to this right now, as I'm on my phone, but just quickly skimming it, it looks cruxy to me. I will respond once I get home.
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basically, this is just another way of saying that every human has preexisting, indivisible SOUL and SOUL is more important than bodies
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And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
Maybe the cause of the differences is on an environmental factor that is hard to intervene on.
Can you propose an environmental factor that is both difficult to intervene on and fits the decades of attempts to intervene with no real success? Because I have a pretty good theory that explains the facts and I'm not aware of any environmental theory that hasn't failed horribly wherever tested. I think this is fundamentally a question about what the null hypothesis should be given that outcomes are far too complex of an issue to conclusively prove any particular theory.
This all seems like a motte and bailey,
Motte: It's very difficult to actually prove causation on outcomes because what could seem like direct genetics could just be a correlation with environment
Bailey: There is an outcome gap therefore there must be an environmental factor so we should tear apart gradually increasing amounts of the social fabric hunting for it.
If you just have a bone to pick with HBD people being slightly too confident in their theory then fine, I can agree with that. But if you're just trying to discredit it to carry water for another theory with an abysmal track record and a far more obvious problem of confusing correlation for causation then please actually defend why you think environmentalism makes a better null hypothesis.
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pretty much:
https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_3.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1
The black-white achievement gap has proven impervious to all efforts to fix it
same for the gender gap
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/satnew.png
But individual absolute ability may have increased , but group differences persist. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that enough hasn't been tried. Policy makers have invested considerable money and effort at narrowing such gaps, with piss-poor results to show for it.
Regarding the gender gap in math ability, has any country tried to just make girls take twice as many math classes as boys do for a generation to see if that would reverse it?
Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.
AFAIK just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality, including obviously-societal ones such as gender differences in names:
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1432940616653152259
(And of course it's been shown to apply to e.g. gender stereotypes too, though that could very well be due to stereotype accuracy.)
I don't know why they correlate like this, but I feel like this gives you something equivalent to the phenotypic null hypothesis for the gender equality paradox: if the paradox applies to some variable X, and X is causally upstream of some variable Y, then a priori you'd expect the paradox in X to create a paradox in Y.
The thing is, as kids, boys will look at what men do and mimic that, whereas girls will look at what women do and mimic that. I don't know whether it is the sex difference in programming etc. that is biological, or if it is the sex difference in mimicry that is biological. I wouldn't expect it to be both, because what would that lead to if you took all the world's female programmers and male elementary school teachers and had them create a society where they raised a generation of ordinary children? Would the boys in this society do programming (and thus be mimicking women), or mimic men (and thus do teaching)?
Since I don't know the answer to this question, I can't tell if the sex difference in programming is innate or not.
"Just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality"
I don't think that's close to right -- it's much too strong, but I admit I haven't seen a lot of data. What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.
The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.
Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences
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However, it seems difficult to explain lack of girls' participation in an all-girl coding camp by any form of male behavior. In that sense, code camp intervention has not been tested, but has been attempted, which is itself a test. Of course, motte = "patriarchy is fully general and can be hosted on female brains", bailey = "men are sexist and that's why women don't code".
If we take this entirely seriously, dismantling patriarchy here would require forcing girls to go to code camp.
AFAIK the mainstream hypothesis among child developmental psychologists is a self-socialization theory, where children mimic adults in their culture. The whole patriarchy thing is more of a feminist activist thing that doesn't necessarily generalize to the expert's views. Of course the experts might be wrong too, but I'm just saying, as far as I know nobody has tried whether raising children in a culture where math and technical subjects is more of a women's thing works.
Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?
That said, it would be fascinating to attempt this. (If all kinds of unethical.) Gonzo homeschooling girlcoder conspiracy when?
edit: Of course, another problem: "We formed a community of 500 female programmers." How do you screen off genetic causes? Everyone adopts?
edit: If self-socialization is correct, but so is sexual preference differences, wouldn't this cause significant suffering as boys and girls attempt to fit themselves to a role they're not suited for in an attempt to fit in with their parents? Then again, plausibly "not much more than ordinary growing up."
edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.
edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?
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Sort of. What you call "left" wants equality of outcome it that sense they want the world as it is, only with all races equally represented in the position of power and wealth. What is wrong with billionaires is that there is not enough BIPOC billionaires.
See the great popularity of fiction set in alternate history where racism never existed, where British Empire was always racially mixed and racially tolerant, where people of all colors were equally represented among aristocracy and it was awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgerton
Looking forward to remake of Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett is black and slaves on her plantation, both black and white, are living in perfect harmony without any racism. It will be record shattering blockbuster, leaving Avatar and all capeshit products in the dust.
Nevertheless, such attitude would not be recoginzed as "leftist" by anyone in history before last decade or two.
"HBDIQ" fans did not came from ranks of Neo-Nazis, skinheads and white prison gangs - these people are absolutely certain about their racial superiority and do not need any bell curves, IQ tables and similar nerd shit.
HBDIQ came from rationalist, atheist, science loving nerds, who did their research.
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I'm not sure that hereditarianism vs environmentalism matters all that much if one believes that IQ scores are predictive across populations and that the interventions that have been tried do not last/work long term. (Not every environmentalist believes this of course.) It's like arguing over the Copenhagen interpretation vs the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics when all you're doing is using the math to calculate the band structure of a semiconductor. But interpreting a model rather than using the model to make predictions seems like a secondary concern.
I think the distinction would be that hereditarianism mostly rules out the possibility of an intervention that could work even if it hasn't been discovered yet, while environmentalism would suggest that better or more extreme interventions would work (in the most extreme case, baby swapping, though I don't think any serious environmentalists actually advocate this). It's like the distinction between a mathematical theorem that has had no counter example found but is still open, versus a mathematical theorem that has been proven/disproven.
In the quantum mechanics case, there is no practical testable distinction and never will be, but in the HBD case there's the potential for a distinction in the future even if there's no meaningful difference for most people in the short-term.
Does it? Unless the IQ is directly influenced by the same genes that cause increased melanin production, protect against malaria, make your hair kinky or give you big flat noses and fleshy lips, you can always intervene. Even if the specific genes are unknown (and thus embryo selection will not work), it will take just a few generations to breed lower-IQ genes out of the population if you do it aggressively.
Sure, straightforward selective breeding and culling might work. But it ain't gonna happen.
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I guess that's a good point. So really it means hereditarianism rules out the possibility of behavioral interventions on the individual level but allows for genetic/eugenic interventions on the population level. Which are less useful given you can't apply it to already existing people, and generally less tasteful to most people, and harder to enact ethically. But theoretically tenable if you can pinpoint the actual IQ genes.
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This is true in the fascile way that an Oldsmobile can go as fast as a race car so long as you replace everything but it's body with racecar parts. Sure, granted, but this world is identical in every meaningful way than if it weren't true.
To stretch the analogy, GM is 100% allowed to revive the Oldsmobile as their performance marque.
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To people arriving late to this discussion, a couple of things might be helpful to know:
When tailcalled is saying "heritability doesn't mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean", his actual argument isn't presented in his post. You'd need to go track it down through the link he posted of his substack. It basically boils down to a longwinded form of "correlation doesn't necessary imply causation", i.e. if parents and children show significant correlation on a certain measure, that doesn't guarantee it has a genetic outcome. A good example someone posted downthread would be "knowledege of the French language", which is highly correlated between parents and their children, but which obviously isn't genetic.
When tailcalled says "HBDers often signal-boost nonserious or dishonest studies", he's mainly referring to people doing this repeatedly on his Twitter posts". He's not really calling out anyone here, and importantly he's not necessarily saying this is an asymmetric problem with HBDers, just that some HBDers do it, which... well of course they do. There are knuckleheads on both sides.
So in the end, I think tailcalled is making points that are agreeable almost to the point of being anodyne, but he wrote them poorly enough that some people (including me, at least initially) are getting confused. On #1, we really shouldn't be forced to track down the basic gist of an argument on another website before the author starts claiming it's a big reason why the HBD-vs-Environment debate isn't advancing. On #2, I think a lot of people got the sense that tailcalled was an anti-HBD'er, but the opposite seems to be true actually. He seems to mostly just be patrolling the pro-HBD side for bad arguments as a way to advance discussion, not necessarily to dunk on the HBD side as entirely meritless.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing the phenotypic null hypothesis would be "correlation does not imply confounding" together with "causation does not imply unmediated or unmoderated causation". "Correlation does not imply causation" is certainly not it.
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I disagree with this presentation of my views. I am admitting that genetics is causally upstream of the heritable variables; the issue is that not every causal link in the chain from genes to the variable are meaningfully biological. I don't think the French example is an example of what I am talking about at all.
Yes. The thing that triggered it was going through the vault and seeing that a post going "haha, HBDers are so much better than antis" had been declared a "best of".
Yes, there's a severe need for patrolling for bad arguments IMO. Both sides seem to have turned into echo chambers.
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Look, there's a version of the progressive position that might actually be respectable. You can make a compelling case that human beings in basically any context have a very poor track record of resisting the temptation to use real or imagined differences in cognitive ability as a basis for a stratification in worthiness of basically any kind. You could furthermore make the case that there's not good evidence that we've outgrown these tenancies.
But if you're going to take the discussion of such differences off the table, they must be fully taken off the table—not remain half on and half off the table as they are now. You can't take the half off the table that involves the study of ethnic differences in cognitive ability but then leave the half on the table that involves forming public policy on the basis of a lack thereof.
It must be all the way on, or come all the way off.
I agree that it must be all the way on or all the way off, and I would prefer if [it was all the way on and people cared about figuring out the truth].
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