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While the tone of your post is a bit aggressive, I do strongly agree with this line of reasoning. I've always been skeptical of hard HBD because I grew up in a rural white town, where there was so much despair and economic struggling.
In my opinion culture is OBVIOUSLY the bigger factor than genes or IQ. And the rise and current downfall of most whites is actually the perfect example. White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.
Some white people roamed the seas and conquered, but most stayed home. Part of culture/context/circumstance isn't how talent is developed, it's also what talents are brought to the surface and become visible.
Consider a toy example: Puerto Rican baseball players
Until 1989, Puerto Rico was treated as a Latin American nation by Major League Baseball, teams signed players at 16 for cash (and typically they had under the table agreements with trainers before the players came of age). Young prospects in Latin American countries can start earning money at a young age, often getting support from trainers before turning 16 if they showed promise. This has lead to Caribbean countries producing disproportionate talent relative to their population, because kids are incentivized to focus on baseball from a young age.
By contrast, in the United States, players can't be signed for cash, they can only be drafted after graduating high school (or attending college) at 18. Players in the draft (historically) got less money than international players, and they got it at a later age.
After the change, Puerto Rico produced fewer MLB players, and according to some reports a lot of athletic poor kids switched to soccer, where they could be signed at a younger age.
Let's take this as a toy model. Assume that 100%, or near enough, kids will pursue the dominant sport. Soccer and Baseball are different enough that there's probably almost no crossover between athletes who could do either at a professional level, genetically they're going to be two distinct groups. Assume for our toy model that 2% of Puerto Rican kids have the freakish foot-dexterity and cardio to play Soccer professionally; and a separate 5% of Puerto Rican kids have the tremendous eyesight and hand-eye coordination to play Major League Baseball.
Under one MLB regime, Puerto Rico will produce MLB stars. Under a different regime, it will produce soccer stars. The 2% that are genetically built for soccer will be merely good athletes if they pursue baseball, and the 5% that are genetically suited for baseball will be merely good athletes if they pursue soccer. Puerto Rico's overall athleticism hasn't changed, the genetics haven't changed, but what aspects are highlighted have changed.
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HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.
I replied already but wanted to address a different point more fully. I don't think public education changes that much if we embrace HBD. E.g. even if we can't turn inner city black youth with 75 IQ into doctors, it still probably is worth sending them to public school to try to get them up to 90. What's the alternative?
Presuming that all that stuff about IQ in HBD is true, then we can make those schools more efficient for turning 75 IQ people into 90 IQ people and measure our success based on how well these schools accomplish this. Instead of being upset that we're not consistently turning 75 IQ people into people capable of working 120 IQ jobs and trying to fix it by pouring more money into such a futile project.
Well, I think that's the chief complaint about public school already in these parts? We spend a fortune to try to bring up the low end and mostly leave the above average kids to suffer with boredom and turn into misanthropes.
How do we make them more efficient? Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains? What do you have in mind?
If we're spending a fortune, futilely, to bring up the low end and we stop doing that with no change in results, that's an efficiency gain.
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I'm sure many people with greater expertise in pedagogy than me could come up with better ideas, if they're looking at the students based on truth rather than on wishful thinking. One idea that comes to mind is having different tracks based on student competency and making sure that school performance isn't measured by overall performance but rather based on how students on each track meet their goals. And perhaps focus on career training for low IQ jobs for the lower tracks instead of academics, at least beyond the 3 Rs.
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My view from the inside of orgs is even if you fall all over yourselves to do AA (like Google did) it barely increases diversity.
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I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)
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