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Notes -
There could be some irony here.
Despite progressive hopium that improved Environmental Factors would close achievement gaps between black and white Americans, if instead the quickly diminishing returns to Environmental Factors (such as childhood disease and nutrition) and improving Environmental Factors across the world led to black Americans losing ground to unpopular population groups such as the Chinese and Eastern Europeans—whether globally or with respect to first generation immigrants from those regions, in domains ranging from academics, income, and even "black" sports.
For such groups have perhaps increased in height and cognitive ability in the past few years/decades by emerging from relative deprivation, while black Americans have long-hit the diminishing-returns plateau from getting subsidized by and riding the Environmental coat-tails of the rest of the US. Young black Americans are basically the same height on average as their grandparents were; young Chinese and young Chinese Americans tend to tower over their grandparents’ peak height.
Both Serbia and Slovenia's men's basketball teams have been formidable in recent years, to say the least. Serbia took Team USA to the brink in the last Olympics and Slovenia made a deep-run in the Olympics before that. A Yugoslavia team would include both Jokic and Doncic in the starting five; a game played between Yugoslavia vs. the US today, last year, two years ago, etc. would likely have the best 2 of 10 starting players on Team Yugoslavia (having the best 5 of 10 starting players would be the maximum).
There was a time not long ago when the USA was expected to not just win the Olympic tournament, but would have been favored against a combined rest of world team. Now the USA would be iffy against Yugoslavia, and in the last Olympics relied on a starting C who, really, shouldn't be on the USA basketball team.
There's layers of irony. Sailer type HBDers have long offered the NBA as the thin wedge to argue that we accept ethnic differences in some fields, and "evolution doesn't stop at the neck," so we should be willing to accept the reality of differences elsewhere. And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Who’s this “we”?
It’s not that complicated at all and broad racial categories work well, especially for the topic of black American (lack of) average achievement. Despite decades of goodthinkers muddying the waters, making excuses, and performing interventions on behalf of black Americans, the standardized test score gap remains substantial between black and white Americans, and even moreso between black and Asian Americans.
Furthermore, "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatism.
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Maybe more complicated than you thought it was, but Sailer and the HBDers have talking about these nuances and for a long time. IIRC correctly, it was from the Sailersphere that I learned about interesting racial differences even among the broad racial categories, such as the height advantage and athletic prowess of the peoples of the Dinaric Alps. Furthermore, it was actually sprinting and marathoning that Sailer used as the clearest example of racial differences. Sailer has always said nurture matters as well as nature for most things. But sprinting has far less room for nurture playing a role than does a high-skill and complex game like basketball. I also learned about the differences between East Africans and West Africans and Khosis, and then even among West African tribes, etc. There is a running joke that if a man knows what an Igbo is, he is probably a super racist.
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