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Notes -
I've been researching HBD for the first time lately.
Question: Could acknowledging HBD have any underappreciated benefits?
Although there is valid concern that it may be exploited by bad actors (such as white nationalists), the idea that intelligence being genetic (and therefore outside our control) could potentially reduce stress for Black Americans.
No more nagging from conservatives about pulling your bootstraps.
Maybe I just don't understand HBD but does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture? If not then there's still plenty of room for nagging.
Not necessarily, but if you were looking for an excuse to give up, it's a fantastic and instant argument-terminating justification to do that.
Of course, it's worth noting that literally everyone accepts HBD on a who-whom basis; group-level biological differences are the current go-to justification to discriminate against men and anyone under 25 in the same way they were used to excuse racial discrimination 50+ years ago.
I believe the easiest counter-argument is that using
scientific racism/sexism/ageismHBD to do discriminatory things has a dysgenic effect on that population; if you treat all a group's members to slightly below their average, it means that any individual with an objectively positive deviation from that average is not rewarded for that as strongly as they would be if the background assumption was that they were that capable in the first place, so the stupider members have less competition for resources (this same argument can be easily made for redistributionist policies in general, by the way).Sure, this is complicated by the fact that financial/material success and odds of reproduction are inversely correlated- and the dysgenic effect of that might very well cancel out the eugenic effect the above should create- but I've never seen anyone seriously try to link the two, much less argue that's a global maximum for everyone involved. (The fact that "just tolerate the bad behavior so that the good ones get ahead enough to spur change" isn't costless, and the fact that yesterday's and today's death cults inherently cannot bring themselves to reward any reproduction, complicate things even further when it comes to whether one should over or under-subscribe to HBD.)
The actual problem with your line of thinking is that the post-Civil Rights level of preferential treatment (disclaimer: I hold that blacks in the US are, ceteris paribus, treated preferentially) did nothing to alleviate black dysgenics which surpassed white rate half a century back already, compounding the ability gap.
Does discrimination exacerbate dysgenics? I could just as well spin the opposite narrative, both in the manner you've suggested and by pointing to generic social-darwinist logic some Philosemitic people use to explain the excellence of Ashkenazim. In any case, the US is roughly a century removed from even beginning to craft policies with natural selection dynamics in mind.
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