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This is just my personal opinion, not an attempt to consensus-build, but the way I see it (picture your friendly bartender chatting about the customers he's seen come through over the years), the forum went through the HBD wars relatively early on in its lifetime and, well, the HBD side won so conclusively it's sort of in the background now. This isn't to say that any particular hard HBD thesis has been proven ("the IQ gap between Belgians and Malaysians is x points and y% genetic!"), our scientific knowledge isn't there yet, but the soft HBD thesis ("genetics matter and vary between groups") won. Sometimes arguments just get won. People move on. Like I say, this isn't a crushing victory, it's mostly just disproving the hard environmentalist thesis ("humans are blank slates, environment explains all mental differences") and the specifically anti-HBD hard thesis ("genetics may matter for the individual but don't vary meaningfully between groups") - and we still do have plenty of environmentalists arguing softer theses (e.g. "we just don't know yet, so we can't assume a genetic cause"), and even right-wingers arguing against HBD from religious/tribal perspectives. But this has a couple effects which massively reduce the level of HBD discourse:
I do not think that this is especially hard. Meritocracy performs well both in worlds where HBD is highly relevant and in worlds where it is irrelevant. There is no reason to select for Ashkenazi ethnicity as a proxy for academic performance when you can just select for academic performance directly instead.
On the flip side, "have a progressive tax system which lessens the burden of people whose economic output is not highly valued, so that they still can live a decent life" is basic compassion, and utilitarianism (the marginal dollar helps the poor man a lot more than the rich man). I am very capable of feeling the pain of those who work in minimum wage jobs without first inquiring to their ethnic distribution and then deciding if they deserve my pity or not.
I will grant you that things might become more icky once a state decides to maximize the number of smart babies. But even there you would not directly select for ethnicity. Instead you might use IVF to create embryos from the gametes of humans with family histories of high education attainment, and then pay surrogates to turn them into babies and have them adopted by couples. Or just CRISPR the heck out of any embryos.
At the end of the day, the gaussians overlap, substantially. There are no large gaps as there are in the intelligence between dogs and humans, which is the reason why we do not allow dogs to even attempt to gain a driving license. Anyone who is arguing for a similar level of discrimination among ethnicities is simply using HBD as an excuse to be a racist.
Except it doesn't. Blankslatism was necessary for meritocracy to have legitimacy and moral foundations. Merit was thought of as hard work or at least something that can be achieved by soft policies. It was never explicitly stated, that merit means good IQ that can neither be improved or worked on either individually, or even for larger swaths of population. You could construct stratified meritocratic society where the underclass is promised, that all they need is better nutrition and education and they or at least their children will have a shot at the top. It is a much harder sell to explicitly state, that they are unlucky and their families are destined to be underclass for foreseeable future, and the best they can hope for is some sort of handout.
That is why there is such an aversion to discuss these issues, as it is unsolvable cognitive dissonance morally and politically.
There are also a great many people who, after being told that xyz group is on average inferior, will not accept a meritocracy.
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I agree with you almost entirely. But that's the issue, there's not that much to debate, except the boring old "how much exactly should we redistribute and how much exactly should we reward merit?" That sort of Bush v Gore stuff doesn't really get people fired up. Of course, there is the CRISPR point, which I think can reasonably safely (between the anti-HBD FAQ and Society is Fixed Biology is Mutable) read as Scott's esoteric position: "Don't talk about this shit until we can just gene-edit everyone to decent IQ and prosocial personalities". Then when you get to the practicalities of moving towards these policies, it's a tremendous kettle of worms that nobody wants to even think about.
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I just want to say, this comment describes almost exactly how I feel about HBD. I see the progressive/leftist/liberal principles I subscribe to and try to follow as being completely orthogonal to whether HBD is true or not. But HBD's truthiness does heavily influence how we would go about accomplishing our goals. Which is why I want my side to openly accept HBD as being possible and begin investigating it using actual science. Because if we actually want to accomplish our goals, then we need to get as accurate and precise a map of the landscape as possible. How true HBD is and to what extent it influences our society are things that we need to actually investigate, because right now, it's been declared by fiat that it's False and 0 respectively, and our strategies for achieving our goals using this faith have left something to be desired.
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This is profoundly interesting. Aside from digging into the archives here, know anywhere to read about this?
Closest I’ve got is:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
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Hmm, that's actually a really hard question. Bronze Age Pervert makes an excellent argument against the "Dork Right", but it's in service of fighting the threat of high-IQ Asians to his Nietzschean dream rather than supporting small-l-liberal-HBD public policy. Likewise Nick Land, whose "hyperracism" (racism as the pure ranking of intelligence) is a very reasonable response to HBD - if you're a Landian in service of totalizing intelligence maximization instead of looking for any policy goals that would be palatable to the typical American. Freddie DeBoer acknowledges individual ability from a leftist perspective, but understandably can't bring himself to say anything about groups. Yarvin approaches it at points (Moldbug-era Yarvin is a small-l-liberal, fight me), but obviously he's trying to be maximally provocative and maximally against existing American models of government. Scott's writing may often be informed by an understanding of HBD, but it's buried under infinite layers of esoteric writing. I don't think there is a single figure who presents the maximally reasonable version of the "HBD, so what then?" perspective. A market niche many here could fill if they wanted (don't get attached to your job). Education Realist might be the closest, in his particular field, and he does seem to have genuine empathy for students of all classes, races, and abilities, but I haven't read him in a long time.
This is why I love HBD discussions. It makes everyone on both sides seethe.
Thanks for the comment, it's a great write up
Cheers!
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but that’s bad. One of the rules is literally don’t do consensus building or assume everyone agrees. And now everyone is dogpiling a view; where are the mods when someone called magicalkittycat retarded? The quality of this debate forum has dropped so bad because of bad moderation this place isn’t really a debate anymore just a rightwing echo chamber.
Being a forum descended from Reddit, left-liberals that find their way here are unaccustomed to any degree of pushback or less-than-infinite mod bias in their favor.
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Hello brand new account that was created yesterday. I see that every comment you've ever made has either been defending magicalkittycat, replying to magicalkittycat, or attacking their detractors. I find it interesting that you would say the quality of this debate forum has "dropped" since you've only been here for about twenty four hours. What baseline has it dropped relative to?
Either you're a longstanding lurker who decided to create an account for the sole purpose of defending magicalkittycat's honor, or...
Well, it's hard not to connect these chains of logic with a certain someone has been accused of using alts and/or being an alt.
justawoman has been around the block here before, and parsimony would suggest that this is her rather than magicalkittycat (or whoever mkc may be).
Yeah, but @justawoman isn't actually banned - and has indeed briefly left her self-imposed exile to praise MKC before. She has no need of an alt that's still obviously her.
The only reason to make an obviously-JaW alt would be if one didn't actually have JaW's password, which might be JaW if she forgot it, but could also be an impostor.
In any case, I've just tagged the original, so now we might get a clarification. Or not.
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Well, if mkc is Impassionata rather than Darwin, you have to throw out parsimony and assume he's got at least a half a dozen alts of various ages participating. But I doubt it, Passionflower usually couldn't keep his main alt sounding sane-ish for this long, nor resist the urge of obviously arguing among his own alts.
I don't think he's Impassionata or Darwin (justawoman is also clearly not Impassionata, though I thought Imp was a woman for quite a long time). I'm not even sold on him being an alt. There are a lot of these Hananian contrarian-against-the-right types floating around in our general sphere now, Turok was far from the only one. Mkc is clearly not a practiced or polished troll, so my guess lands closer to my comment on "people coming here to argue with the forum".
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I don't know how I could make it clearer that I'm not trying to consensus-build - should I add in another couple disclaimers that this is just one old-timer's opinion? Why, when I was a boy, this town was a great place, we all used to go down to the soda fountain...
As for magicalkittycat, people shouldn't call him retarded, and I should think the mods will get to whoever did once they see the reports. But he is a very bad poster even at making the arguments he wants to make. While themotte is supposed to show charity to people who make arguments against the prevailing winds, they still have to be good arguments, and you can't ask people here not to tear apart bad ones, and particularly not bad ones made in bad faith. Dogpiling a bad post has nothing to do with building consensus when it's being done to magicalkittycat any more than when it was done to securesignals.
The other thing I have noticed is a consistent decline in the quality of non-RW posters (some honourable mentions excepted) - RW posters have declined in quality somewhat, but not nearly as sharply. We started off with some great non-RW posters, some of whom were driven off by the ickiness of the HBD debate (rip yodats), more by the continuing success of HBD arguments against the strong environmentalist thesis, more of whom were lost due to 2020 covid/blm/election fedposting, and more of whom have since evaporatively cooled off, or flamed out over some particularly emotional point and gotten banned. There are a couple reasons for this, some better and some worse, though I suspect a major one is that there's just a deep incompatibility between the discourse norms of themotte and those of liberal/leftist spaces, such that somebody who is a high-quality poster in those spaces is unlikely to be able to transition to themotte, and that there will always be a certain psychic friction for people who are on themotte to debate in good faith but are otherwise marinated in those spaces (there's also an incompatibility with people who are totally in the jug of hard right-wing spaces, but they usually get themselves banned pretty quickly).
Your assessment of themotte as an echo chamber does bring up my assessment of the stage of decline we're currently at. I've seen this happen on many 4chan boards, for instance - it's the stage of forum decline where people come in specifically in order to argue with the forum. Incels on /fit/ are the purest example, but also just about everything on /pol/ post-2020 or so (and /pol/'s decline into that started much earlier). Both low-quality liberal posters and low-quality Hananian contrarians like kittycat/Turok all see this place as a featureless Outgroup blob and want to come here to Argue With The Forum. I'm not sure where we get new blood at this point; I see every non-RW poster with the intellectual subtlety and emotional stability to hang here as a minor miracle.
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Are Hakan and Drukpa the same guy? I had heard that Hakan had a new account, but I had not linked the two as the tones are quiet different even if the subject matter is the same.
No, they’re not. Very different guys. But I think there’s something similar, not the same but similar, in their general approach to race/culture (though KD has taken it to the next level with all his travels).
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