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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Once you accept some level of HBD, the next discussion is finding the policy implications, usually in the context of how to make effective and humane public policy in an HBD world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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