Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Weird ask, but I got into a discussion with a friend, and the topic of HBD got brought up. Now I never really paid attention to it when it was discussed, here and the before and the before before. It just really wasn't interesting to me to dig into. But he has never heard of it and wants the studies that get cited by HBDers (He is more interested on population level differences and whether that means we should treat people differently).
I know around here it is approximately a stable-ish state, so would anyone drop some links from their old argument folders that I can pass along?
Short version for the question is, in essence, no we generally do not need to treat actual people directly differently (especially for people where you don't know their ancestry beyond the visibly obvious, and even for those the variance per person is still usually larger than the population level genetic differences, though there are some notable excemptions), but we also simply shouldn't expect different groups to exhibit the same mean for many traits even given identical environments. The big problem here is especially affirmative action, which lifts people visibly beyond their competence levels into positions they're unsuited for.
There are multiple substacks that write a lot about topics in this space. One of my favorite HBDer is Razib Khan, who is writing almost exclusively about population genetics. There is also a community of heterodox scientists which frequently publish together on HBD and all run their own substacks: Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Frost, Seb Jensen, Meng Hu, Davide Piffer. Several also write in the hub Aporia, which also includes a good entry point.
I think the general topic of our discussion was that he was advocating for treating actual people differently, I was not. He has a strong moral distaste for certain historical positions, to which I pointed out if HBD is even slightly true, the downstream effect of his positions, would lead directly to the historical ideas he so loathes. He had never heard of HBD, and I didn't have the the necessary repository of information to give him an in depth highlight more than the surface level: Traits are inherited across different ethnic groups leading to a distribution between groups.
I wanted to attempt to fix that.
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