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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

variance per person is still usually larger than the population level genetic differences, though there are some notable excemptions

Depends on trait. One could Lewontinize any neutral SNP which does nothing. But for traits that matter, between Sub-saharan Africans and NW Europeans about 1.2 SD in IQ and that's a lot, between Ashkenazi and pygmies nearly 3 SD. Similarly, difference in extraversion is large

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