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Notes -
Rambling based on a shower thought here:
Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession, or even ideological conformity - and thus more of an opaque and effectively hierarchical society? A society where appearances become more important than the underlying reality, and where presumptions are not challenged? Where the average individual, who insofar as they've been taught anything about mental horsepower, has come to believe that it's about the development and growth mindset - any child can join any profession if they work hard and choose through free will to develop smartness; and knowledge - the person in higher education studying e.g. psychology becomes smart and competent through their acquiring of knowledge and routines and joining into a professional group? The flipsides of these coins being that someone who didn't go to college/university has stupidly chosen not to become smart and grow their brain and thus can blame themselves and should not be given much time of day? And if appearances are what matters, someone with perfect grooming and high class speech and all the shibboleths should be assumed to be smart rather than looking under the hood?
I've had this suspicion building for a while while going about my business in a very "blue" environment where social class is on some level assumed to not exist anymore and is never discussed, but in actuality might be used heuristically quite heavily to decide who gets to make the judgements and be listened to. Where snap judgements seem to be made (and then very hesitantly changed, if ever) about a person's intelligence and worth as a human being, without this actually being discussed or studied. I get the feeling a lot of people have their own poorly informed and biased understandings of what mental horsepower is and who's got more of it and why.
This arrangement seems to favor the people who are living and breathing inside of and shaping and reinforcing the dominant culture and hierarchy, while subtly closing out dissenting voices from outsiders: they have not got the surface appearances of people we listen to, regardless of what greater powers of judgement they might have under the hood.
I think you're absolutely right. It's closely related to Scott's example of a law banning childcare employers from asking prospective employees about their criminal record (or lack thereof), under the assumption that this would improve diversity metrics in the industry. Instead, the opposite happened, for perfectly understandable reasons: employers don't want ex-cons working in their daycares, they're forbidden from asking interviewees if they have a criminal record, but they know that a given black interviewee is 7 times more likely to have a criminal record than a given white interviewee, so they make an educated guess.
I'm wondering if these are both examples of some kind of general trend:
A related example I thought of was various kinds of rent controls, rent freezes and protections for tenants (such as those which make it extremely difficult to evict a tenant). In principle these are designed to protect tenants, especially people who might be especially vulnerable to eviction (say, because they're recent immigrants to the country, with no family or friends to fall back on in the event that they get evicted). In practice, they make renting to a complete stranger such a risky proposition that landlords would much rather rent properties to people they know via the "old boys' network", which makes it even more difficult for newly arrived immigrants to secure accommodation than it would have been otherwise.
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