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(Side notice: why is parent modded to -14? Are there so many lurkers who disagree with him? I see this as evidence that the voting does not confer useful information beyond the alignedness with the local groupthink. Some sites (LW) do manage a culture where contrarian-but-interesting takes are upvoted. If anyone has css ready to hide post votes, I would be interested.)
The poster child for HBD is the intelligence advantage of the Ashkenazi Jews, to the point where Scott himself used them to tentatively advance that idea. Yet for some reason, I do not recall anyone here suggesting that only that group should have the franchise. Instead, HBD is used to argue for propositions which for some strange reason happen to rhyme with racism of old.
Personally, I am in favor of colorblind meritocracy all the way. We do not need to use ethnicity as a proxy for intelligence or whatever, we can simply select directly for it. Picking people who are known to be intelligent is much more effective than picking Ashkenazi in the hope that the individual variation is in your favor. Ideally, we could do this regardless of HBD.
The only reason to bring up the HBD hypothesis at all is if the SJ whines about disparate impact and unequal outcomes, which for them imply that the system is racist and unfair, and needs to be changed. And sometimes they might be right, in that our systems (e.g. criminal justice) are less colorblind than we would like them to be. But sometimes the answer may well be that genetic or cultural group differences are to blame for the unequal outcome, and we should just shrug and move on.
I have another, less savory reason to insist that people are treated equally before the law. Good old Niemoeller. If I were to grant that small racial differences in genetic inclination to violent crime are a reason to disenfranchise one ethnicity, I will have no reason why I should not lose the franchise for being a man -- after all, the crime sex gap is rather impressive.
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