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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   35169 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective,

Except that Tolkien wasn't thinking about Russia at all, in the slightest. If they really do think that the Orcs are a depiction of what the West thinks of Russia, they're barking up the wrong tree. If they then say "Okay, let's be Orcs! To hell with the West!", they're idiots (not to put a tooth in it): they'd rather cut their nose off to spite their face, and they still don't understand how irrelevant they are to most Western thought historically.

Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.

(this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative).

Here it is. CW for, uh, emotional honesty if you follow the link.

Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Venezuela are like that while Indonesia and Botswana and Costa Rica are not like that because the former set of countries are run by elites with Marxist assumptions that lead to retarded economic policies and general dysfunction, while the latter are run by elites who are normal and where dysfunctional are dysfunctional in predictable self interested ways. Botswana and Indonesia in particular benefit from keeping much of their colonial institutions from very functional countries instead of asking corrupt and ideologically driven marxists to design new ones.

A somewhat fanciful tangent, but that reminds me of the debate over Elon Musk commandeering Twitter on free speech fairness grounds only to end up promoting his own tweets.

I think a social media CEO tilting things in their individual favor is less terrible than abstract ideological shenanigans stacking the decks against rival or suspiciously off-the-grid political notions.

According to Wikipedia, which cites the IMF, Haiti's per capita GDP, in purchasing power parity, is $3,188. Jamaica's is $11,802, and Barbados's is $17,407. Something other than HBD is going on.

And, btw, describing Guns, Germs and Steel as a just-so story seems very odd. The book repeatedly discusses alternative theories, potential weaknesses in its evidence, and avenues for additional research which might confirm or refute his argument, none of which is the norm, especially in books designed for a popular audience. That doesn't mean he is correct, but it certainly isn't a just-so story.

The book is a very good just-so story with an honest author who more or less admits that's what he's telling.

It's particularly visible towards the end when it attempts to explain European dominance as opposed to Chinese, Arab or Indian dominance, but then admits that had one guy made a different choice (the emperor of China and the treasure fleets) then European dominance likely would not have happened.

You've got that backwards: He starts by saying that internal politics led to decisions which meant that China did not end up conquering the world,and then argues that that decision would have had less effect had China been divided into several regional states, and then presents a hypothesis of what role geography might have played in China's high level of political unity. But, regardless, that is basically irrelevant: It is 3 pages tacked on at the end on the subject of potential future avenues of research

Not a complete explanation. I've long objected to Lynn's "the (southern) Irish only have an IQ somewhere in the 90s" because I know by the guy that this is politically motivated (plus, his methodology is crap). But it got touted around, and then regurgitated in articles about "wow, now the Irish test at normal IQ levels, how did the giant increase happen?"

Well, maybe there wasn't a giant leap forward. Maybe it was a combination of other crap (including the Brits doing their damnedest to destroy any entrepreneurship in the country) that meant we tested badly on IQ tests. I agree that there are a lot of stupid Irish people, and that if you give them a test they'll do terribly, but it honestly was not a tidy explanation of "well all the smart ones emigrated so only the stupid ones were left, HBD triumphans".

Me.

Institutions matter.

I guess I'm neutral. Being smart helps with a lot of shit, but at the same time, it doesn't take book smarts to do the right thing. People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

As to Haiti, I suppose that, besides the genetic stock thing, there's just too much misery in its history. You'd think that being basically the first country made of slaves who freed themselves the hard way would be a sign of something special, but the reality is much darker.

Perhaps, indeed, the Haitians are suffering for lack of a uniting narrative to point to; we Americans get the Revolution and Democracy, Haitians got out from under a European thumb only to find themselves boxed in by the rest of the hand.

Yeah, cursory look at Haiti shows that it has had centuries of really bad luck in all possible ways. It's been a nightmare for centuries, and it's difficult to work out exactly why: how did it get to the state it is in, by comparison with literally the next door neighbours? Part of it has to be down to climate/environmental factors, that it does get hit regularly with natural disasters. San Francisco has it tough, but how much of a chance would it have to develop Silicon Valley if it had the equivalents of the 1906 earthquake and the Great Fire every five years or so?

People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

This is a really uncharitable interpretation of what intelligence (IQ tests) actually is.

It's not the shape rotating or word games, it's the ability to do those things. Modern people might deadlift an Olympic bar instead of lifting up a log into a wagon, but the ability to do both those things is identical. Similarly, the ability to internalize the principle of modern civil engineering is the same ability to internalize that the columns in the Pantheon are not only there for the aesthetics, it's the same thing as shape rotating ability.

Do you really think if Homer were alive today he couldn't fill out a crossword? Or Al-Khwarizmi wouldn't be able to do matrix multiplication? The amount of intelligence difference to understand something and invent something is the same difference between an ant and a human. I might know more math than Arcemedes, but I am an ant compared to him. Don't confuse standing on the shoulders of giants with being taller than them.

I think Homer would have trouble with a crossword, considering he was blind.

Don't be so confident! He might have required external help, but I still would expect him to give @f3zinker a run for his money.

In general, blind geniuses may have much less of a problem with spatial reasoning than one naively expects.

Antoine’s Necklace is not a mere curiosity and has very interesting properties. One would suppose that constructing such a structure would require considerable visualization, which is indeed true. However one of the most interesting things about this knot is that it was formulated and studied by Louis Antoine, who was blind. After he lost his eyesight, the famous mathematician Henri Lebesguesuggested to him that he study topology.

I have noticed (it is a common observation) that it is almost a rule that mathematicians who are blind are usually geometers/topologists. Such a correlation can not be mere coincidence.

Before reading Sossinsky’s book which also mentions G. Ya. Zuev as another influential blind topologist, the two best examples that I was aware of were L. S. Pontryagin and the great Leonhard Euler. Pontryagin is perhaps the first blind mathematician that I had heard of who made seminal contributions to numerous areas of mathematics (Algebraic Topology, Control Theory and Optimization to name a few). Some of his contributions are very abstract while some such as those in control theory are also covered in advanced undergrad textbooks (that is how I heard of him).

Pontryagin lost his eyesight at the age of 14 and thus made all of his illustrious contributions (and learnt most of his mathematics) while blind. The case was a little different for Euler. He learnt most of his earlier mathematics while not blind. Born in 1707, he almost lost eyesight in the right eye in 1735. After that his eyesight worsened, losing it completely in 1766 to cataract.

“It is not surprising at all that almost all blind mathematicians are geometers. The spatial intuition that sighted people have is based on the image of the world that is projected on their retinas; thus it is a two (and not three) dimensional image that is analysed in the brain of a sighted person. A blind person’s spatial intuition on the other hand, is primarily the result of tile and operational experience. It is also deeper – in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. […].

recent biomathematical studies have shown that the deepest mathematical structures, such as topological structures, are innate, whereas finer structures, such as linear structures are acquired. Thus, at first, the blind person who regains his sight does not distinguish a square from a circle: He only sees their topological equivalence. In contrast, he immediately sees that a torus is not a sphere […]”

I imagine, in my mediocrity, that crosswords are in fact much easier solved using a visible 2D grid as the foundation. Who knows if that's true. Maybe «seeing» some modular-alphabetic arithmetic, or word embeddings rotating through each other and locking upon letter matches, would make for a faster solution.

Learn something new everyday indeed.

Learn something new everyday. In that case, any other great author or poet could do the hypothetical crossword.

People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

Ancient Greece and Egypt certainly show evidence of shape rotators (e.g. Euclid, pyramid builders). Rome more on the word (and deed) side; they had Greeks to do the shape rotation. The Babylonians were no slouches at the numbers game either.

Caveat, I have never enjoyed math or life sciences and have no serious training in it, so that will probably mean my opinion will/should be discounted to nothing.

That said, I think HBD is a real, but small input into how societies grow and develop over the long term. But its clearly not a sufficient explanation on its own because historical outcomes are way too varied over time, and the dysjunctions of black swan events loom so large.

I reckon instead it is more or less a difficulty slider on civilization - the less generally capable your population, the better your social institutions have to be about finding ways for them to be productive, and incentivizing longer time preferences. Also, you're going to have a much smaller number of true geniuses who have the capacity to make major developments. Doesn't make development impossible, but it does make it (much) more difficult.

I remain skeptical.

Since you are clearly aware of Jensen's answers on the matter and perhaps of this issue's discussion in e.g. Wade's Facts that need to be explained– how do you figure skepticism is a tenable position? Sure, maybe the genotypic potential of those Sub-Saharans isn't in the 50s or even low 70s like Lynn et all argue, maybe they'd get to 80's with a proper societal infrastructure (which is to say, under a regime they themselves fail to establish). I personally buy that at those low levels, in conditions of scarcity, every minor institutional slip-up can lead to compounding loss on the environmental side: they dumber you are, the more you fail, and the more you fail, the lower your IQ goes, so equilibriums of underperformance of groups separated by a few genotypic points may be more than an SD apart. Okay.

But we have a great control case in the form of American Yoruba-White mixed population, that displays differences which map perfectly onto the HBD framework . Unless one takes seriously the hypothesis that systemic American racism/Black culture degrades environmental conditions of affected American children to the level of a third world nation, in a manner that is resistant to adoptions, educational interventions and so on, and allows some to become billionaires and public darlings and political figures, but exclusively through sports and entertainment and never anything recruiting the extreme right tail of the distribution for legible tasks (and so on, and so on, and so on) – it seems inevitable that HBD explains at least a great chunk of the disparity. I won't even discuss that we've had some progress on education PGS delta since then, because obviously those results are easy to suspect as being underpowered. But... it's really hard to see how HBD could not have a substantial effect.

Even if they simply show more abstract failures like difficulties with planning, at the scale of a ten-year-old's type of planning, this should show up pretty quickly during normal conversation. But for the model to be true, the actual matter has to be yet more abstract still: Equatorial Guinea has more than its fair share of problems and corruption and lackluster decisions, but they're not The Three Stooges.

Have you spoken to a functional adult person who tested below 70? My impression of Haiti stories is that they really have next to no rigorous abstract thinking but have otherwise healthy nervous systems – as would follow from the conjecture that White/Asian IQ advantage is a product or relatively recent selection and not-as-smart but functional peoples have existed and survived in the wild for a long time. They talk like... rather dim but normal people I know. And not to dehumanize anyone, but it doesn't surprise you that animals with literally zero ability to take an IQ test or have their g measured orient themselves in space well enough, does it?

At the weak level, I recognize that the attempts to remove environmental influence are going to unavoidably limited, but I think "the facts that need to be explained" doesn't sufficiently handle other possible explanations and doesn't have the necessary data to persuade me. I don't want to fall into an anti-HBD-of-the-gaps, here: this is a difficult field and it's not exactly subtle how much more funding and effort goes toward research of environmentalist and cultural explanations. But the people doing that research are still awful social scientists, even the easiest research in this domain gets very far from the stuff they're able to accurately study, and they're often looking under lampposts like a drunk searching for his keys. Even if not intended as such, a lot of HBD looks a bit like an HBD-of-the-gaps, where things stop having g-loading or stop exactly at the borders of where other matters have not be conclusively demonstrated, or where anything not explained by often-incompetent mainstream scientists must be genetic. But that's a fairly trivial problem -- and not a disproof, so much as recognizing the limits of available information -- and one that's mostly at a gutcheck level for me.

((I also have the general grab-bag of complaints about social science: insufficient control of confounders, and an acceptance for ad-hoc or post-hoc definitions that aren't intentionally salami-slicing or garden-of-forked-paths but can fall prey to those faults accidentally. However, these are, admittedly, problems most people find acceptable when the social science agrees with their positions, so I'm just including them for completion.))

The animal comparison kinda illuminates the crux of my deeper disagreement, though.

It makes sense that there are animals that have evolved better spatial orientation or reaction times than humans; indeed, some of the simplest insects have faster reflexes than human neurology can support, and this doesn't invalidate the general concept of either spatial orientation or of complex brains. And for humans, there's not much controversy in saying that dyslexia and dysgraphia (which have some genetic aspects) could impact many IQ test scores but don't consistently result in equal disparities on other g-related matters, on spatial orientation, or for reaction times. On the other hand, Jensen used as an example (and developed) the odd-man-out reaction time test as an example of a behavior strongly tied to information processing as a 'cognitively complex' task, and I'm pretty skeptical that if someone trained a cat to play whack-a-mole that this would change the minds of HBD proponents.

I think there's an argument for links between (some subset of) IQ tests and race, and while there's some issues with calling IQ/g/whatever "intelligence" at this granularity, genes are at least a plausible explanation for whatever's going on. ((In this sense, I'd even argue HBD is somewhat optimistic; more environmental or social effects might be more politically acceptable, but even recognizing anti-vaxxers, we are demonstrably far more capable of getting large portions of the population to accept several injections of random science than we are to improve education by the tiniest degree or have lead abatement in poorer cities not be a joke. Slapping "to prevent dysgraphia or dyslexia" on a prenatal therapy would be really, really convenient, and I'd expect the 'bioethicist' issues you see from Deaf or Blind culture would very quickly evaporate here.))

I think there's an argument that some definitions of low IQ could explain a number of common problems, both in the United States and internationally. IF the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa could not tie their shoes without long training or make a bed at all, or understand hypotheticals or the 'symbolic reference' of currency, or do monkey bars, or understand alphabetization, it'd be really easy to understand why so many of these countries have problems running the (sometimes literal) equivalent of a mobile phone stand.

My main problem is that it's easy to come up with an X-factor broad enough to explain the wide berth of problems and disparity present, or closely-defined enough to match the traits we see in the real world, but that trying to achieve a reasonable synthesis gets rough. These traits will necessarily be motioning around the shadow of the thing rather than the true borders, but I'm hard-pressed to believe you'd get the same borders when starting from American test scores, Haitian test scores, Brooklyn politics, or Haitian politics.

If a group did bad enough on some tests in some way that predicted inability to tie their own shoes or understand currency, this could explain Haiti's level of dysfunction. And if you want to talk about how Jensen's tests and manipulation predict LSAT scores, sure, fine.

But it's hard to go from Jensen's tests to Haiti. It's not just that the odd-man-out reaction time test, inspection time test, and Peabody's Pic-Vocab seem a weird cluster when excluding digit-span memory or free recall; it's that it's a really awkward match to the problems present in a lot of these countries. Haiti isn't poor in the "can't build power plants and highways" sense, or the 'agriculture isn't mechanized enough to compete internationally', or even the 'can't follow traffic lights' sense: it's poor in the 'even traditional agriculture is fucked up', 'police are taking the 'stationary bandits' metaphor very literally' sense or in the 'United Nations dumped cholera into the water supply and no one noticed for months' sense. No small number of the horror stories often are problems with things like free recall or digit-span memory or serial rote learning that are outside of Jensen's Level II and closer to the neurological damage problems, combined with a lifestyle that predicts a ton of that neurological damage.

Uganda isn't as much of a basket case, to damn with faint praise, but it's my actual go-to for "can't run a mobile phone stand". And there's an absolute mess of things of things that could be tied to Jensen's predictions, some things can tie to digit-span memory that he's excluding and again is common in people with a background predicting neurological damage, and others don't clearly tie to domains for IQ tests at all. I don't want to overstate personal experience -- it's a large enough country it is possible that the guide industry or the specific industries I got close to were picking from a couple standard deviations above the norm -- but I do have some experience with functional low-IQ adults, and if we're going to appeal to that I didn't get the same feeling from dealing with most native Ugandans.

There were certainly individuals who weren't very bright! But on average, you weren't running into the sort of problems common to non-institutionalized low-IQ adults. I actually had conversations about conditional hypotheticals, not just with tour guides but with randos, and to the point where one was confusing for a lot of people involved, it was confusing for cultural reasons (American 'tribes' and racial identity works a lot different than Bantu actual-tribes and cultural identity). We had a really annoying time trying to build a four-wheel dolly or solder a damaged circuit board, but that's because you can't get caster wheels or not-shit-quality AA-batteries in Kampala, not because anyone had difficulty understanding the construction or processes.

Now, Uganda scores higher than a lot of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and probably has some selection biases making those IQ tests not-representative (testing tends to favor extremes, but also favors people in schools or state-visible institutions, tribal stuff). It's a large enough country I could have (especially given tribal stuff) have only encountered people a standard deviation or two above the norm. And I'm not great at noticing social issues anyway. But it limits the appeal to personal experience pretty seriously.

There's an argument that perhaps all or at least most of the problems of Haiti and Uganda are downstream of this subset of IQ (or g, or another X-factor). Indeed, this is a more convenient explanation for why Haiti and Uganda were temporarily not-basket-cases; despite worse environmental climates in their respective colonial eras, and despite the European state-runners being such a small minority (eg, in Haiti, even many slave-owners were Black affranchi), and often not exactly the best and brightest of Europe. Or compare African-American ghettos of the 1950s with those today. In the HBD model, outside force mandated Correct behavior (modulo those arms), and perhaps g prevents that from happening voluntarily. They're probably not wrong to some limited extent: it's hard to run a power plant if you can't apply math in a generic sense, nevermind do the modeling necessary for load balancing; it's harder still to teach someone to run a power plant, or build the conceptual infrastructure necessary to do that sort of teaching. In Uganda, dysentery was rife and possible to pick up even from some less-reputable bottled waters, would be a plausible 'familial-environmental' cause of low-IQ if rampant during prenatal and early childhood years, and that's def the sorta thing that could be downstream from decisions of previous local generations that are an IQ or g thing. There's definitely an even broader story you can tell where g or this X-factor explains all of the corruption and gang violence because mumble mumble low-time preference.

But we get further and further from the core claim to defend it.

Having dealt with actual working class blacks, they do seem to have cultural habits that plausibly suppress IQ(generally poor nutrition by first world standards, notably, as well as high rates of recreational drug use and injuries). I’m not doubting that there’s an HBD component to their underperformance, but more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount.

more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount

These are also much more likely to have higher proportions of white genetics.

Why has HBD particularly struck Haiti so hard, but not other Caribbean or west African nations with the same genetic stock? A bit suspicious that these genes so uniquely struck this one subset all within a single nation.

At this point I'm open to considering lack of functioning institutions and Haiti's history of killing off all the people who actually ran their society and the ruinous debt imposed on them by vengeful French.

If you're taking a poll mark me down as unconvinced.

I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.

GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.

Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.

At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.

I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).

In addition to what @No_one said, China also has to be graded on a curve because before their recent rise the last hundred years or so had been absolutely awful:

*Great Leap Forward: tens of millions starved

*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties

*WWII (chinese theater): tens of millions killed, plus huge swathes of the country's vital agricultural instrastructure purposefully destroyed as a military tactic.

*"Boxer" Rebellion: hundreds of thousands killed/displaced

*Taiping Rebellion: tens of millions killed, tens of millions displaced, major portions of southern China depopulated - literally the worst civil war in human history that we know of.

Plus all the internecine fighting between factions, attempted/successful revolutions, several minor wars fought on Chinese soil (Russo-Japanese war, first Sino-Japanese war), and a normal dose of the floodings, droughts, and other natural disasters that have punctuated Chinese history.

China had one of the worst stretches any civilization has ever had, to my reckoning. Getting conquered by the Mongols again probably would have been significantly preferable. Honestly, I'm kindof amazed that there still is a china after all that. A lot of ruin in a nation, indeed.

So there's been a lot of instability, wars, and bad policies in China?

If these are sufficiently retarding to hold back China until the 1980s, then why aren't the instability, wars, and bad policies in Sub-Saharan sufficient to explain more or less all of its backwardness? When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation: if there's one thing that we know about economics, it's that tremendous natural resources are not sufficient for development, and in much of Africa they seem to be a curse (see the DRC or Zimbabwe).

Certain sections of Africa have had some conflict thats comparable - the postrevolutionary Congo comes to mind - but frankly I'm not aware of anything on the horrific, mind-breaking scale of what China consisfently went through from 1850-1970 (often self-inflicted). Other countries tend to get it once or maybe twice if they're really stupid (Russia's period 1905-1955 ranks up there, I'd imagine, as would Paraguay from the War of the Triple Alliance to the Chaco war). Not for a 100+ years.

That certainly could be a failure of my knowledge. Definitely African wars are a bit more difficult to find major sources on in English. Certainly open to learning more if you have suggestions.

The answer is that none of this is true, China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa, despite value judgements of some racist whites who pooh-poohed remarkable Chinese traits as «mere» industriousness and servility or some such. China was in a very bad place very recently; but it has not been barbaric for millenia.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita), and claim this is an argument against HBD. This is an argument against GDP, if anything. Likewise disingenuous, only for more complex reasons, to compare China and Africa as a whole.

When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation

See what?

65 years life expectancy, 86.82% literacy, 20.8% AIDS, all economy runs on a De Beers mining contract. Botswana is maybe a big success by African standards, but that success belies the hypothesis that Africans with unusually good policies would just converge with non-Africans in all other things that matter – matter for maintaining stability, peace and good policies, too. So it will not be a huge surprise if Botswana one day just fails.

Why are you pointing out AIDS? Like, yeah, it's a problem, but I'm not sure it's in the top 10 priorities for nations to worry about. And I'm skeptical that North Korea is at 0% anyways.

China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa

I never said that it was.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita),

Good thing I didn't make that comparison.

claim this is an argument against HBD

Who is arguing against HBD? I never questioned it. The point is that, with respect to economic success or failure, there just isn't a lot or anything for HBD to explain once you account for bad policies and history. Bizzarely, many responses have been "Ah, but those facts you cite are due to bad policies and history."

See what?

My figures were out of date: in terms of GDP per capita, China has caught up with Botswana in the past 10 years. However, at Botswana's independence in the late 1960s, they were the same, and until recently, China was behind:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10gui

China is ranked 31st for "Ease of Doing Business", Botswana is ranked 87th. So, even in China's catch-up, there just doesn't seem to be much if anything for HBD to explain. That doesn't mean that HBD is false, and AFAIK the evidence for HBD is psychometric rather than macroeconomic (and much the better for that fact). What doesn't do well is trying to explain differences in the wealth of nations in terms of IQ rather than cultural and historical explanations.

...

I think it's being grouped not as a defeat, but just as a mass Chinese death event.

...

Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation.

Communism as a cause is naturally appealing to people in our memespace, which had an unmitigated love for markets even before it was thrown in the right-wing pit, but I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A story where something was already wrong with the countries in question beforehand and this something facilitated their conversion to communism when that meme was going strong - in other word, communism in the mid-20th century being yet another symptom, and having no explanatory power - seems no less plausible to me.

...

I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around.

The best still-extant version of that arrow is near the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula.

I was intending to respond to the common version of the theory that past communism breaks the correlation in the present. For present-day comparisons, NK/SK seems fairly inappropriate since NK is politically isolated and sanctioned to death with barely any outright allies, while SK is tightly integrated in global markets (and in particular with "communist" and at least certainly postcommunist China). On the other hand, I have seen the assertion repeatedly that up until the '70s or '80s or so, NK outperformed SK economically, and in the present day, to compare two countries without extenuating international-politics circumstances, it's not clear to me that for example median human life in Taiwan is actually better than in China.

Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation. And before that, China wasn't industrial, and was under very malthusian conditions, with poorer classes in cities literally starving to death if fired from work. (see e.g. Changing Chinese on the conditions in China before it descended into civil war.

Yes, this is my point. IQ is a factor, but other things seem more important. And note that the issue is not IQ / GDP, it's a genetic predisposition to higher IQ / GDP.

IQ affects performance at every task. It's not a 'natural resource', it's more of a multiplier, an advantage in almost everything.

I should have been more specific: IQ is comparable to a natural resource that can be leveraged or not leveraged, depending on the circumstances. You gave a good example with China, where communisn stopped the Chinese from leveraging any innate tendency to higher IQs that they might have into exceptional economic success.

The question is too broad. Does "does not think that HBD is an explanation" mean "we are all literal tabula rasas", or "the gaps between groups aren't all down to genetics"?

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