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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.
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.
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