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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that, etc.

Well I don't need to conclude anything, but I can certainly lean toward the explanation that seems to correlate to poverty basically 100% of the time across contexts, rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.

rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.

The goal isn't to find a single, simple master explanation for everything. The goal is to find the minimum number of explanations with the maximum amount of explanatory power.

Pure HBD clearly doesn't serve as a complete explanation. For example, African Americans are about 20% White admixture and have IQs of 85. If we think that 100% of the difference between African Americans and Whites is explained by genetics, we can predict the average IQs of Subsaharan Africans with the equation: (0.80x) + (0.2 * 100) = 85, and predict that their IQ should be around 81. And yet most of the numbers I see HBD people cite for Subsaharan African IQ are far lower than that. I've sometimes seen claims in the high 60's. A genetic difference between African Americans and Whites, implies a strong environmentally-mediated difference for Subsaharan Africans and African Americans.

But if we're already going to allow that environment effects can cause a one or more standard deviation in IQ from what we expect based on environmental factors (as we observe with the Subsaharan African vs Black disparity), I think we then have to double back and question our originally granted assumption that the IQ differences between African Americans and Whites is 100% genetic. It has got to be a mix, and if it is a mix, I don't think we can yet say where African Americans will top out.

On the other hand, I think the nutrition + parasites + tropical diseases explanations seem to have a lot of explanatory power. They're not another thing to memorize, they make predictions that I tend to think are born out in the data, even if they can't explain all of the difference with best estimates for effect size.

No race scientist worth their calipers claims that environmental factors have absolutely no effect. IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.

lean toward the explanation that seems to correlate to poverty basically 100% of the time across contexts

I don't think you're trying very hard. North/South Korea, East/West Germany, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Same genes, different institutions, very different outcomes.

The Haiti/DR case is especially clean: same island, similar populations, 6-7x GDP gap, and Haiti spent 122 years paying France for having freed itself. Hold genes constant, vary institutions, get massive divergence. The "100%" claim doesn't survive contact with five minutes of thought.

I'm not memorizing hundreds of rationales, I just actually looked for counterexamples that ruined a seductive hobby horse.

Haiti being a basket case is relatively recent, because they were ruled by an insane witch who turned the country into a failed state because he didn't trust his own government, and the Dominican Republic's dictatorship was a normal standard average egomaniac strongman.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Not the same genes. Haiti is ~90% sub-Saharan African, the DR closer to 40%.

I expect there's some genetic variance east to west across Germany as well, though Communism was obviously the larger influence.

Never ask Puerto Ricans what they think of Dominicans, Dominicans what they think of Haitians—much less why.

As @SecureSignals distinguishes but @dr_analog appears to have elided—there’s a major genetic difference between North African ancestry and Sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Not the same genes. Haiti is ~90% sub-Saharan African, the DR closer to 40%.

I'll give that to you, though if we're going to contend a drop of African blood can turn South Italy into a wasteland imagine what 40% should be doing to the DR.

Sicily is very poor for Europe and the DR is doing quite well for Latin America, but Sicily is still much richer than the DR.

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