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You’re making some pretty dramatic claims there. Proactively provide evidence rather than just asserting that “you must” do something. Why do you think that? How have you ruled out other explanations, models? These are the questions people are going to ask you. Preempting them helps to keep things…civil.
Evidence has been provided for decades. What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring. And it's biased that you guard this specific topic with the provide evidence rule much more than other topics.
One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.
At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.
It „used to be that way” and is not that way now, because the Motte did not reward effort posting enough. In my mind the reward for effort posting should be no more „evidence please” for the same dry topic; just go browse the AAQCs or some canonical blog posts, maybe from some of those effort posters who you chased away. If the mod feels the need to chime in, maybe they should chime in with links to some of those instead of demanding another poster do it. There's no point to having a debate if you can never make any progress.
Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier. It's not a particular failure of the Motte to fail to make progress on this topic. If anything, the Motte is better than most places when it comes to it. But what is more interesting to me than rehashing it again is looking at the meta question of, is one side operating in bad faith? I think so, probably. Which deflates my motivation to engage in the object-level debate with high effort.
Maybe you haven't been exposed to any decent anti-HBD arguments. Personally, I think there probably is a genetic component to racial differences in criminality. However, I think that pro-HBD people often overstate their case.
@2rafa's recent post about Irish Travelers is interesting when it comes to the explanatory power of HBD.
There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much. If one used a time machine to observe the founding Indo-European-speaking stock circa 2000 BC, one would probably find it hard to imagine that 1500 years later they would have descendants like Thucydides and Euclid. If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.
1500+ years later. Which is about 75 generations. At just +0.01 SD per generation, that can add up to 0.75 SDs in that time. Which is 11.25 IQ points. Which is a rise from a mean of 88.75 to 100. This can be produced by having an average r=0.02 correlation between fertility and IQ during that time by the way. We're experiencing 5x that selection pressure in the opposite direction right now.
Why should the rate be .01 SD/generation? Why should it even be linear?
If the one sample set we’ve got today is a somewhat stronger negative correlation, I would expect that to extend backwards. I know that was the case in 1800s America.
The trait mean does not have to be linear with time, it just has to have an average derivative of 0.01.
How do you know? Galton claimed it was dysgenic in late 1800s England, so maybe you're correct. But we have Clark and associated data indicating there was an inflection point in the early to mid 19th century in Europe. So I expect that it was indeed a positive trend between 0 and 1800 AD. And this matches what we observed phenotypically.
You’re right, “know” is probably too strong.
I was reading about the growth of antebellum America and was struck by these self-reinforcing contributions. Industrialization drove women out of cottage industry and into education, which drove religious revivals, which drove temperance, which drove industry. But also they were spending more time and effort on each child, so fertility was tanking. Though actual family size fell more slowly, thanks to repeated revolutions in medicine. The boom in public education also skewed any results we might have collected from early intelligence testing.
So I don’t know that fertility was negatively correlated with IQ, just that it went down as education, investment per child, nutrition, etc. went up.
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