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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Even if it becomes widely accepted as true, in liberal societies that should not lead to any significantly different political policies.

The entire affirmative action policy regime depends on the assumption that group disparities are a problem that can be rectified. You say that affirmative action can be justified even with belief in HBD, because some of the disparities could be the result of discrimination. Disparities being the result of discrimination would be hard to falsify in a world of HBD-believers, but more importantly I think the same incentives to play the victim would exist as they currently do. I suspect few people will be satisfied accepting that they're innately less capable when they can easily and unfalsifiably claim to be victims of discrimination, systemic or otherwise.

You're also missing the most important policy that would change in a world of HBD-believers: immigration. Once you accept HBD, it seems to me to be straightforwardly horrifying and despair-inducing to witness what our society is doing to itself with its immigration policies, and to contemplate the implications of extrapolating these trends a century or two into the future.

The entire affirmative action policy regime depends on the assumption that group disparities are a problem that can be rectified.

I think there's a redistributive justification too, as well as a representational justification, as well as a justification premised on the purported instrumental organizational benefits of diversity. I happen not to find any of those justifications persuasive, but affirmative action supporters do not have all of their eggs in the remediation basket.

A liberal society that accepted HBD would not be arguing over whether or not to impose race-based immigration policies because such policies would be clearly illiberal. It would instead, just like it does now, be arguing over whether or not to impose immigration policies based on the prospective immigrants' level of intelligence and/or civilizedness. Arguing for race-based immigration policies is very unpopular in current Western society and in a liberal society that accepted HBD it would still be very unpopular because race-based immigration policies are clearly illiberal and unfair in the sense that they would discriminate based on group characteristics rather than individual characteristics. So in a liberal society that accepted HBD, the conversation would still revolve - much like it does in actual modern Western society - over whether or not society should make immigration policies that discriminate based on prospective immigrants' level of intelligence and/or civilizedness (roughly speaking, actual modern conservatives are in favor of such and actual modern progressives are opposed to such). HBD acceptance would not change immigration policies unless society as a whole significantly began to give up liberalism to an even greater degree than current anti-white policies represent an abandonment of liberalism. The anti-white policies at least pretend to be justified by liberalism, whereas a society in which immigration policies were being directly driven by HBD awareness would be a society in which there was not even the pretense of liberalism at least when it comes to this issue.

I don't see why restricting immigration based on group identity is antithetical to liberalism. People who are not lawful residents of a country are not owed the same treatment as that country's lawful residents. We discriminate amongst would-be immigrants all the time and in all manner of ways that liberalism would rightly demand we not treat our own lawful residents. For example, a categorical ban on immigration from people who believe in certain ideologies or who have illnesses likely to make them a public charge.

And while selecting based on individual characteristics rather than group characteristics is ideal in theory, in practice it runs up against the problem of regression to the mean - children of people at the high end of their group's bell curve end up closer to that group's mean than their parents' giftedness would predict.

There's also the additional problem of the possibility of HBD being applicable to group personality differences. We might not want a substantial portion of our population to belong to groups that, for whatever reason, differ in personality in ways that are at odds with our culture (e.g., individualism vs collectivism, work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and so on). It can be hard to test for this sort of thing, and it also probably involves some amount of regression to the mean. We may rightly decide that's just not a risk worth taking for a bit of a boost in GDP.