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Except eventually one would have to reject ideas like "all people are equal" in order to update, and that's a fundamental problem as it is the anchor of the overton window in western societies.
Not to beat a dead horse again but for that and just that belief alone (sufficient, not necessary), western society deserves to be replaced.
Equality does not square well with the human condition, no different to how communism does not square well with it.
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The more people that reject such ideas and update, the more the Overton window shifts.
Hence the forever War on Noticing things like racial IQ gaps or crime statistics—spaces like Reddit banning wrong-think, chatbots getting hate facts reinforcement learning’d out of them, the UK policing supposed online hate crime, the FBI focusing on racial or involuntary celibate extremist terms like “based,” “red pilled,” “Chad,” “Stacy,” or “looksmaxxing”.
Only the overton window of elite discourse and opinion matters with regard to changing policies. Voters just don't matter and pretending, or even giving lip service or respect to the absurb and empty pretence that they do, requires mastering such cognitive dissonance that I just can't do it anymore. Sorry.
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Nobody except a few extreme ivory-tower types acts like they believe "all people are equal". The idea is absurd and should be rejected. (note rejecting it doesn't require HBD; you can believe that all people are born exactly equal -- also absurd -- and still not believe "all people are equal")
Some do believe it, and for the others it may be a signal, a, not the, pilot light to enable distributed identification of friend/foe and spontaneous cooperation.
In a similar way to how noone really believes in speed limits. If it says 50, I know my car car physically exceed that and even a few mph over it won't necessarily result in a fine or stop, even if directly measured. It does, however, act as signal to enable spontaneous cooperation of a certain type and in a certain direction, in tbis analogies case to not go too much faster than 50 mph (perhaps even a 10% tolerance for measurement error, depending on country and jurisdiction).
Professing all.people to be equal is, I think, similar to this. Both a havels greengrocer flag in the window, and an anchor of the overton window, and it's ideological internal counterpart, to enable apontnaous cooperation of a certain type, to drive actions in a certain direction likely to give results with, use methods accepted or liked by, etc to those who might profess the, known false, belief in equality.
You are also correct about equality not necessarily requiring HBD or invalidating. One could can add "epicycles" galore and still have a self consistent model, contact with reality notwithstanding.
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