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It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
What does "HBD" actually entail? It's a term you never see used outside of this forum, afaik. All I know is that it stands for human bio diversity and means that you take seriously the findings that all sorts of tests like the SAT etc show in terms of group differences? What else?
I would define it as:
The belief that individuals and groups meaningfully differ in nearly all measured attributes for biological and genetic reasons.
That’s really the extent of the belief. The point of contention is what is off limits to scrutiny through that lens. No one would object to the idea that skin color, eye color, or hair texture differ between individuals and populations for genetic reasons.
HBDers (alternately “race realists,” “hereditarians,” “scientific racists,” etc.) are those willing to apply that lens to all human traits.
To borrow your word： apply how? Apply simply in acknowledging the idea as worth further research? Or apply by accepting the hypothesis as axiomatic and then set public policies (re immigration, hiring, voting laws, whatever) in some seemingly reasonable way so that presumably the smarts make the decisions while any member of the dumbs must first pass intellectual muster to be taken half-seriously? Or something else? I ask this question genuinely, and I would be interested to read various answers.
At this point I would settle for undoing some of the damage that decades of attempts to enforce equal representation and the blank state theory have done to our society e.g. by bringing back tracking in schools, ending affirmative action, admitting that biological explanations are a possibility when investigating group differences in life outcome, prioritizing our immigration and foreign aid policies based on which populations have the most development potential (as crudely and imprecisely measured by national or sub-national IQ), and funding large enough genetic studies to uncover the basis of heritable personality and behavioral differences between groups. Pretty much all of these except for the last were the normal state of affairs prior to the mid-20th century.
... why not as less-crudely and less-imprecisely measured by individual IQ, in the case of immigration? If it's that important then the extra cost of proctoring a test is going to be trivial compared to the advantage of extra accuracy.
In order to be passed any potential immigration policy has to be justifiable in non-HBD (either group-based or individual) terms. Individually IQ-testing potential immigrants will never be considered acceptable, but screening them on the basis of "culture" is more palatable.
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