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First, HBD is usually not a «claim of superiority» in some global sense. I find it extremely wrong that White hereditarians aren't cut any slack for admitting that they are, in terms of genotypic cognitive potential, middling relative to Jews (who are massively dominant per capita) and East Asians (who are even more numerous than White people; nitpicking about muh creative European geniuses has bearing on historical prestige and such, but is largely irrelevant to aggregate population quality). This fact is more crucial to understanding the world than 13/51 type stuff, but gets just dismissed out of hand as some bad faith gotcha. The relative advantage of those groups is also not scrutinized as problematic, but just attributed to virtues like hard work and «culture of learning» (though Asians were covertly discriminated against in higher ed). This shows that the discourse is captured by special interests which only care to assert that «underperforming minorities» in the US are the Main Characters of history, and if they underperform Whites, it can only be for external reasons.
Second, I do not agree that claims of genetic superiority are more inherently suspicious than the alternative hypothesis, which is more or less «hateful conspiracy in plain sight spanning hundreds of millions of people», that is, moral inferiority; vague theorizing about «systemic racism» and «implicit bias» can only go so far to downplay the inescapable claim that White people are, in the current year, acting in an ethnocentric manner to abuse their non-White countrymen. I think people who promote this view do not defend or caveat its wildly libellous implications nearly enough, and must be pressed to do so.
In short, I disagree with the mainstream evaluation of which hypothesis is null, which claim is more extraordinary, and accordingly the assessment of the appropriate burden of proof. And if «'science proves this about X race'» is generally problematic, we must at the very least normalize agnosticism about causes of differences – not say that Science Has Spoken and all races have equal aptitude (ergo race Y is just oppressive, since differences remain).
Of course I'm not agnostic; IMO this horse is very dead. It's been dead since 2012 at the latest. You can just search HBD on this site and get this thread or this comment. Or go through these sources.
I'm not sure you realize how annoying it is to see that the response to HBD «facts that need to be explained» has been to simply make laypeople more confused. For example you ask «what about Flynn effect». What about Flynn effect, indeed? We don't have a reason to think it's relevant to the problem of between-group differences, it happens for everyone at basically the same rate. Likewise for isolated genetic pools; it's not relevant, virtually nothing depends on their existence. How did you arrive at the contrary prior, can you carefully try to trace it? My guess: you think that intelligence, in the HBD model, is mostly dependent on some specific adaptive variants that have emerged among the «superior stock» and failed to spread (in reality, it seems that the same core set of variants is present in all major groups; lower predictive power of European-derived PGS should be due to linkage disequilibrium, as usual). But where did you get that idea from in the first place? Probably just osmosis.
I don't hold it against you, getting reasonable priors would take purposeful work. It's just a thankless job to argue a scientifically nontrivial point against priors that have not been reflected upon. I hope you skim some of the links above.
Thanks, I think... I am quite agnostic about these issues. I do have a prior skepticism on HBD because I've seen the way it's used but am capable of updating priors and I'm not bad faith.
The things you are happy to leave behind seem pretty relevant to me, but I'm just at the start of rediscovering the science. I was pretty keen on evolutionary psychology about 20 years ago.
My personality is to latch on to something and think about it for a while, read a paper and slowly cycle, given the usual time constraints of daily life.
But if I gain an understanding I can explain it relativity simply and linearly to someone else, and I can point to weaknesses in the logic, science. I understand frustration with hearing the same old arguments, or bad-faith people and I know that people can get worn out on a topic but I don't know of any belief I have that I couldn't articulate the gist of in a long post.
I can articulate the belief again, sure. To wit:
Humans are animals like any other, with populations evolving divergently under local selection pressures by all normal evolutionary mechanisms. An important difference is that past some distant point, human cultures have began exerting even more pressure than the natural environment; so environmental cues, founder effects, cultural choices and historical-political circumstances have determined path-dependent evolutionary tracks of our groups. Relative fitness tradeoffs, and thus selection pressures, differ between populations, although the requirements inherent to having human society constrain them some; societies are just very different. For example, all healthy humans can learn to speak some language, use abstract concepts, do different jobs. Yet populations which form big settled communities with labor specialization, and practice technologically demanding agriculture in cold climates with clear seasonality that rewards long-term orientation, experience pressures unlike that of nomadic groups or foragers near equator; on all levels from biochemistry to metabolic constants to skeleton proportions to prevalent temperaments to, yes, average level of general intelligence.
Human evolution is counterintuitively fast, even without some explicit eugenics or strong bottlenecks – groups can diverge on a trait by 1 SD in thousands of years, under mundane pressures like whether a tribe practices diving or not. This happens mainly through the change in distributions of already present alleles, not novel mutations (though we also accumulate novel mutations increasingly quickly, due to population size explosion; contra popular anthropological myth, human evolution accelerates in historical time, we are all genetically very different from «anatomically modern humans» of 200 KYA or even «behaviorally modern humans» of 50KYA).
Stable individual traits, including value-laden like intelligence, are influenced by heredity and environment. It is not very meaningful to say that a trait is more influenced by one or another in some general sense. But there are reaction norms that, for value-laden complex traits, tend to resemble logarithmic curves with regard to environmental gradient: positive environmental contributions at some point effectively plateau, and remaining variance is dominated by genetics. The corollary of this is that as the median environmental quality increases, heritability of traits increases too, even in societies with significant inequality, until only small extremes are dominated by effects of nurture. In the developed world, environmental inputs are satisfied to such an extent that intelligence is roughly 80% heritable and this doesn't much or at all (there's some debate about «Scarr-Rowe effect») differ between social strata.
There's a strong political commitment to understate the progress in environmental conditions and overstate effects of economic inequality on ability, which together with American history of race relations and a few other contingent political factors makes people deny all that and suppress this knowledge institutionally.
but since you've read Murray you must already know the core thesis. There are plenty of other digestible intros from self-awowed HBDists: Sailer, Jayman 1 and 2, even some links in this library. The problem begins at the level of arguing finer empirical and methodological points, it quickly devolves into this kind of abstruse stuff
Thanks, this is a cogent summary with plenty to explore. It was cheeky of me to prompt it because of course it's possible for me to do my own hunt. There are some things I've never come across here such as reaction norms so all well and good for learning something new.
But as you say rests on finer empirical points. I found what I read of Murray (not the bell curve but a later one that talked about gender as well) that it was already making inferences at the higher level and didn't have enough of the detail underneath. Of course at that level it's rapidly overwhelming, but it's where potentially false assumptions could be exposed.
Broadly speaking I don't think the universe is necessarily going to line up with progressive wishes but I'd need to understand more to get a view on the robustness of HBD.
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