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Notes -
Michael Lind, Eugenicons and the Motte.
Recently, Michael Lind, a notable political commentator and anti-immigration activist, took a stab at what he termed the "eugenicons". The most prominent of which being men like Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard and guys like Richard Hanania, whose face is prominently plastered over the article.
Linds piece paints these "eugenicons" as being not just factually wrong and out of their element with regards to the science, but also politically ineffective. As Lind sees 'race realism' and the libertarian ethos it allegedly expresses itself through these men to be "utterly incompatible" with broadening the appeal of the modern Republican party to working class Americans of all races. Lind, being a bit of a ‘soft’ materialist in the old Marxist sense, has a preferred view of the public as being in a bit of an economic class struggle. Though his view is far more principled and sophisticated than what you generally find among big L Americans Leftists.
Lind’s article is worth a read, and so are the various responses. The two better ones being from Steve Sailer and Brian Chau
Charles Murray did not respond in length, but remarked after reading Linds article that
Sailer, like Murray, voiced his disappointment that the article by Lind was not composed of anti HBD arguments of higher quality. And took issue with the view Lind expresses with regards to the state of the scientific literature at this time. Maintaining that Lind is far behind the curve on just how heavily the evidence has been falling on the side of HBD in recent years and that he also mischaracterizes some of the HBD positions as strict determinism. Pointing out that social causes have a very clear effect, as he cites his new favorite chart of various fatalities rising in line with the 'happening' of George Floyd.
These are all familiar notes for HBD folks, but they focus on facts and details over the broad stroke narrative. Something Brian Chau points out and extrapolates on. And it’s a worthwhile endeavor, given that someone whose been in the game for as long as Lind is probably not going to have his broader political viewpoint or his fondness for the American working class dissuaded by, as he put it:
It’s a fair position to hold, I suppose, so where does Lind get his ideas from?
As Chau sees it, Lind is working from a presupposition of political representation. That is, Lind sees himself representing the American working class. To that end it is no surprise he dislikes the HBD creed, given it is inherently divisive to the multiracial America. Something modern day classical Marxists have been pointing at for a long while, to little effect as they continue to support mass immigration, unlike Lind.
On that note Lind ties Libertarianism and HBD together, showing just how these two ideas are compatible. As Lind puts it:
This is certainly an observation. I think it would be easy, like Chau does, to point out that of the 4 big “eugenicons” only Hanania is ostensibly libertarian and otherwise poke holes in it. But I think that draws us away from the truth value of the statement as it relates to Lind and his position as a representative of the working class American. In a broad class interest narrative, there is an obvious pathway where the notion of free market success correlates with ‘superiority’. At the very least, if we value success in modern society, and we place some stock in the notion of heritability of traits, we end up with an undeniable truth. The lower classes are inferior to the superior upper classes. But as it relates to the "eugenicons", again, it’s not necessarily a truth anyone of the 4 mentioned, Sailer, Murray, Winegard and Hanania, are guided by politically.
Lind goes too far then, or does he? You don’t have to to go full send Capitalist Darwinism or whatever. Most people have the self reflection to look at themselves as a less than perfect part of a greater whole. Or that would be my view. Except that is the minority view of a National Socialist. So I think, to the extent American politics exist as is represented in media, Lind might be more correct than not here. And if “eugenicons” are not viscerally racist in their soul, I’d argue they do have to contend with the old ghost of “Social Darwinism”. Merely pointing at The Bell Curve and HBD as a truth can’t qualify as just another feather of truth in the cap of HBD folks. In the words of Eric Turkheimer, this truth could rival the atom bomb.
Chau's criticism of Lind is that Lind is not seeking truth but instead seeking to represent a class of people. To that end, if there is a truth that can harm them it’s not his duty to have that truth guide him but to shield the people from it. They are stronger together, class solidarity and all that. And through that lens Chau contextualizes some of Lind’s more extravagant misrepresentations of HBD ‘truths’. It’s simply not Lind's job to represent this truth. Lind is representing a class of people. Protecting both its class interest as well as its dignity, at the very least.
Beyond this you will have to read Chau’s article as he takes broader issue with the worldview Lind expresses.
On the whole I find Lind’s position to be stronger than I had suspected after seeing the "eugenicons" pile on him for the various errors and factual misrepresentations made. So long as Lind is accurately representing the people he feels with, his position will remain strong. Particularly since it is dealing with immediate problems that are likely to result from the HBD 'atom bomb' being released on the public. I had always assumed that biological truths would lead people towards something like ethno-nationalist 'democratic' socialism. But I’m now more willing to believe that America could surprise me if the bomb was dropped on them.
On that note it is not clear to me if Lind’s representing of the multiracial American working class is for its protection or ours.
That sort of pussyfooting is infuriating. He is basically saying even if they are right, they are wrong and pathological. It's so cowardly. It's pretty rare though to see that level of hedging from anti-HBD pontification. But he'll never accept that they were right even if they are right.
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I read Linds piece and my conclusion was he never even made an argument against Hannanias position. He had some weak dumbed down ideas on what Hannania believed. I guarantee any Eugenicon is able to differentiate between pure blood Argentinian Italian and pure blood Mayan. His piece just looked like 10k woods that said nothing more than Hannania bad.
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Charles Murray is also libertarian, and has explicitly described himself as such, so that makes two out of four.
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So, Lind’s argument is essentially that most people can’t be trusted not to misinterpret “overlapping curves with long tails” as “bimodal distribution.”
I’m not sure he’s wrong. Even at what should be some of the smartest employers, like Google, you can’t say the first without being misinterpreted as saying the second, and then subsequently lose your job.
It seems we are caught between two choices on this issue. Either keep political power in the hands of the people broadly and keep lying to them, or scale back who has political power to those that can interpret very simple ideas like overlapping curves.
It’s somewhat of a false dichotomy: “overlapping curves with long tails” and “bimodal distribution” are often pam_theyre_the_same_picture.jpg, especially with natural data.
“Overlapping curves with long tails” can result in bimodal distributions, and bimodal distributions are frequently the result of mixing two overlapping curves, long tails or not. A common case is a bimodal distribution being a mixture of two normal distributions.
That being said, it’d be fallacious to conclude that, if a unimodal (or, at least, non-obviously bimodal) distribution results from the mixture of two populations, that means the difference between the two populations is not significant or substantial. Especially since even modest differences in mean can produce amplified effects on the tails.
As described by the paper linked in the Wikipedia article above, a population mixture between men and women is unlikely to be bimodal in height, despite human height between the sexes often serving as a canonical example for a bimodal distribution in statistics textbooks. And, might I add, its status as a canonical example is probably because the average height difference between men and women is well-accepted, observable, and uncontroversial in spite of there being readily noticeable variance in the heights of both men and women.
The authors suggest a rule of thumb of the difference in mean being greater than the sum of the two population standard deviations for producing a bimodal distribution. Such a difference would be akin to a difference of greater than 30 IQ points for two populations with a standard deviation of 15.
The paper also hilariously (not sure if the authors find it as amusing as I do) Notices that the male heights in a previous study have far more 5’10” and 6’0 men than would be expected relative to 5’11”-ers. This immediately made me think of classic OKCupid dating statistics, where there is a dearth of reported 5’11”-ers due to potential 5’11”-ers rounding up to satisfy the female demand for male height and round numbers. I would remark, "5'11 versus 6'0: the meme to academia pipeline." However, it might actually be "5'11 versus 6'0: the academia to meme pipeline."
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Even on this very forum!
Really? I don’t think most HDB enthusiasts think all whites are smarter than all blacks or even the less strong form that very few number of blacks are smarter than a very few number of whites.
I do think HBD proponents believe that at a population there is a material difference and it largely explains difference between white and black outcome.
There is a distinct gap between the motte that HBD advocates argue for, and the Bailey of how they actually advocate for treating individual Blacks, whether in the news or in theory.
Can you substantiate this at all? There are of course unceasing accusations of such things, and I'm absolutely sure that HBD opponents would love for this to be the case, but it really does just appear to be wishful thinking.
What level of evidence do you require exactly? Will forum links from users who advocate HBD and then advocate for segregation/expulsion/etc of disfavored groups be sufficient? Or will they get No True Scotsmanned and Hey I Was Only Joking'd and Out of Context'd out of town? Will examples of more public advocates of hbd holding spicier takes in private go? What level of substantiation would lead you to consider this proven for some subset of people using the phrase HBD?
My patience for sitting around waiting for people to admit the obvious is sort of wearing thin when we've all watched Just-Skeptical caterpillars bloom into anti-Semitic butterflies in this meadow. Holocaust denial isn't anti-Semitic was an objection I'm supposed to address one moment, the next Catholic doctrine is the protocols of the... Well you know the rest.
The existence of radicals in all areas is not disqualifying for plainly true ideas. From my experience on themotte the majority of HBD proponents simply want to use it as a counter theory to widespread racial discrimination being the source of disparate outcomes. There exist some people that want to use it to justify horrible policies, just like there exist people who want to use all sorts of facts to advance terrible policy that does not necessarily follow from those facts.
My patience for needing to address this accusation every single time that people want to plug their ears and blind their eyes to the plain truth wears even thinner. You can't actually contest the truth so you instead attack motivations. To what end? The peace is already not holding. We are running out of possible interventions and the demand for an explanation for disparate impacts grows only stronger.
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I would be very interested in your examples of "public advocates of hbd holding spicier takes in private", with the added conditions that
I predict you won't be able to find anything about denying individuals human rights based on race, only about assuming individual blacks are more likely to commit crimes and be poor at high-g loaded tasks than individuals of other races. I commit to making a personal bayesian update of my worldview if you can fine 2 or more examples that meet this criteria, since you used "advocates" plural.
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Both sides have valid points but a trying to plot a 2D phenomena on a single axis.
Society is far more than Iq scores. Just focusing on Iq misses that a society is the people, the culture, the sense of belonging and the historical continuity. For a society to function people have to be group oriented. A bland atomized society of smart people looking out for themselves is going to be corrupt, decandent and soulless. It misses the fact that a society is a large extended family and people have responsibilites as a part of that family. People within the family have to be taken care of and people have their role within the family. Throwing large portions of your own people under the bus and blaming people's failures on their lack of a high Iq is going to divide society.
Ignoring HBD misses the fact that there are major differences between people. High Iq people will be far more capable at solving problems, getting along, thinking long term and creating well functioning societies. Social cohesion will be higher and easier to create the more genetically similar people are. Other mental traits such as impulse control, personality and hormone levels do matter.
Having a low Iq group oriented society ends up like much of the middle east. Super clannish and people are willing to do good but fail to do so. High Iq and ethnically diverse will end up like parts of India in which smart people work in a tech hub while there are mountains of garbage outside their office.
well functioning societies like Denmark or Japan have been ethnically homogenous and have had high IQ.
I think it is important to note that Japan has been as ethnically homogeneous as it is today, and has presumably had the same inborn disposition for intelligence as today, for a very long time, yet Japan has only been well-functioning for some periods of its history. In the past it often experienced massive internal conflicts and social dislocation. 80 years ago it was massacring loads of civilians and supporting an authoritarian government that had gotten it into an obviously near-hopeless war.
Obviously everything that I have said about Japan is also true of Europe.
Pointing to modern examples of well-functioning societies that are ethnically homogeneous and have high IQ fails to explain why those societies have been, historically speaking, only intermittently well-functioning even though presumably they were also ethnically homogeneous and had high inborn disposition for intelligence in the past.
For example, as I have pointed out before, Northern Europeans went from being backwoods savages at around 1 AD to being the world's leaders in science at around 1600 AD. Did they become more ethnically homogeneous and develop higher inborn disposition for intelligence over the course of that time?
Slavs are another example of high intelligence not necessarily corresponding with well-functioning societies. Despite having IQs nearly on par or on par with Western Europeans, and routinely producing exceptionally intelligent scientists, engineers, and artists, Slavic societies tend to be mired in the sort of corruption and dysfunctional politics that remind one of stereotypes of Africa or South America.
I don't get your point here. Japan was very well functioning when they were massacring each other during the Sengoku Jidai. As was Europe during the Thirty Years War and the World Wars. They fought those wars with aplomb and skill.
That they used their great talents for such terrible ends is a tragedy, but it says nothing about how well functioning they were. They could not raise and command such powerful armies if they weren't well functioning.
The Sengoku Jidai was a huge breakdown of central authority, civil war, and constant factional warfare.
The closest modern equivalent would probably be a narco-state like Brazil or Colombia. I'm not sure you would call these societies well-functioning.
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Basically yes! Many things happened since 1AD to impact northern European genetics, including the church ban on cousin marriage (leading to less clannishness), harsher punishments for violent behaviour, and the accidental pressure for high IQ in Jews due to usury laws.
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Could you elaborate? I hadn’t heard about this. Or do you mean external conflict like Nanking?
Yep, I meant what they did to non-Japanese during their wars, although I am sure that, being authoritarian, they also killed some of their own.
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I would argue that HBD, properly understood, is the least divisive explanation for racial achievement gaps. There are a few competing mainstream explanations:
HBD allows for the possibility that it's nobody's fault. White people aren't keeping black people down. Rich people aren't keeping poor people down (and neither are Jews). And black people don't just need to try harder (obviously this would help any individual on the margin, but it's not the main reason for group disparities).
Some of the more insightful leftists actually understand this, and hate HBD precisely because it offers an alternative to their libelous villain-and-victim narratives. Over the past week or so, I've seen several people "accuse" HBD advocates of being defenders of the "status quo," as if rejecting the idea that society is a conspiracy by whites/rich people/Jews to screw over everyone else were indisputable evidence of bad faith.
HBD also gives us a clear path to a biological fix to a problem that has stubbornly resisted all sociological approaches to remediation. We need to invest much more into understanding the genetics of human intelligence and developing technology for polygenic gene therapy. HBD is a red pill, not a black pill, and it offers a way forward out of this madness.
Edit: Wacky but also kind of serious idea to tide us over until STEMlords save the day: Offer low-SES women free access to semen from high-IQ men, explaining to them that this will give their children a much better chance at succeeding in life and greatly reduce the odds that they'll end up in prison.
Maybe there's a universe where that's true, but it's nowhere close to the one we live in. Even taking it as given that HBD is correct in a descriptive sense, that doesn't come with any set of policy prescriptions. Considering the historical track record a lot of people would be reasonably concerned that HBD conclusions would be used to justify oppression.
Could you give a couple of example? This reeks of "our enemies hate us because they know we're right", which is basically never correct. Every leftist I've ever encountered or read who addresses HBD dislikes it because they see it as reheated 19th century pseudo-science employed by closeted white supremacists.
I've seen about a hundred people express concern over what other people would do if HBD became public knowledge, and about zero people express the idea that we should enshrine racial discrimination in law because of HBD. There's some selection bias here, of course—I don't really hang out in racist forums—but I do think that the idea of equality before the law is deeply enshrined in the modern American consciousness. Pushes for racial discrimination come almost exclusively from the environmentalist left. We do not, in general, endorse restrictions on the rights of people with low intelligence. There's a very strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of, e.g., gating voting behind a test of civic literacy, or sterilizing institutionalized women with severe mental disabilities, who are at elevated risk of sexual abuse and clearly incapable of raising children.
Given that there's extremely strong resistance to any kind of limitations on the rights of individuals with even severe intellectual disabilities, the idea that the public would suddenly decide to restrict the rights of even highly intelligent individuals on the basis of membership in ethnic groups with low average intelligence strikes me as wildly implausible. Meanwhile, the insane overreaction to racial achievement gaps by heredity denialists is a very real problem that we're dealing with right now.
Off the top of my head, I can give you one. The other two recent examples that come to mind would require self-doxxing. Here's Jamelle Bouie on Richard Hanania:
I'm not saying that Bouie has done a deep dive into the evidence, concluded that there is in fact a strong genetic basis for racial achievement gaps, and decided that he has to help cover it up. I'm not saying he hates us because he knows we're right. Frankly, I don't respect him enough to give him that much credit. What I'm saying is that I don't think he cares that much about the science, and that his true objection is that hereditarian explanations for achievement gaps undermine the idea that these gaps are the product of a deliberately rigged economy, and let those bastards off the hook. He's pretty explicit about this.
Well, the internet ate my homework, so now you're getting the abbreviated version.
Long story short, I think he is doing the same thing as you, just in reverse: explaining the traction of HBD by what it does for its adherents. Namely, rationalize their elevated position in society and absolve them of any social duty to people at the bottom. As for why he opposes HBD, I think I nailed it:
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I've seen about zero people suggest the idea that the communist revolution should involve killing millions and yet for some reason it keeps happening. The eugenicists and race realists have a really, really bad track record. It's not much of a jump from "we should discourage low IQ people from reproducing" to "we should prevent low IQ people from reproducing".
But we don't want to discourage low IQ people from reproducing. We just don't want legally mandated racial discrimination via the disparate impact doctrine.
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If we assume any will take you up on the offer(as far as I know getting pregnant from a sperm donor is mostly for wealthy infertile couples and lesbians, and low IQ women who want a baby will just get pregnant from whoever their boyfriend is at the time), you still have to deal with 1) low-IQ genes from the mom and 2) the terrible underclass culture and shitty parenting from poor people. I suspect any kids thus conceived would wind up keeping books for a drug dealer or something, not productive members of society.
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I was totally with you until this paragraph. No we don't. "Fixing" the IQs and abilities of the races flies in the face of nature and history and humanity. Let Asians be smarter. Let black people be better at running. Let everyone be the way nature/God intended them. I don't imagine creepy futurist scientific interventions will be any better than today's misguided progressive interventions, for example distribution of genetic intervention is unlikely to be evenly distributed in the near future.
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There are several environmental factors that can and will probably derail those children from leading a successful life.
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In a vacuum? Not really. It'd almost certainly be preferable if it was just racism or rap music as opposed to the US being saddled with legitimately lower-IQ groups in a time when it matters more than ever.
The problem is that those other explanations and the policies put forward based on them by their supporters haven't closed the gap . Which leads to desperate attempts to save the theory (e.g. now with "model minority myth" and "multiracial white supremacy") and ever greater derangement in general.
This is what a HBDer expects, because they think the gap can't be closed. So we're not operating in a vacuum in this hypothetical - HBD less divisive in a world where HBD actually is true and we won't eventually close the gap.
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I think the problem is HBD sounds fatalistic. There is no “solution.” Some might say “welfare” but that doesn’t really work and has a lot of corrosive side effects. Some say “bad roll of the dice kid” which while true seems heartless. Eugenics has a bad name.
Honestly, I think it goes beyond that. If you admit HBD you're saying a whole bunch of racist assholes were right. A whole bunch of careers and identities and entire movements are pinned on opposing that. And many have burnt their ships in a variety of ways (including doing serious damage to others).
If there was an obvious cure available right now then maybe people would be forced to bite the bullet, but if it's "accept HBD and accept Jefferson was right when he explained the difference between ancient Roman and Negro slaves to justify the situation and...at some point we'll get fiddle with your kids' genes, maybe"...not a good sales tactic.
Yes, yes. I've heard all of the platitudes about "treating people like individuals" or "it doesn't justify what happened", "more variation within groups" (I loved half-Jew, full-elite Sam Harris writing the issue off as irrational cause he's not worried about being less smart than von Neumann, like...fuck off). I don't think it matters.
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That's not "wacky", that's "eugenics" (or "positive eugenics").
It's "reproductive choice." Lefties talk a big game about reproductive choice, but they only want to allow women to choose whether to have children. I want to allow women to choose what kind of children to have. That's real reproductive choice.
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Sadly, the conclusion that 95% draw from historical eugenics movements is not that murder and forced sterilization are bad, but that any attempt to make future generations healthier is bad.
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The systemic part of that doesn't really imply the latter; at least not regarding present day white people. It may be some white people's fault, say slaveowners or Jim Crow politicians, but that isn't especially divisive because no-one defends either of those today. Individual/unconscious bias is a bit divisive, but I don't see why the historical explanations really are.
That's the motte, but people pushing the systemic racism narrative routinely go out of their way to interpret it in ways that make modern white people the villains. The standard response to "I never owned slaves" is "But you benefit from the perpetuation of a system of racial privilege and oppression†." Maybe it's not technically your fault, but it's totally your fault. Also, modern white people are actively perpetuating systemic racism with microaggressions, cultural appropriation, voting to imprison criminals, not voting for reparations, reading to their kids, demanding that high schools teach calculus, etc.
There is some hypothetical systemic racism narrative that scrupulously avoids blaming modern white people just minding their own business, but it's not the one we get in the real world.
†Not actually true; white people would actually be better off if black people started performing at par. Less crime, less welfare dependency, no longer needing to pick up the slack on taxes, etc. We'd still have to deal with opioid addicts, but many of the US's problems would diminish greatly.
Again though, whether you agree with this or not, it still doesn't really imply fault. As an analogous case, I could say that those from richer backgrounds benefit from the perpetuation of entrenched class inequalities, but that doesn't mean I'm suggesting any individual rich person is somehow responsible, as these are systemic problems.
It may be the one you get from a minority of activists etc., but in the mainstream I don't think the 'every white person is complicit' line is that prominent - I don't think you'd ever see it from the vast majority of Democrats.
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I feel deep disconnect with Lind and with what appears to be your beliefs. It is not, in fact, good to lie. It is worse to congratulate yourself for your lies on the basis of some is-ought confusion. The self-servingly populist, paternalistic – no, probably even maternalistic – posture of a portly mother hen shielding her simple-minded salt-of-the-earth «electorate» from «shock jocks» with their nasty statistical tables, which Lind adopts, is despicable; hypocritical, condescending, emasculating and evokes every sadistic impulse I have. So it's a bit hard to engage in good faith.
But, just to remark on one strategic detail.
Turkheimer at al (see e.g. the discussion about HBD trutherism as x-risk factor here) imagine themselves arguing from a place of wise pessimism: they cannot let this infohazard be mainstreamed, the risk of degenerate social developments from its implications in people's minds is too great, thus white lies are necessary. Naturally, this is optimistic about the counterfactual development in the condition of HBD denialism. But more than that, this is wildly and irresponsibly blithe with regard to eventual failure. That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch comes to mind::
Sailer gibes at liberals for the attitude mocked here, and I believe he's literally correct about a fraction: the predilection to High Modernist social engineering schemes plus callousness toward muh inbred Flyover Country hicks and badly hidden fear of «urban youth» (or what's the term now?), if reinforced with a theory of biological differences between groups, would make at least a minority de facto genocidal. But the rest are just making a foolish mistake. Pegging your ideological commitment to a contingent practical fact which does not inform that commitment is bad praxis; is egoism. Do you just double down in on rhetorical suppression, burnishing your Respectable Person creds in the process and hoping it never fails? What if it does and you've cleansed the debate of any principled opposition to that which you're trying to prevent? Your side gets routed. I won't go so far as to say that «anti-eugenicons» create a self-fulfilling prophecy, modern Americans at large really won't be willing to «kill all the poor» or some such. But they are sowing the seeds of chaos and conflict greatly surpassing the current culture war, and they cannot credibly take responsibility for those seeds never sprouting; indeed they cannot even legibly discuss the issue.
I've been observing the AI safety debate lately, and it irritates me there as well: in contrast to doomers with their bizarrely abstract takes on «the space of Optimization Processes in full generality», many AI optimists only have weak arguments contingent on minutiae of engineering and overconfident physical estimates, like «the brain is near Landauer limit already» (it's not, Yud is 100% right it's OOMs from the mark). E.g. George Hotz seems to believe we shouldn't air strike datacenters because AI just can't get that much smarter than George Hotz, certainly not soon. He'll crumple like tissue paper when this is falsified. The creationism debate comes to mind as well.
Denying facts is morally wrong and strategically wrong. You can only do that when your side is so overwhelmingly advantaged, there's no point to caring. Well, this is the case sometimes.
Probably not for American anti-immigrationists, though. Good luck proving to some Vivek Ramaswamy that, since Sailer is a poopyhead and HBD is not true or at least not handshakeworthy, America shouldn't grant citizenship to millions of qualified third Worlders.
(this turned into a bit of a ramble as I'm having trouble expressing this, hope its readable)
I think most of the modern western world is how it is today precisely because of the extreme amounts of information and truth suppression.
I can't argue against the fact that most people in the west genuinely believe every single ounce of propaganda that is poured into their heads. A lot of which isn't just some pie in the sky stuff about morals and ideas but things that are in direct conflict with everyday realities and basic common sense. Yet people either believe the propaganda or contextualize what their lying eyes are seeing to not go against the broad narrative of the propaganda.
Propaganda works. Lying works. If I want mass immigration from the third world, what truth can aid me? Why rely on any truth? Why hope that the masses share my grand and noble vision for the EuroAfrican future when they are so short sighted and stupid? I can just lie to them and they will eat it up like children watching a toy commercial.
I don't believe this is an issue you overcome with ideals and values about truth. If you want society to function, you lubricate it with lies. This works. I want my society to function. I don't want mass immigration. Why contort myself to fit the truth into the heads of those who don't want to bear it? Just replace the lie already in their heads with another one.
I guess what I am trying to get at there is that I don't believe in human ontological moral innocence. I have no reason to believe that, if left alone, people will gravitate towards good. That if I remove one layer of lies there is a truth waiting under it. That under the skin of these ethno-masochist bobble heads there is a National Socialist waiting to be free.
I want European ethnicities to continue to express themselves, evolve, survive and thrive. I genuinely don't have a 'true' argument for why Estonia shouldn't be flooded with brown people.. Sure, I might believe it will be bad and that non-stop mass immigration will lead to the end of the native ethnic expression of themselves, both culturally and genetically, but... What even is that? My belief? Why do I care? Why should it be more important than the belief of EU bureaucrats on the goodness of EuroAfrica? I've never even met an Estonian. What if someone doesn't share my belief? What if they already believe the propaganda that diversity is our strength and that Estonia will be better after a few million third worlders?
To put it another way, it literally doesn't matter to me how truly statistically bad my ingroup is. So long as they are my ingroup I care about them. Anyone trying to get me to dislike my ingroup through statistics and crime rates is evil. And me not bowing down to their tricks is noble and good. As an example: It's bad for your economy. Ok, to borrow your own line of thinking, would it be good to ethnically replace Estonians if it was good for the economy? What if I just believed that being open to mass immigration was what made me a good person. Is that true? Would that belief offset the truth of mass immigration being bad for the economy? I mean, what good is an economy for if it's not bettering the lives of people.
To reach some conclusion from this ramble, truth just isn't a part of the game here. Even if you care about it. It's just your personal preference. It's not more inherently valuable than the 'delusions' of your outgroup. And more importantly, the mechanism by which you get people to believe in the truth is not necessarily based on any truth.
I might not like Eric Turkheimer and I might personally despise his brazen lies. But on a bigger picture level, where we drop our own ego and just look at the world as it is, guys like him and Lind are much closer to having their truth out there than any boorish HBD truth seeker ever will be, and they are more honest and self aware of their intention. They represent something good. World peace, the working class, human dignity, being kind. Your justifications, on the other hand, are what? Truth uber alles, because... It will out someday, probably? And it's good anyway even if it might be bad after all the lies we told about it?
My question to you and someone like Sailer would be this: Who will enforce the view that we shouldn't kill all the untermensch after the truth gets out? Why should someone believe that when the truth is that they are parasites making the lives of everyone else worse? Surely we should ensure, with propaganda, that people believe the 'correct' thing, right?
It seems rather straight forward to me that you would do this by doing the exact thing Turkheimer and friends have been doing for decades.
The alternative to HBD is not people treating each other well, it's the continued search for a reason that some groups do worse than others. I think you may be aware of some of the other popular theories and they imply some troubling things.
Can you speak more plainly? What are the other popular theories you're talking about?
Active and widespread racial discrimination seems like a pretty popular theory.
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«Looking at the world as it is». What is that if not truth? Even in denying its value, you can't make do without it.
As for me, I just like truth as a terminal good, and certainly I prefer the triumph of truth to the survival of Estonians as a distinct people (though as you observe, not even Estonians care very much; and individually they will be mostly fine either way). I straightworwardly like honest people more and want societies to have more honest people. The notion of in-group favoritism is not alien to me, but I despise «my people» who turn out to be egregious liars, mostly lose interest in their welfare and exclude them from the ingroup. So this is a matter of value differences.
On a meta level,
If you do not feel that there's anything but arbitrary particularism to your values, then I advise you go find better values. This is my major problem with hidebound European nationalisms: what are you lot even defending? Senile sentimentalism? Loyalty to a land and bodies buried within, like some lamb visiting his mother's grave? «Uh we want there to be Estonians/Finns/Romanians in the future» – who the hell should care any more about enabling that than Eliezer Yudkowsky cares about an alien obsessed with computing SHA256 hashes of audios of cows mooing? If you cannot give birth to a single philosopher capable of making an intellectually non-vacuous case for your contribution to the canvas of the Universe that justifies you not just dissolving in a greater body, how do you hope to contend with elite bureaucrats appealing to universal humanism and other overpowered ethical principles? Especially if they already hold the levers of propaganda. Even tactically: how do you intend to lie, and to whom?
But a) I could make a case for the survival of distinct peoples, even Estonians and b) I also believe that my values correspond to instrumental advantages. Truth offers a way out of local minima and toward a higher Pareto boundary for all players.
Say, @Skibboleth claims above:
Well, it that were true in any way that matters, we'd probably see less resistance to it. And worries about some future turn to Eugenic National Socialism are not remotely the concern – compared to the immediate implications which offend leftists. Namely: Affirmative Action discredited, «it's about inssuficient school spending» laughed out of the room, «systemic racism holding them down» debunked (together with the entire civic religion built around white guilt), «immigrants will assimilate and become productive just fine» goes down the drain and so on. All those translate to policy proposals, from an even more vigorous rooting out of obfuscated AA to rebalancing of budgets and policing to more merit-based immigration. This might seem bad for the leftist's case which you seem to understand as basically «brown people deserve more nice stuff». But I think their case is a degenerate, compromise-riddled implementation of their defensible and popular intuitions about fairness and justice. Redistributing jobs to «marginalized minorities» with the goal of breaking path-dependent poverty does not work; but you can still redistribute wealth, and you'd have more wealth to redistribute if you optimally allocate jobs. Sure, one can argue that without the promise of returns, charity is harder to solicit. But do people in the current year seriously understand AA as investment? I think this hard-nosed optimism is a polite fiction, a tribute to last vestiges of Protestant ethic. It dies, along with boomers.
Crucially, though, I return to the tactical issue of «whom do you lie to?» It is ironic that your cynical viewpoint is also very democratic. You think you need to convince «the plebs» to enact policies on their behalf, but is this true? Do they not tolerate poorly justified mistreatment, only ineffectually grumbling or sometimes burning shit on the streets, if the entire Professional-Managerial Class is on the same page and moves swiftly through the playbook?
So I contend that to get anywhere, you need to win the favor of Elite Human Capital. And you cannot, not from the battered position of some nativist or white identitarian, do that without intellectually sound arguments. To develop those, yes, you need truth.
Great post.
I have never heard AA framed as an investment before but now that I think about it it's actually a great framing. Growing up around lower to middle class white people in the midwest everyone I knew hated AA and resented it but if I'd been around in the 60s and thought of it as an investment for society I might have actually supported it. It's appealing: Why not give better opportunities to 15% of the population? Shouldn't we invest in those people, to make peace with them and so they can have a greater contribution to our society? It sounds great on paper.
Of course the situation as it works out just reinforces the importance of telling the truth about things.
For clarity, it was only in the early noughts that it stopped being viewed as an investment. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing - it definitely generated more support for the idea, in line with your reasoning, but it also had a tempering effect, giving it structure and a more results focused viewpoint which would never have tolerated the policy of wishful thinking that currently appears to prop up AA.
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Can you clarify your stance on two questions for me?
The reason I ask is because you talk about caring for your ingroup regardless of other things. Which is not necessarily a problem. If I were told that something boosted my local economy, this would not be the sole factor in my view of that thing. But you seem to be going down the route of always supporting the ingroup.
Both 1 and 2 are a yes.
But on top of that, always supporting the ingroup is what everyone is doing. The argument that Africans will improve the Estonian economy is not there to say that your outgroup will benefit your ingroup. It's there to make you believe Africans are now a part of your ingroup.
If I believe Africans are of my ingroup the question of the factual economic realities of mass immigration from Africa are irrelevant. Insofar as one believes more people of ones ingroup will 'enrich' ones societies, which is definitionally what one would believe if they were a part of your ingroup, the rest follows naturally.
The act of 'telling a lie' in this context is just a protection of the truth from the outgroup. As an example: I might understand someone to be against mass immigration from Africa. But that's genuinely only because they are bigoted. Which is true. They might say that Africans are bad for the economy. I object to this on a basis that it's untrue in some sense. Because my greater truth, derived from the fact Africans are a part of my ingroup, trumps everything else.
I think this becomes apparent when lib/left/progressives go from supporting mass immigration because its good to implying that it's a punishment when challenged too much on the factual premise of the alleged benefits of mass immigration. They do believe mass immigration is good for them and their ingroup. And if it's bad for their outgroup then that's also good for them.
I find it hard to call this sort of thing a lie. More that, when it comes to the ingroup, we tell the truth, and when it comes to the outgroup, we protect ourselves.
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If HBD is such a dangerous position that it cannot be allowed to be popularized, either because it will be used against the working class, or because it will be abused by the working class - then the broad spectrum suppression requires policing the left flank that attempts to do "corrective" racial discrimination in the opposite direction, so that race can be maintained at a lower standard of relevance for most people.
This is where the Turkheimers and Linds of the world have, in my opinion, really fumbled the ball. I think there are a sprinkling of people who are both anti-HBD and against the "corrective" racial discrimination advanced by the 'social justice' ideology, but they don't seem to have enough power to enforce this view at this time - except, perhaps, for the Supreme Court.
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The article starts with so much sneering and name-calling that I wasn't sure if it was worth continuing. But I find a rare opportunity to defend a progressive (not woke but the more financially-focused ones) claim, so that's something unusual.
Eh, that's almost a tautology. There's no reason to control for that. Nobody who finds it a problem that blacks have less wealth would find "well, that's because they're more likely to be lower-class" to make it better. Controlling for (e.g.) age makes sense. Controlling for class controls out something you're looking for.
Now on to other things.
"Unscientific" is just a boo-word here. But "arbitrary"? No. They have fuzzy boundaries, yes, but in practice they are not arbitrary. Chances are very good that a Spanish-speaking immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country, or their Spanish-speaking children, will call themselves "Hispanic". As for the racial categories, we know from this astounding study that they (at least white, black, and Asian) correlate incredibly well with something physical and pervasive -- race can be determined from medical images of different parts of the body even when either the detail or gross structural information is removed.
Four, actually, he forgot Adriatic. But these were considered sub-races of Caucasians, so even if the beliefs of the scientific racialists were relevant (which they aren't), the gotcha doesn't work.
He then goes on to more sneering, taking an exchange between Razib Khan and Steve Sailer in VDare (which has no pretensions of being a scientific journal) as being somehow representative of 'race-realist “science”'.
It won't be done by "actual scientists" because it's taboo, which leaves plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked up by "right-wing shock jocks poring over statistical". Because some of this stuff isn't subtle at all. Sailer's prediction (that Lind sneers at) that "Eurasian" kids in the future would do very well on the SAT-M and would thus prosper in the technology-dominated economy was made in the year 2000; it could be tested NOW by serious scientists. But they won't, because it's taboo. Especially if it turns out to be true.
I'm not familiar with the historical Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean/Adriatic classification system, but it corresponds pretty well to the clear pattern of differences between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan (and Slavic more generally) countries. The North Germanic and West Germanic distinction is a bit more subtle, but it's still there.
I don't have a strong opinion on how much of this is genetic and how much is cultural or otherwise path-dependent, but if you look at HDI rankings, there is almost a complete disjunction between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan countries.
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I think your last paragraphs sum it up for me, it would be a fascinating topic for me if you had visibility of scientists arguing science at the individual issue level, so that you could get a sense of the thing. Instead you have people many levels up with their understanding and particular biases and material is locked into that frame, which actually limits inquiry and learning.
The same goes for global warming, there is actually a real world phenomenon of global warming (to whatever degree, causes and impact that it is) and funnily enough reality doesn't care about what the left or right happens to think about the issue. But the debate is culture warred out - people tend to start with their politics and build out from there and so we don't really progressed, it gets frozen in time.
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It's a shame Lind carries all these low quality anti-HBD viewpoints and sneers into his article. A guy like him genuinely has inroads with "eugenicons" like the ones he mentions due to his well fought anti-immigration effort.
Even as a soft Marxist materialist he has salient arguments backing up his anti-immigration position that could easily be leveraged into a critique of 'blind' HBD promotion.
The most obvious point he could hammer home would be the fact that a lot of the anti-immigration rhetoric from the right in general revolves around it being bad for the working class. Well, can't we, for the sake of argument, assume that dropping HBD on the working class might also, potentially, be bad? That seems to be a belief of Lind's and I wish he would spend more time on expanding on it rather than fumbling the ball on HBD.
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I mean in fairness ‘academic success of hapa children’ is totally the sort of thing that could be studied if it was framed right(paens to ‘unintentionally benefitting from white supremacy’ or whatever).
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