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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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