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As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.
Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.
I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"
This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.
No it is not.
Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...
...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.
Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)
Less charitably you are simply lying.
Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,
[…]
I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.
Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.
…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:
etc. etc.
You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.
Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?
The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.
What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".
If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".
So is your excuse simply that this shit is your nature and no amount of educational efforts can fix you? A bit inconsistent given the argument you advance, innit?
No, I'm saying some level of reciprocity is required, or proverbial carrot provided, if you want me to choose "cooperate" after the other guys have already chosen "defect".
I actually recall the precise moment the switch flipped, and I stopped considering the HBDers here worthy of engagement. It was summer of 2021 during CW discussion of the NFL's "race norming" scandal and a number prominent HBDers (including a few who are still active today) defended the practice of artificially lowering the scores of high performing black individuals as necessary to "improve accuracy". After all if HBD is true, and a black man scored well it must be because the test was flawed and not because that individual black man in question might have actually been smart.
I pointed out that that if you have data that falsifies a theory, you're supposed to update the theory not the data, only to receive a bunch of downvotes, snide comments about my lack of intellectual bone-fides, and lectures about distributions, set theory, etc... Yet the whole time the simple fact that these guys were (by their own admission) editing observational data to support a pre-arrived-at conclusion was sitting there staring me in the face. Given that, why would I trust anything further they had to say?
That out of the way I will give you a chance to start a new hopefully more cooperative cycle by offering you (and anyone else who cares to chime in) the same basic case against HBD that I've been making since we started having these discussions in the open comments section of SSC.com.
HBDers like to claim individual and environmental factors largely don't matter and that everything can be boiled down to genetics. When I observe the world around me, I find that exceedingly hard to believe. My go-to example is that someone can have all the genetic potential in the world and still end up a flabby bastard if they don't eat well or work-out. Or in the case of the linked thread, all the genetic potential in the world isn't going to make a kid read well if nobody teaches them to read. From these simple observations I have arrived at the conclusion that the effect sizes of individual/environmental factors like having an engaged adult who teaches the kid to read, or getting off one's ass and going to the gym are far more predictive of outcome, and thus must have substantially greater effect sizes than that of genetics assuming such effects exist at all.
The replies I get (assuming anyone engages at all) are typically something along the lines of "Maybe, but if we control for all those other factors, genetics will be the only one left". And that's often where the conversation, breaks down because they haven't actually adressed my claim about effect sizes, they're just explaining what the term "Controlling for" means.
The statement that "If we eliminate all considerations that are not X, X will be the only consideration remaining." Is a tautology, not a proof that "X" is true, or that "X" is more meaningful than "Y".
This is incorrect. There was a billion dollar lawsuit, and in a settlement the NFL had to pay based on estimates of the loss in cognitive function caused by concussions. The 'race-norming' was assuming that black people (with concussions) started from lower IQs than white people, to reduce the NFL's payouts. Which is reasonable, because large-scale IQ testing of black people does find they have lower IQs. They are not claiming that the black person is 'too smart', and his IQ should be adjusted down. They're claiming that he has the average IQ of a black person, not a white person, and thus his score of (past IQ - current IQ), i.e. his IQ loss, should be adjusted down. Again, you persistently mischaracterize the statements of your opponents, instead of engaging with their arguments.
Can you make a direct analogy for the cases of education and income here, so we can address it directly?
It's very relevant that we have phones, school-provided tablets, libraries, and closed-caption tv shows. These massively equalize the 'environment' people experience relative to the past!
What's an intervention that you think would have a comparable effect size to genetics?
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