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This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences. I would prefer a world where when we encountered uneqial outcome we carefully considered both possibilities. Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility
Absolutely!
The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other. Not only is that a priori unlikely, we definitely definitely don't have clean enough data to make such a claim (in either direction) at teh moment.
Well, that's the thing - what 'policies' are recommended by the HBD hypothesis?
Like (ad absurdum here), we could stop bothering to educate women and black people at all, or funnel them into home ec/trade schools, but that seems clearly discriminatory and not really how you should react to small differences in population averages where the distributions have tons of overlap.
Would the policy just be 'stop trying to push diversity at all, because any differences are probably genetic and ok'? But that's assuming all differences are genetic, which is the opposite of carefully considering both possibilities, and makes no sense in the most-likely world where both factors contribute to outcomes.
The thing is, if discrimination exists the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight it, and if genetic differences exist the correct policy is probably to just do nothing and let the market sort itself out.
So if you think that some discrimination and some genetic difference both exist, then the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight discrimination, and that's it!
(or, fight discrimination but less strongly than we would in the world with zero genetic differences. But we don't have a measure of 'how strongly to fight discrimination in a hypothetical world', we just have directional policies that fight discrimination or don't, so we can't really distinguish policy agendas between those two worlds)
Anyone pushing for something other than that seems like they are making assumptions about discrimination not existing, or the genetic differences being way stronger and more universal than we have any evidence for.
Which is where the shaming comes in.
I hope you realize that almost all of these people are on the anti-hbd side. Even big names like Rushton and Jensen said they thought IQ gaps were only 50-80% genetic.
As far as policy goes I support doing everything based off test scores and keeping all judgements as colorblind as possible. The only place where hbd comes in at all is just not being shocked and acting like the system is failing when the low preforming group is disproportionately black.
See the rest of my previous comment after that sentence for my reply. That's what the whole thing was about.
My point was, if you are against any attempts to account for and correct for institutional discrimination, then you are in effect behaving as though you believe it doesn't exist and all outcome gaps are only caused by innate differences.
That may not be your explicitly endorsed belief about the world, but it's implicit in your policy preferences; they don't make sense in a world where that's not true.
And I do think it's mostly the hbd side which falls into that category.
I'm not opposed policies which attempt to stop institutional didcrimination. What I'm opposed to is policies that pretend to be stopping institutional duscrimination but are actually just opening the door to discrimination in the other direction.
I support removing names/ethnicities and other identifying information from applications, relying heavily on standardized test scores for college and aptitude tests for jobs etc. All of these policies reduce the opportunity for a bigoted boss or admissions officer to discriminate against a qualified applicant because of their race.
Liberals just don't like these policies because they know from experience what results they'll produce but they're still policies directed at reducing discrimination
Are you in favor of making it illegal to hire someone you already know previous to getting the application? Are you in favor of making it illegal to promote people within a company where their boss already knows them? Are you against putting college names on applications, since some of them are historically black or women-only?
I assume not, that would be silly, which demonstrates how you can't really have race/gender blind hiring/promotion at any scale.
Which is why advocating for that as our primary way to fight discrimination, again, pattern-matches to only caring about hbd: 'I suggest we fight discrimination using this policy, which is nearly impossible to achieve in principle, and I don't intend to even try passing the extreme measures that would be needed to achieve it,' means the same thing as 'I propose we don't fight discrimination'.
It also ignores the ways in which test scores and other parts of the resume can be affected by things other than ability (real easy to get a stellar resume when your parents network do-nothing internships for you at their yacht club), which again is a major part of the systemic discrimination that people chalk up most of the problem to, that you're ignoring in your policy.
And the thing about that it is, you can't actually send government agents into yacht clubs as surrogate parents to underprivileged youths in order to network for them. The real world is too complicated for you to actually correct those differences in opportunity and experience at the source like that.
The only policies to address that type of thing which can actually be implemented are ones that assume a bias exists, and explicitly corrects for it at a single specific layer, such as hiring. I agree that this approach is distasteful, the utopian dream where we can intervene at other places until test scores are perfect metrics of ability would be a nicer world to live in, it's just not the world we actually live in.
People who believe that part of the gap is still from discrimination of various types (again, not just explicit individual bigotry, we did mostly correct that already) and want to actually do something about, end up having to bite that bullet.
People who won't bite that bullet are revealing either their priorities (the problem is real but not worth solving at that cost) or their beliefs (there's no problem because the gap is 'natural'), and the outcome for policy and for people is the same regardless of which it is.
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