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Notes -
Richard Hanania writes we need to shut up about HBD.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
He defines HBD as believing:
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
And he goes on to criticize 2-4. I tend to agree with those criticisms, but I think it’s fairly common in these kinds of circles to believe a version of 2 focused on ideological competition, not between racial groups, where the social justice left and its preferred policies to rectify group differences can only be defeated by using the facts to explain group differences that won’t be rectified through policy.
While I accept Hanania’s point that the facts frequently don’t matter in which political ideas rise to the top, I still feel like Cofnas has a point (whom Hanania is responding to).
I’m quite philosemetic, for example. The best argument against antisemitism based on observing Jewish overperformance and concluding it’s due to some kind of plot is explaining that intelligence matters and the Ashkenazim underwent a particular history and we now observe them having very high average test scores.
Hanania himself wrote not so long ago about how Jewish personality traits might be needed to fully explain their political interest and influence, beyond just intelligence.
Using biology to explain overperformance but not underperformance seems like a strange compromise.
In much of today’s polite society, if one points out the achievement gap among groups, you’re a racist.
But if one doesn’t acknowledge the achievement gap between groups to justify affirmative action, you’re a racist.
And that’s without even mentioning biology! Watching lefties like Kathryn Paige Harden and Freddie deBoer try to (admirably) describe these kinds of issues while trying to remain in the good graces of polite society is enlightening.
Now, if you could guarantee me a return to a more race-blind culture and legal system if we shut up about genetics then I would take that. But we are on a path towards learning the murky details of (and being able to influence) genetics of both groups and individuals. I don’t think the elephant in the room will stay quiet.
It’s a bit remarkable to read Hanania write:
I think he means, “talk about something publicly” as opposed to at all, but actually I’ll easily bite those bullets and say we ought to understand the disadvantages short men face due to female preferences and that we ought to know just how much we expend society’s resources on the severely handicapped.
Social desirability bias is incredibly powerful and one should choose one’s battles. Polite society in the West went from being quite racist, in ways that didn’t always align with the facts, to correcting hard (thanks, Hitler) to race is only skin deep, which also doesn’t align. And then we got the influence of Kendiism.
Even ignoring immigration (where he doesn’t cover the Garret Jones stance), a lot of US politics comes down to this issue, and HBD was mostly in a quietist tradition the last few decades with little influence for being outside the Overton Window.
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts. Conceding the present Overton Window is unassailable is I think conceding defeat to the social justice left.
Hanania says:
But that's exactly what has happened, no?
Anyway. I believe that there are very few people writing cogently and effectively on any given topic, and they all know each other, so the bulk of discourse is advanced essentially by conspiracies. I think there's some Discord group where Hanania, Karlin, Yglesias and other such edgy dorks hang out. I suspect that some time ago – maybe around Scott's disappearance – they've concluded that the right is doomed politically (for reasons Trace describes with regard to the GOP) and just decided to cut their losses, concocting some compromise vision and rhetorical tradition. What we observe now is a product of that covenant – bloodless, by-the-letter, superficially reasonable essays that may feel very fresh to a tired culture warrior, but also make flimsy arguments that prove them having engaged in a bit of lobotomy as a gesture of goodwill to the liberal-progressive hegemony they wish to be forgiven by.
Rather than this schlock, I'd rather read Hanania's Discord messages.
btw
https://twitter.com/nooceleration/status/1760765496218026264
Tfw Karlin has no idea who Scott Alexander is.
I'm also not 100% certain about "Scott's disappearance". Do you mean immediately following the doxxing threat until he reemerged a few months later, or do you mean ongoing since the doxxing (ie, metaphorically, old Scott never came back).
Karlin (and Hanania) definitely know who Scott Alexander is, it's probably just not immediately salient to them that he went dark for a few months 4 years ago.
The former; I believe he wasn't literally non-existent back then, after all. I think this was the private start of this Great Reconciliation with the Big Brother discourse, which eventually made its way from the apex (Scottsphere) to the less plugged-in pundits.
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I came across this, too. It's not quite "Senpai noticed me," but it's definitely indicative of some lurkers.
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I think what happened is that Moldbug and BAP’s stuff (and to an extent Hanania’s) worked ‘so well’ and (often via Scott and others) was read by a broad enough - though still small proportionally - slice of ‘the elite’ (tech billionaires, powerful political donors, influential media figures like Yglesias and Klein, some people on Wall Street) that they began to be invited to actually meet these people. And when they did they realized what would be required to effect genuine political change, and realized that there was simply no way it was going to happen through either the established Trumpist or mainstream conservative movements in the US. Moldbug always knew this, to some extent, the only thing to be done is to convince elites, which is disastrous because progressivism is a patrician ideology designed to appeal to them. Smart reactionaries, people who aren’t tradlite evangelical Christians with two sons in the US military, these people (‘blue tribe’, whatever) are always going to be outsiders on the American right. They’re always going to be thrown under the bus. They don’t have Trump’s magnetic charisma and TV personality. Their natural constituency is people who already have great power and wealth, and so they move to them.
I think the biggest black pill for them was abortion, though. The right finally wins a great cultural victory decades in the making that requires the meticulous coordination of multiple Republican presidents over 30+ years, extensive lobbying, the invention of a whole legal apparatus in the Federalist Society to funnel anti-abortion lawyers into the judiciary and the participation of countless Christian movements and churches. And it was all to slightly reduce the number of poor black women having abortions. That was the great American conservative victory of the 21st century, the towering achievement. Nothing could be more of a black pill than that.
Man, that’s a good description of what a hollow and expensive victory it was.
But it was the strongest motivator for conservatives to try so hard for court control, and that is likely to pay dividends in other issues even if it hurts GOP elections (until they moderate down to safe/legal/rare).
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There are a ton of private discords and groupchats, but unfortunately the quality of discussion is usually the same or worse as what people post on their main accounts ime. And a lot of what seems like coordinated action is just people independently coming to similar conclusions.
Even BAP has, for whatever reason, made posts recently about how race and IQ/HBD is politically doomed. Imagine him and Yggy plotting together.
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Maybe, but Hanania harps on about the virtues of free markets a bit too much for me to believe that this is all just some shtick to deflect from his now-known past as a 4chan edgelord. I figure he's probably hiding a bit the extent to which he is a Hoppe-type libertarian, but I also think that his professed faith in free markets and meritocracy is probably largely genuine, not just an attempt to cover his political goal of ending discrimination law and bringing about free association.
I think that to some extent, he might also be leaning into his particular niche of being a provocative writer who gets engagement by pissing off both the left and the right - an activity that he seems to personally relish anyway, so it's not entirely a shtick.
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