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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.
I don't have time for this right now, but I'll leave my flag in the sand and say HBD is wrong. I'll just leave this quote here I found on reddit that does the same job as me taking the time:
If you have no reason to put a particular prior on a distribution a Gaussian is absolutely the best one to go for (because for a given mean and variance it is the maximum entropy distribution).
Besides, we do have good reasons for why intelligence should be Gaussian: if something is an aggregate of lots of different additive factors (which pretty much everyone agrees intelligence is) then by the central limit theorem the combined thing will be gaussian.
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I think it's clearly true that humans are a lot less biodiverse than is possible or normal for other species, and that the range in human cognitive ability and behavior would be a lot larger if older human populations were still around.
I mean, some African subpopulations seem to do a lot better than other African subpopulations, but it's reasonable to compare American whites to American blacks even if you don't generalize that to all of Africa so I don't think this proves much. I think it's reasonable to not expect the properties of American blacks to generalize to Africa, but that isn't the core of HBD so whatever.
This is kinda ridiculous. You can tell what a non-mixed person's ancestry is by looking at them. There are extremely clear associations, you can get something looking like a map of europe by doing (something like a) PCA on genetic variation. Yeah, there's no single entirely correct categorization, but no single entirely correct categorization exists for fish either, and I think we can talk about fish. And different ancestry groups have differences in so many different traits - skin color, kinds of athleticism, body shape, hair, etc etc etc - that it's not implausible there'd be a statistical difference in intelligence.
... I mean, there's a whole literature on this, but IQ tests have strong associations with achievement and capability in every area. And just like, anecdotally, I can personally observe that some people are clearly much smarter than other people. And, funnily enough, when I get these people I know to take IQ tests, the ones I judged as clearly much smarter score ~130+, and those that I didn't don't.
No, this is because valuable complex traits are highly polygenic - many different genes have a small effect on the trait. This is because any variant that has a strong positive or negative effect is highly selected for/against, so the only genes with remaining variance have small effects.
The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.
So, this is a subtle trick. The comment's been attacking several things as foundational to HBD - the construct validity of IQ, the relevance of heritability, genetic explanations for traits like intelligence and personality that are claimed to be genetic, the relationship between genes and race. And then we say "HBD operates outside academia and is unknown in genomics". This is true, if HBD means "race genetically causes low IQ". It is profoundly and either maliciously or negligently false if we take HBD to include the validity of IQ, polygenic scores, and the heritability of and genetic explanations for intelligence. Those are well studied and in significant part accepted in academia. The positions this comment takes, especially about the validity and heritability of IQ, are not what is currently believed in academia.
... okay? This is "every progressive organization was funded by SOROS, a globalist jew who loves criminals and hates wites" tier. Funding doesn't make something false, Soros has funded plenty of good causes.
Yep, and anti-HBD people do bad things too. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the big names! Or consider modern research policies that just ... ban the use of biobanks to research the relationship between race and IQ.
I'll also link you to this, which probably does a better job than me, but I like writing anyway.
And if this is all too abstract and not connecting, try this - for a direct demonstration of one of the practical consequences of HBD, jewish overrepresentation. Once you've seen it it's hard to stop seeing it. But it's not necessarily a (((conspiracy))), they're just smart.
Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.
There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/
And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.
To be clear, do you acknowledge that the motivated reasoning is present both ways?
Yes absolutely.
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Those would show up as shared environment in twin/adoption/sibling studies. We see, universally, low shared environment in every research method tried. These hypotheses have been tested and found wanting.
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Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.
Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.
I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.
The simple way to settle this would be to:
A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.
Has anyone actually done this?
As described before, the are thousands of variants responsible for variation in intelligence in existing populations (as distinct from 'responsible for intelligence', there are many more nucleotides sequences that are necessary for intelligence and don't have any variation in the population because you're disabled or dead without them). This is the only paper I could find: http://pfigshare-u-files.s3.amazonaws.com/2134951/NineHits__3_5.pdf and there's a graph inside it which shows that the populations HBDers claim are low IQ have lower polygenic scores for intelligence. Now, it's just one paper, I think it's as likely to be biased/wrong as it is to be meaningful. There isn't more research into this because as I said it's considered racist, and in order to do a proper study you'd need a lot of biobanks and research approval to get the data, and they don't want you to be racist. They even restrict research that's only tangentially related: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
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You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?
There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.
See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity
Yes, this is true.
Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?
Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.
My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.
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There's plenty of room in the human genome for large differences in polygenic traits or Japanese and Norwegians would be the same average height.
Edit: Not to pile on to this comment excessively, because this applies equally well to many others, but posts like this were what really turned me into an HBD guy. You present a fully general argument against population level genetic differences in literally anything, apparently without noticing that there are plenty of such differences that are completely uncontroversial.
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People often mean very different things when they say "most common ancestor".
Do you mean the person such that every single person living today has as an ancestor somewhere in their family tree? This person is a mere 3,000 years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html
Do you mean the time from which every person living back then was an ancestor to everyone living today. That's about 7,000 years as you mentioned.
Do you mean the person from which a certain locus in all modern living humans descends from? This person is about 50,000 years ago (this is highly dependent on the locus though)
Do you mean the person from which all of a large block of the DNA of all living people comes from? This person is about 300,000 years ago (see e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam, the guy who all modern extant Y-chromosomes are descended from) and isn't even an anatomically modern human.
Do you mean the person from which all of our DNA is descended from? This organism is many many millions of years old and isn't even human.
The first two cases really don't mean much when looking at modern humans. For instance you could have gotten a fragment of Chromosome 1 from this person while I got a fragment of Chromosome 17 from this person (if we even got any DNA from him in the first place, which in itself is pretty unlikely), and it's perfectly possible that people living in East Asia preferentially got Chromosme 1 fragments from him while people in Europe got Chromosome 17 fragments from him (because his descendeds which moved to those locations carried those specific parts of his genome there).
Same with the second case, just because every human being at that point was both our's ancestors doesn't mean anything about what proportion of those ancestors we have and these proportions can be very different, from Wikipedia:
It's the third and further things which matter for how much genetic variance there is between two groups, becuase at that point you can directly point to specific portions of the genome and say that for both of us that ancestor provided the DNA at this location.
Those numbers are way too low.
The 3000, if you read the link you put, is using a way oversimplified model.
The 7000 is clearly false given the separation of the Americas long before that, and very low rates of admixture since aside from the last 500 years.
You don't actually need to have any DNA from any specific people generations back in your ancestry, the recombination could and often does go the wrong way.
Your overall point is good, though, that things go far enough back to matter, and that mere common ancestry doesn't mean an enormous amount.
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I don't know enough about all the points to literally refute every one, but everything I can understand about what's written here is almost complete nonsense.
The very first thing:
Almost all experts agree that people were in North America 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that this may have happened even significantly earlier. That someone could claim that ~7000 years would be enough for everyone currently on earth to share an ancestor is self-evidently completely nonsensical.
The claim above is nonsense, but not nonsense for the reason you are saying. 5,000-15,000 years is roughly the time for all humans to share ancestors. Plus the identical ancestors point doesn't mean those people were your ancestors, it's either they were your ancestor or have no living descendents today.
However just because you share ancestors doesn't mean you get DNA from them in equal amounts, or that you even get DNA from them at all (for context given how recombination works you have ancestors a mere 500 years ago you don't carry any DNA from, indeed you don't carry any DNA from almost all of your ancestors 500 years ago). From the Wikipedia page on the identical ancestors point (I recommend reading it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point
Add in the fact that somone who appears only once in your family tree 7000 years ago has basically a < 10^-50 (or thereabouts) chance of contributing DNA to you living today we can pretty safely say that modern Japanese people do not have any genetic ancestry from Norwegians because as I said above geneological ancestry and genetic ancestry are not the same.
The differing proportions in how much of your ancestors were living in place X vs Y at the identical ancestors point still lead to large scale group geographic phenotypic differences, even though everyone has the same ancestors (as a set, but not in proportion of their genetics that made it down to you) not too far back in the past.
Honestly someone who knows about the identical ancestors point but then does not mention the differing proportions is sending off a massive red flag that they are acting in bad faith because they are absolutely smart/well read enough to know better. I wouldn't trust much of whatever else comes after they wrote that.
That feels impossible. From a quick google:
I think the ~5k-15k number is a theoretical number that one comes up with if one ignores selection, geographical barriers, and anything else that makes mating not some kind of random walk.
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See:
Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
In a nutshell, if you take a White or Asian person, they are about as different or as similar as say two White people are.
Most variation is neutral and due to genetic drift and the accumulation of, new, mostly neutral allele variants. This doesn't change the fact that people can vary genetically on socially relevant traits like height, IQ and skin color despite being genetically similar.
Amazonians are relatively light skinned, but nearly identical genetically to their dark skinned Peruvian neighbors. Both Europeans and North East Asians are light skinned due to convergent evolution despite their large genetic differences. Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians, because they have a lot Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry from people who used to live in Siberia, the same as Europeans.
Yet they don't look or act more like Europeans than the North East Asians do, because of culture and selection and the fact most variation is neutral.
wrong e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png
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I'm pretty sure you're wrong on this, Amerindians are somewhat closer to East Asians than Europeans. People living in Siberia weren't same as Europeans. and Amerindians are product of mixing of Siberians and proto-East Asians.
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Yep, two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10 phenotypically important loci will present much more differently to each other than two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10,000 neutral loci.
Counting all loci as being equally contributing to differences in phenotype between separated groups misses the fact that the common differences between two groups have been selected to disproportionately have phenotypic impacts.
Hence you can't compare a mutation on a locus that's different between populations X and Y vs a mutation that some people in Y have and others don't and they say the impact the mutation has on the individual must be similar in both cases, hence that mutation makes people just as phenotypically different as the one which segregates the two populations.
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Iff you consider only a small fraction of differences.
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Sure, but this isn't super relevant, since there clearly is variation? We know a bunch of traits are heritable and vary between individuals.
This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.
People conflate a small handful of groups (Khoekhoe, Hadza, Pygmies, etc.) that are actually very diverse and different with subsaharan Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, I believe it is still true of subsaharan Africa that it's more diverse. But I don't think it matters. When the question is "can I treat this as a group to run statistics on", you can pretty much always do that, with whatever group you care about (left handed people would work just fine, and they aren't even endogamous). But it's also closer than that, as my impression was that in general, most subsaharan africans were more closely related to other (non-exotic) subsaharan africans than they are to the people who left Africa. That could be wrong, though.
Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.
I've been led to believe that g is one of the psychological findings that holds up best. IQ tests are meant to measure "that statistical thing over there that shows up in everything."
I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.
Okay? Your point?
A whole lot of traits are very polygenic, and it makes sense that intelligence would be one of those. I don't get the point of your last sentence. Are you really arguing that "genetics is complicated, therefore it can't be genetic"?
It was my impression that the epigenetics stuff was pseudoscience. Sure, microbiomes could be heritable (I think?), but I don't think "it could be different microbiomes, so it must not be genes, at all" is a valid conclusion.
And why, exactly, do you think they are outside of academia? Why are you putting the blame on them, and not academia? There's obviously a taboo. Noah Carl was ousted from academia for trying to do things like this, I believe. Is Razib Khan not a figure in the genomics community? I'm also pretty sure I've seen some survey showing that most academics in the relevant communities believe that the IQ gap is partly due to genetic factors. Talking about journal publications is problematic for the same reason.
Oh, and mainstream academic institutions are perfectly neutral. Tu quoque aside, "motivated people donated to them" is not the same as saying they're wrong, it just means you need a bit more caution.
Yeah, you shouldn't be extrapolating data and then treating that as if it were additional information, which is what I'm led to believe Lynn did. I'm not familiar with the other people.
No, most of those were mostly irrelevant, and the rest were wrong.
I'd be open to being convinced that HBD is wrong, or at least, closer to being wrong, but it would need to be with better arguments, actually engaging with the data. Nothing that you've mentioned here has even addressed the point that these statistics vary by race, and attempted to explain it. Evidence of the effects of environmental factors, especially culture, could be helpful.
Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.
It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.
I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?
Not quite plausible, though getting much closer. The oldest American sites are from right around 15000 years ago. I wouldn't expect too many people to have Native American ancestry. (Yes, if I remember correctly, Athabaskans and Inuit etc. peoples are later, but I don't think that's enough to matter.)
Humans have much, much more diversity than cheetahs*, though also quite a bit less than chimpanzees. Cheetahs are extremely low in genetic diversity. It's silly to say that there isn't a significant amount of diversity when it's obvious that humans vary substantially among many traits that we might consider significant, and when many traits are heritable.
Yes, of course. Disambiguating would take some care, investigation into what effects environmental/sociocultural factors have, etc. It would be odd not to recognize the possibility (and I would expect it would have some effect). And as pointed out, race can act as a proxy for genetic ancestry, since non-exceptional subsaharan africans will, I believe, look genetically more like each other than they do like non-subsaharan africans. It would also be odd not to recognize that genes could play a factor.
Assuming that IQ tests match sufficiently well on to our usual concepts of smartness (probably, but with only a 4 point difference, and IQ tests evened by construction, I'm less confident than usual), then yes, it would follow that women would be smarter than men; the tests said so. We could investigate causes, sure, to see whether they're innately smarter or due to the environment, but that wouldn't change that there'd be a difference.
You could investigate to what extent groups differing in whatever factors might be lowering IQ would differ in IQ. (Adoption studies could be one avenue to pick up on some sources of variation, different countries, etc.)
*the graph on page 91
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This just means that human level intelligence is exactly sitting around a Great Filter. And variations between the “inbreds” range from can form “Hunter gathering tribe” complexity to can make “rockets that leave earth” complexity.
I have no doubt if I took subsaharan Africans and filtered them for 500 years for IQ that I could arrive at Ashekenazi level Jewish average IQ.
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Don't do this.
The purpose of this forum is to be a discussion group. This is why we don't allow people to just drop bare links at the top and say "discuss".
So either participate in the discussion, or don't. If you do not want to participate the correct action to take is to not post.
Sorry, I won't do that again.
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This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.
To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.
The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.
I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:
Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?
The obvious anser to me would seem to be that academia is not a particularly rigorous field and that especially at the highest levels it's primary role is to sort aspiring members of the chattering class into "winning" and "loosing" buckets rather than to educate, hence why so many professors grade on a curve rather than against knowledge of the material.
As such I think claims made based on anything produced by academia in the last half-century or so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Anecdotally the sort of naive symbol manipulation that seems to be measured by IQ tests and academic achievement seems to be only tangentially related to conscientiousness, foresight, and ability to take-on/integrate new information. In fact, there seems to be a tipping point +1 or 2 SD where it actually becomes negatively correlated with outward signs of intelligence as the Higher IQ/Symbol-Manipulation Quotient gets turned towards rationalizing previously held opinions/beliefs rather than updating one's model to reflect changing circumstance or generating accurate theories of mind.
Meanwhile correlation to income and criminality is easily explained by academia's role as a means of sorting aspiring members of the chattering class into "winning" and "loosing" buckets, though I would question the "criminality" claim. Are we certain that the Bidens are less crooked than the median family "unlicensed pharmacist" living in the projects? Or are "the elite" just looking out for their own? Personally, my money would be on the latter.
You should be happy to know that the US military’s use of standardized testing goes back more than a century. For college too actually.
And you not accepting low IQ levels of criminals and trying to blame this on academia is frankly just an impressive way to think.
You’re a rare flower that hates academia but also agrees with it on race and IQ being made up and used by bad people for bad purposes.
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Whatever you say, General McNamara. Last time someone brought his name up in one of these discussions you just cracked a joke and tapdanced your way out of the exchange. Do you have anything more substantive to offer this time?
McNamara was never a general. He was the CEO of Ford.
He was our longest serving SecDef.
The guy who is the boss of the generals.
Don’t evade the point just because @somedude messed up a detail that doesn’t change the substance of the point.
And that point would hat be?
If there is an argument that hes trying to make i dont see it. In the meantime McNamara's legacy as SecDef is one of why no one should ever listen to WEIRD systematizing utilitarian types who think they can fix things with this one weird trick.
Here, I'll just link to the last time someone brought up McNamara in response to your specious opinions on IQ and you shamelessly dodged. I'll walk you through it so there's no confusion.
Aardvark2:
You:
Generic sneer aimed at rationalists, twee anecdote that doesn't even try to answer the question. Someone notices.
zPvQINBQvfFR:
Boy it sure does, doesn't it? Someone decided that those silly standardized tests don't really reflect actual human ability, and gambled on that notion in a field where results actually matter. The ensuing trainwreck seems like a big challenge for someone who seems to believe essentially the exact same thing, so let's see how you responded.
You:
Wow, stunning rebuttal. Sure McNamara conducted a nearly perfect experiment on how much standardized intelligence tests matter in real life, sure the results were directly opposite to what your worldview predicts, but on the other hand you said "No."
Like what do you imagine that people think when they see stuff like this? Your little crack about McNamara being a high IQ moron isn't actually a point. The notion that high IQ people can't make terrible mistakes isn't a belief anyone holds that you're refuting. Meanwhile you have literally zero explanation for why this huge body of evidence shouldn't count. Just "No."
You'll do this kind of stuff, and at the same time act like it's really strange and disconcerting that HBD holds so much sway around here. I hate to break it to you, but it's largely because you and so many others of similar persuasion make bad arguments and lose constantly.
That's what it's called when you sit around pretending to not understand the questions, or play off contrary evidence with a joke that doesn't answer anything, or just abandon an exchange when it's pointed out that nothing you're saying is supported by the facts. Losing an argument. You do it constantly, and it makes an absolutely mockery of the superior air you work so hard to give off.
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McNamara ignored established DoD policy based on intelligence testing and job performance.
It didn’t go well.
It’s a famous case to cite when people want to believe that IQ doesn’t correlate to job performance. People here would assume you know that context.
Note the serous irony of you criticizing WEIRD utilitarian optimizers for trying to fix things where the “one weird trick” was IGNORING THE WELL-ESTABLISHED LINK BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND JOB PERFORMANCE.
You understand half of why McNamara and his Whiz Kids made a mistake; just not the half that contradicts your views and explains why the example was cited.
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Gosh I guess this huge historical datapoint about the consequences of disregarding standardized intelligence testing just doesn't exist as long as you continue to dodge it, or someone calls a defense secretary a general, or whatever. Darn, I'm sure your response would have been really good, too.
At no point in your prior comment did you try to make an argument/point, you were just wanted to insult/dunk on me.
Your behavior here is an apt illustration of the wider trends of historical ignorance, sloppy thinking, and "arguments as soldiers" that typify the HBD discourse on this forum.
By the way, if you're tired of me and my historical ignorance and sloppy thinking, you can always go ahead and respond to Nybbler here where you actually lost the argument like three days ago. You know people notice when that happens, right? It sort of typifies the anti-HBD discourse on this forum.
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Yeah my bringing up this concrete example of the consequences of disregarding intelligence testing, in response to your meandering asspulled dismissal of IQ, is just a vapid dunk. I'm sure you could totally explain how it doesn't invalidate your worldview if only someone worded things just right. Oh well, maybe next thread.
But seriously, pretty sure last time someone brought it up you just joked that McNamara was a high IQ moron and refused to engage. We all know you've got nothing.
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All this makes a good springboard for you to express your disdain for academia and rationalists, if it were true, but it's not. IQ correlates with achievement in the general case, up to +2 SD at least (I haven't seen good studies beyond that). It also correlates below the level you'd expect academia to have an effect. And there's certainly no evidence of a tipping point at which people start to appear dumber.
What part of "it's primary role is to sort aspiring members of the chattering class into 'winning' and 'loosing' buckets" did you not understand?
If only we had some kind of example to use as evidence one way or the other. Like say a famous historical case where someone came into a non-academic setting where actual results really mattered, and lowered the requirements in regards to standardized intelligence testing.
That sure would tell us something about how this all works, don't you think?
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What part of "general case" did you not understand? It is true even for non-members of the chattering class.
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Why is that its primary role?
Why does the US military use it so heavily?
Even if that’s how it was being used, you’re not invalidating the massive amount of evidence that IQ correlates with performance.
And well beyond the things the “chattering class” have any direct interest in.
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This is just an arrogant demand to close ones eyes.
And yet you can look at a man with purely sub-Saharan African ancestry and one with purely Scandinavian ancestry for at least several millennia, and you will be able to tell the difference.
I checked Wikipedia.
Emphasis mine.
Furthermore:
and
So we can reject a 7000-year-ago Identical Ancestors Point as being both wholly unproven and irrelevant even if true.
This is simply a non sequitur, though I will note that the usual separation is "sub-Saharan Africa", not Africa as a whole.
This is just blowing smoke. And the discovery that self-reported race can be robustly predicted from medical images, with many different modalities, demonstrates that race is physical. Race may sometimes be hard to categorize, but there's a real thing there and we've at least done an OK job of categorizing it.
Construct validity is a property of a measurement, not of the thing measured.
It's Gaussian because studies done by Terman and others based on the IQ of children using earlier tests (which were not forced to a Gaussian) came out reasonably close to Gaussian. And yes, g is an output of factor analysis, though whether it is a mere artifact or not is not known -- claiming it to be a mere artifact is simply assuming away its relevance. Anyway, for this and the previous claim to be able to debunk HBD, you have to reject the concept that some people are more intelligent than others and that we have ways of measuring that. Without that, you haven't debunked HBD, you're just complaining about the crudity of the tools.
I'm pretty sure HBD proponents do care about genes. But just because determining the actual mechanisms behind HBD is difficult doesn't mean HBD is false; it's not even evidence for the proposal. Mendel didn't know shit about DNA either.
Non sequitur
Yes, this just means HBD is anathema, not that it's wrong.
Ditto, even if true.
Even if true, fraudulent evidence for a proposition is not evidence against it.
None of this erases e.g. the difference in various standardized test scores between black and white Americans, nor demonstrates a non-heritable (or even heritable non-genetic) explanation for them.
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I’m going to leave your arguments about scientific practice and appeals to authority to someone else, and note that nearly everything you write about population history is wrong.
No, not every human alive is descended from every other human alive 7,000 years ago. Humans had already dispersed by then; I’m probably a descendant of every western hunter gatherer and early European farmer and yamnaya on the landscape 7,000 ya, but of no sub Saharan Africans or aboriginal Australians from after the ice age. And your statement about genetic diversity in Africa is also not true; technically speaking, pygmies and Khoisan are farther from any other human population than any other human population is from any other population… but the vast majority of sub Saharan Africans are descended from early Niger-Congo speakers, who are an identifiable genetic cluster like eg Europeans or orientals.
Even leaving out the San, Pygmies, etc, subsaharan africans do have greater genetic diversity than non-africans—their bottleneck was smaller than the out-of-africa group's, if I remember correctly.
I'm not sure what the Bantu expansion looks like genetically.
But I don't think this means that you can't model them as a group, at least when we're in the context of talking about group representation and affirmative action. It's not like other groups aren't composed of a bunch of smaller groups that also vary (elites vs. commoners, if nothing else).
And yes, the 7000 years point is obviously wrong—very few people today outside of the Americas would be descended from the average native american 7000 years ago. It's also irrelevant.
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... Racism?
Or, more charitably: you're variously making unsubstantiated declarations of fact that are not accepted into evidence yet, defending a motte that's entirely different from the bailey people are actually caring about, cherrypicking a couple of statistics that support your view from the entirety of human history and civilization which has literal billions of such metrics you could have chosen instead, and presenting a bunch of disparate and unrelated phenomena and demanding a singular explanation for all of them at once.
Maybe the tiny sub-sub-population of Ashkenazi Jews has an average advantage; good for you, the motte is about whether black people are too stupid to participate equally in the economy, and whether we need to shut down the borders because allowing generic 'immigrants' in will make us dumber.
The claim that adoption studies show kids following racial outcomes rather than parental outcomes is not a fact in evidence, and you would need to do a ton of work to establish what you actually empirically mean by the claim and that it is true, and then the answer for that individual claim would probably be something like 'half those adopted kids were still raised in poverty for the first 5 years' or 'people who put their kids up for adoption have worse genetics to start with and provide bad fetal environments' or 'yeah, we told you racism of various types exists and affects people's outcomes, good job demonstrating that.'
I have no idea what your claim about Tamil Nadu actually means in empirical terms or whether it's anything resembling true, but if it is I have no idea what economic and cultural and historical factors obtain in that part of the world, and from your fluency in English I bet you don't either. By one dumb metric Jeff Bezos alone represents 1% of US GDP, how sure are you that whatever metric you are invoking here is actually much less dumb than that? Based on your knowledge of the region and its history, how sure are you that something local variant of bigotry and discrimination akin to racism can't possibly be the explanation?
Etc. The answer here is 'that sounds a lot like a gish-gallop, and there's a reason people don't respond to those'.
Shit, I must have deleted my comment (you’re right, it was pretty low effort) the same minute you posted your response. I’m very sorry, please do make this reply elsewhere.
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I've banged on before about Lynn and his agenda and his absolutely shoddy 'data', so I'll just applaud from the sidelines here.
He's right on Lynn, from what I've read, but the comment overall is horrible.
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Lynn’s data is only critical in discussions that reference his absurdly low estimates for some countries based on extremely flawed reasoning and his own personal biases (for example against the Irish).
For major population groups in the United States, data on the standardized testing of tens of millions of people is available and categorized. A reliance on Lynn’s studies here and there is unnecessary.
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If you're going to post something, you should be willing to defend it.
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I don't know if any of the our resident HBD obsessives are still around, so maybe you'll get a full response to this, or maybe not. All I'll say as someone who really doesn't want HBD to be true is be extremely careful making these kind of bombastic rants. Back when this was a subject discussed with some regularity around here, watching people come in hot like this, and getting refuted point by point, was pretty radicalizing.
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This is obviously wrong in at least the pretty clear case of the Ashkenazim.
It’s also wrong because we observe average differences between populations on polygenic traits like height, and evolution didn’t stop at the neck.
What an embarrassing statement to make about what is the single strongest predictor social science has.
Wait until you learn about IQ proxies and how often they’re used in studies of all kinds. Also, this writer doesn’t know enough to know to separate psychometrics from psychology.
You can and maybe even should ignore all the studies done by these HBD types. There’s immense bodies of evidence in just normal science if you care to pay attention.
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Bluntly, a lot of this is really unsophisticated or just non-responsive. I'm not going to address each piece of the Gish Gallop, but let's take this one:
Who the hell thinks this is how any kind of biodiversity is generated? Yeah, genetic drift, founder effects, and other random or stochastic processes result in differences between populations that are non-adaptive. I have no idea why someone would think this is even worth mentioning in an attempt to demonstrate that there are not meaningful population-level differences between groups.
The whole post is kind of this way, with snarkily presented factoids that don't have anything to do with addressing their opponents. It's a fun ingroup signal for people that also don't really know anything about the topic and want to dunk on the outgroup though.
It's not like much, if any, of the Pro HBD stuff that gets posted here is any better.
If we're being blunt, it ought to be pointed out that HBD as it is most typically advocated and defended here on theMotte is a normative belief rather than a descriptive one and should be judged as such.
But there is some actual logical basis to 'It's clearly obvious that blacks are better at running than whites, just as whites are better at weightlifting than blacks - if there are differences in physical capacity there are presumably differences in mental capacity. We can draw conclusions from IQ, criminality, Nobels, education scores, income, Fields Medals and national development just like we can draw conclusions from Olympics and sport and conclude that blacks are significantly weaker at the abstract mental skills needed for advanced civilization'. There's nothing complicated about this idea, it's perfectly straightforward.
Meanwhile the blankslatists have to conjure up all these epicycles 'Oh the shape of Africa prevented horizontal proliferation of technology, oh whites and Arabs inexplicably became racist and suppressed blacks to permanently lower their performance, the many majority-black nations were sabotaged by communism or lacked institutions, even when they took over South Africa and Zimbabwe white racism somehow turned the functional institutions broken, white racism somehow wrecked many American cities when blacks showed up, all the affirmative action wasn't enough, there are these mysterious cultural factors acting in all different countries preventing black excellence...'
Other peoples and races have dealt with communism, colonialism and unpleasant history. Few have received such extraordinary amounts of foreign aid and affirmative action. Russia went through more communism than anyone, suffered the brunt of the biggest wars and still made all kinds of advances and contributions. We derive the word Slave from Slav and yet they're not civilizationally impaired.
A billion blacks, many of them rich and not a single STEM Nobel or Fields Medal? Not one major global manufacturer like Samsung or Volkswagen? The simplest explanation is that on a populational basis they're stupid and incompetent. This has obvious normative results for a huge range of expensive policies that are implemented right now. It has obvious significance for those of us who are interested in meritocracy, development, safety and civilization. It is the normative beliefs of the blank-slaters that are extremely costly.
I don’t disagree with your point that descriptions of the zanj weren’t glowing either, and in fact no one who has encountered them except for recent progressives had been very impressed with blacks; they’re simply not, on average, very good at IQ and conscientiousness requiring tasks. But there’s a lot of things in your post that are simply wrong.
White racism is a convenient thing for black liberation movements to blame, but the ruling parties in those countries are just really that corrupt and incompetent, and the institutions they took over were more fragile than commonly believed to begin with. And the corruption and incompetence has more to do with communism- remember, these guys are actual ideological maoists even if they’re less committed than Mao was- and structural features of their society(the national party wasn’t a bastion of transparency either) than with HBD; neighboring Botswana has similarly crappy HBD and it’s doing much better. As it turns out maintaining first world institutions in third world countries is a hard problem, and guerrilla fighters hastily taught some principles for doing so by communist advisors are unsurprisingly not up to the task. And we shouldn’t forget that; Rhodesia and apartheid-SA whites built nice, technologically modern neighborhoods… for themselves, the vast majority of the country was still mud huts and subsistence farming.
Yes, they are. Russia produces some geniuses, but it’s a poor, corrupt shithole with extreme problems. Yes, it would be the richest country in Africa if it were in Africa, but it sits on an ocean of oil in Europe. Meaningfully different circumstance. Ukraine is even shittier, and was before the war, and their average IQ is like a standard deviation higher than the smartest country in Africa. Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, etc are pretty good arguments against HBD as the end-all-be-all; all of them are high-average-IQ countries in bad shape due to their own damn fault. Institutions and culture matter.
Maoism is a terrible ideology but Maoist China was still a very strong adversary. They beat the UN out of North Korea, despite lacking every kind of materiel. Few have ever beaten Western forces in a conventional war!
Furthermore, Maoist China was able to reform itself, turn itself into Dengist China. They managed economic liberalization and rapid growth without Soviet-style chaos and disaster. That's an impressive feat, something South Africa's consistently failed to do. That's the key difference. Ideology matters but HBD matters more, it alters baseline performance and opens up more possibilities.
Maoist influence in the US was pretty limited but you see the same kinds of dysfunction in Detroit, parts of Chicago. Mass looting in South Africa, mass looting in black America. Extremely high rates of STDs in South Africa, extremely high rates of STDs in black America, educational dysfunction and educational dysfunction... In the US it's mitigated by white institutions and resources but the same force is there. If the US was 90% black, it wouldn't matter whether Mao or Marx was a thing, it'd turn into South Africa or Haiti.
If Russia is a shithole, what are we? They're apparently producing more munitions than the entire West. NATO is feeling threat from them, they're trying to train more divisions, increase munitions production, reintroduce conscription. We were reliant on Russia to reach the ISS for 10 years, we didn't have the rockets!
Ukraine, North Korea and Russia are all tough, powerful nations. Ukraine's fought hard. North Korea alone has ICBMs and hydrogen bombs, they're more powerful than all African countries put together. Russia could wipe us off the map. I don't deny that Russia has weaknesses (shit semiconductors for one) but it's of a qualitatively different nature to sub-Saharan Africa. They are a great power, they belong in the category with us and China, not Nigeria and South Africa. They export jet fighters and nuclear power plants, they made their own COVID vaccine, there's Yandex and so on. They project power in Ukraine, in Syria, even in sub-Saharan Africa with Wagner.
African countries don't produce their own jet fighters (white South Africa excepted) or long-range missiles, they don't project power into other continents and they can't threaten Western countries on the battlefield. They are in way worse shape than Russia, Ukraine and North Korea.
Botswana just rides on its minerals and mildly competent government. You might say 'oh well so does Russia' and they sort of do. But Russia does so many other things, it's not a bigger version of Saudi Arabia. Russia's been dealing with all kinds of challenges, Botswana sits in the corner and does its own thing (with the world's 3rd highest HIV rate).
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What do you mean by that?
Exactly what it says on the tin.
More effort than this, please.
I'm not much more clearly I can state it.
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That's not helpful.
Let me clarify. What normative beliefs do you see HBD as being?
HBD posters on theMotte generally fall into two broad categories, strict bio-determisnists, and reflexively contrarian intersectionalists/identitarians. Both consider evaluating individual people on the basis of race/ethnic membership to be the "correct" / "rational" means of understanding human behavior and both deeply resent the Anglo/American traditions of individual responsibility, agency, and merit. They derisively refer to the norms of equality before the law and evaluating people on the basis of individual ability/merit enshrined in the US Constitution as "blank slatism" and it is the destruction of these norms that is their primary motivation.
I thought people were reacting to the woke reverse discrimination policies and systemic racism discourse that are driven by the argument that because "blank slatism" is obviously true, we need to be obsessively following societal outcomes by race and interpret any disparity as necessary proof of racism. Charles Murray says this is the reason he wrote Facing Reality, the guy Hanania is chiding claims that the woke "equality thesis" leading to unending recriminations about white racism as long as outcome disparity remains is why he's writing his stuff.
Most people seem like they would be happy to go back to a 1990s style color blindness detente, assuming it was applied evenly. You don't talk about race and intelligence publicly and you don't do racial grievance identity politics. What we got instead is that people took "there are no racial differences in intelligence" as the implicit uncontroversial truth, and drew up the whole intellectual edifice of systemic racism from that. What this has already cashed out in practice has been a complete travesty of "evaluating people on the basis of individual ability/merit", and this shows no sign of stopping. People just go "what can you do, we must keep fighting against systemic racism until it goes away".
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Okay, I think I would generally say that I accept some form of HBD, but reject everything you just said.
I think different groups have different traits on average, and that some part of the variance is probably due to genetic variation. That's all.
I'm not a strict biodeterminist; environment, culture, etc. matter too.
I'm not an identitarian, I don't think it's important for most groups to cultivate racial identity (cf. Gal 3:28); there are far more important things.
I do think it's rational to make judgments based on race, in the same way (but to a much, much lesser degree) than you might make judgments based on sex, but in both cases, those judgments are mostly only relevant before you get more data—you learn more by directly observing than by priors.
I am heartily in favor of Anglo-American norms of responsibility, agency, and merit. In fact, this is one of the main reasons that I think differences in racial averages are worth talking about (at least, when discussing policy): because they're often used as evidence that the system of responsibility, agency, and merit is actually racist, acknowledging that there are differences helps to defend the best parts of the system we are in. As it currently exists, it's often legally problematic to test for qualifications, because different races do worse on it on average, leading to the dropping of tests and less merit across the board. It would be better to just be a meritocracy and accept that the racial distribution will be more uneven than currently.
I see blank slatism as something distinct from equality before the law, and evaluation based on merit. The latter two I am in favor of, the former I think is incorrect.
What I mean by that is, yes, there are genuine differences between people. (Shocker, men and women are not the same.) But that doesn't at all mean we should drop merit or equality before the law.
Perhaps I'm unique in this, but my sense was that many people who would say that they affirm differences between racial populations are pro-merit, though that's certainly not true of everyone.
Do you also find me repugnant, and mostly making normative claims?
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Wait, what.
Evaluating individuals as individuals, independent of any group affiliation, is definitely my preferred policy and personal approach. Equality before the law and focusing on individual ability/merit would mean no affirmative action and gut DEI. Bring back meritocracy!
“Blank slatism” leads to creating government interventions around race or gender that do not reflect reality. “Systemic racism” and “heteronormative patriarchy” have to be invented to explain disparities that are not resulting from actual evidence of discrimination, because classic racism and sexism have already been defeated.
I’m not sure how representative I am of the typical Motteposter who accepts biological effects on group averages, but I doubt you’re portraying things accurately.
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