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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.
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:
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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