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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:
... 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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