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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:
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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