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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29931 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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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:

  1. Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)

  2. Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)

  3. People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)

  4. 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:

Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss. The idea of sleeping with very short men fills many women with revulsion. The severely handicapped are a drain on society’s resources. And so on.

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:

Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.

Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.

Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.

Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.

Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)

IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.

Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.

There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.

Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".

Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.

Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.

Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.

Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.

  • -39

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.

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.

IQ correlates with achievement in the general case

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?

What part of "general case" did you not understand? It is true even for non-members of the chattering class.

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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