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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28443 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 decided to weigh in properly first, before I respond to anything below.

I find it incredibly ironic that this topic which deals with a whole host of complex environmental, social, cultural and yes genetic factors that are interlinked is being reduced to what amounts reductive reasoning. The genetic biomarkers that indicate genetic lineage also indicate significant non-genetic differences or environmental and social causes as well. The genetic markers that indicate race also point to factors such as: blood serum lead levels; air quality/pollution exposure; poverty and its associated effects and a complex interplay between sub-cultures and the wider society around them. The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.

There is considerable evidence demonstrating that fetal exposure to maternal psychosocial experiences contributes to the determination of children’s neurodevelopmental trajectories (Bale et al., 2010). Data generated largely over the last two decades shows that when pregnant women experience significant stress, anxiety, or depression (each of which are frequently indexed by cortisol levels), their children are at increased risk for biobehavioral characteristics conceptualized as potential precursors to psychopathology

Also

The results of the study revealed that children who were living in poverty and whose parents lacked nurturing skills were likely to have less gray and white matter in their brains.

The researchers say that white matter is usually linked to the brain’s ability to transmit signals between cells and structures, while gray matter is associated with intelligence.

The MRI scans also revealed that poor children had two key brain structures that were smaller, compared with wealthier children. These were the amygdala – a structure linked to emotional health – and the hippocampus – an area of the brain linked to memory and learning.

Furthermore, it was found that children in poverty were more likely to experience stressful life events, such as moving house or schools, which can have an impact on brain development.

See: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/268066#Improving-parental-nurturing-skills-vital

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/

The American Black population is simply exposed to a greater level of stress, and this affects them both individually as well as socially within their segregated communities. They are affected both at a personal level and by the effects of this psychopathology on a wider level within their communities as they are exposed to crime at a much higher rate than the rest of the non-Black population. These effects are passed down both through both genetic expression as well as their cultural environment. These factors carry down through multiple generations as unless the environmental causes can be ameliorated, they will persist into future generations as long as the environmental factors that caused it are still present.

Your post is indeed incredibly ironic; In the beginning of the post you try to obfuscate an unfavored finding by claiming it's just too complex to understand, and then in the last paragraph you reduce everything to a single incredibly convenient theory, namely that it's all just stress levels and if we just fix that, everything else will fix itself as well! Very nice, if true.

Stress levels probably have some minor effect, but most of the research in this field doesn't even attempt to control for genetics or causality in the other direction. I happen to be a postdoc in biomedical research, so I just took a glance at the study your article is referring to (which wasn't even linked in the article, lol), for anyone interested: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1761544

It's... not good. Or to be more specific, it's designed to be incapable of resolving the question you want it to resolve. They test a single theory, namely that income directionally causes everything. They don't even attempt to test the alternative, they only test against the null hypothesis, that income is unrelated to everything. Something nobody thinks anyway. Not that I'm surprised, this is just par for the course of the field.

Your other paper is well-known, but mostly very misleading. It's pretty much on the same level as the paper that found that men and women don't differ significantly if you take a list of 100 random biomedical traits, and therefore men and women are mostly the same; Sure, the former is obviously true, but nobody disputes that and the latter is just a complete non-sequitor. It's misleading on three levels:

First, his investigated measure ω merely tells us that two population are somewhat overlapping. It tells us very little about difference in means, which is what we're usually interested in. In fact, his finding of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European is absolutely compatible with large average differences between the groups.

Second, it's again just an assortment of random genes, but we usually care about specific sets of genes relating to known phenotypic traits. For a particularly simple example, you can't counter "they have phenotypically different skin colors, and we can show that these relate to differences in genes A and B" with "well we can show that over all genes in aggregate the differences are pretty small, so DEBUNKED". But obviously this is only ever applied if people dislike a particular gene/phenotype interaction.

Third, the most damning by far, and I'll just quote the paper itself:

To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero.

"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:

(c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population.

So he finds that this core claim, the claim why you're quoting the entire paper in the first place, only holds for closely related populations (duh) or if you wilfully ignore the majority of the genome. His example of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European, do you want to take a guess how many loci he used? 10.000? 1000? Nope, it's, wait for it, ... 50! I guess he himself is excused bc this was 2007, he probably would have wanted to do 100 loci but his Prof told him they only have money for 50, hah.

Spending a few hours compiling a long and detailed post debunking HBD is particularly uninteresting to this forum and would be like trying to teach a pig to roller-skate, a waste of time and annoying to the pig; however, on the other hand spending a few hours proving how strong the genetic effect is on the population would be wonderfully received. I invite you to spend the time and that post-doc giving all the people here what they want to see, they will love you for it. Go on, I would love to see some actual evidence for this phenomenon.

RenOS lives in Germany. I'm not 100% on the laws there, but my understanding is that doing such a postdoc might actually get him thrown in jail.

HBD certainly isn’t illegal in Germany. Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories (the Holocaust/antisemitism and ‘advocating the overthrow of democracy/the constitution’). For garden variety un-PC speak Germany is probably better than anywhere in the Anglosphere except the United States, admittedly a low bar. Germany actually has very strong protections against being fired for political speech for example, Höcke was legally declared a fascist, called the Holocaust memorial a disgrace etc but is still technically a registered high school teacher (he doesn’t teach on account of his political election). All the SPD could do was declare that if he returned to teaching they would try their best to have him fired, but it’s unclear they could do so.

Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories

If by "relatively liberal" you mean you'll get fined rather than sent to prison (probably), then yes.

What German speech law does HBD violate? As far as I’m aware there are in fact German evolutionary psychologists who openly argue in favor of HBD, and they haven’t been fined or even fired.

I'm not a lawyer, let alone a German one, but there was a pretty big story during the refugee crisis, where a German couple got fine for a pretty milquetoast Facebook post. It doesn't surprise me German HBDers remain more or less unmolested because the way laws are applied tends to be pretty arbitrary, but that also means they can suddenly decide to change their mind, and persecute them.

Thanks for doing the detailed rebuttal.

I find it incredibly ironic that this topic which deals with a whole host of complex environmental, social, cultural and yes genetic factors

I think people generally don't think it's 100% genetic, at least, if they know what they're talking about.

The results of the study revealed that children who were living in poverty and whose parents lacked nurturing skills were likely to have less gray and white matter in their brains. The researchers say that white matter is usually linked to the brain’s ability to transmit signals between cells and structures, while gray matter is associated with intelligence. The MRI scans also revealed that poor children had two key brain structures that were smaller, compared with wealthier children. These were the amygdala – a structure linked to emotional health – and the hippocampus – an area of the brain linked to memory and learning. Furthermore, it was found that children in poverty were more likely to experience stressful life events, such as moving house or schools, which can have an impact on brain development.

This is just a typical study pushed by "pro-nurture" people who want to assume that correlation=causation and don't think to control for any genetic confounding (poverty causes low IQ rather than parents' genes that cause low IQ causes poverty). Hardly some kind of slamdunk on anti-HBD people.

The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.

I don't think that's the mainstream position. I think the mainstream position is a series of concentric lines of defense.

The first line of defense is "how dare you!?". The point and sputter, as Sailer calls it. An attempt to dissuade the opponent from even breaching the subject of whether different people have different aptitude, without addressing it. Might involve siccing the mods on the opponent, or arguing that Something Must Be Done abut the fact that such a discussion can even take place, on sites where mods aren't available or sympathetic (i.e. twitter).

The second line is to deny that measurement is possible, i.e. IQ denial. Expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.

The two-and-a-half is to acknowledge that individual differences exist, but group differences don't or are irrelevant. Lewontin may be invoked.

Only after those we're approaching what you postulated as the mainstream position. Even then, the primary focus will be on present oppression, i.e. it will be argued that the result in education continue to diverge because the black students are underfunded or otherwise discriminated against. Only then, after it's shown that funding is often negatively correlated with test scores, it may be admitted that inherent group differences exist. Very cautiously and tacitly, as it may get the admitting party into hot water from the people who stopped at layer one.

I wish my comment on this topic hadn't been nixed by the reset, but anyhow in brief:

expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.

Well, it does apply; however, the coalition on the left are heavily into a one size fits all approach -- higher education -- due to their own deep investment within the educational establishment or having been a product of it. The professional management class (PMC) simply does not respect anyone without a higher education, nor do they respect blue collar vocations or vocational education. Immigration isn't a big deal for people who have jobs with high cultural context (much of the PMC/white collar workforce) and they have significant barriers to entry to their professions. On the other hand, unrestricted migration and the closing of many blue-collar workplaces along with the heavy restrictions on development in heavy blue coded states means that there are narrow windows in both aptitude and time for a young 'disadvantaged' person to potentially rise up and get away from grinding poverty should they have been unfortunate enough to be born into it. All that extra money being poured into education (administration bloat) is essentially a blue coded jobs program with exceedingly little to show for it in terms of ameliorating poverty and hardship.

Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.

Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.

I'd be fine if the left would, in fact, show some humility on this question. Pretty much all traits that we have looked at are ~30-70% genetic, and vary accordingly along ethnic lines, so the humble HBD position is just that. And nobody generally has a problem with this finding on any other trait, it's just the moment intelligence is involved people go crazy.

And if anything it's the other way around; Most HBD advocates I'm aware of don't claim it's all genetics, just merely that genetics is involved. On the other hand it's the left that wants to claim it's 100% environmental or that it's a magical kind of genetics that doesn't vary along ethnic lines. This post is a perfect example, he tries to reduce everything to his own pet theory, stress levels.

We’ve know since Stephen Jay Gould that evolution didn’t apply above the neck.

I’ve never had anyone who knows much about biology (and doesn’t try the very dumb trick of denying IQ) explain how height (obvious and uncontroversial) differs from intelligence genetically.

Both are polygenetic and can be severely affected by environment (particularly malnutrition, historically), and can differ across races, but we simply can’t deny the height achievement gap.

We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.

It would help if the other side, in all the ferocious arguments that have gone on over the years, ever made any observations that were genuinely inconsistent with HBD. Instead it's always a litany of alternative explanations for an HBD-consistent world.

Like I guess Igbo find Nigeria less stressful than even reasonably well-off American black dudes find California or Ohio or whatever? Certainly couldn't be all that vaunted African genetic diversity at work.

There's never a decent competing model of intelligence backed by consistent observation. Just a grab bag of reasons that things might not be as they clearly seem, most of which don't hold up very well.

Instead it's always a litany of alternative explanations for an HBD-consistent world.

Alternative explanations which don't hold up to cursory examination. And then the faux-reasonable demand that we accept that we have insufficient basis to judge between these explanations, and therefore the status quo of rejecting HBD (because it's repugnant) is fine.

I feel like HBD is actually the less surprising hypothesis and should be the default. It would be such an extreme coincidence to have separate human populations living with different selection pressures for thousands of years to the point that they have different skin colors, heights, builds, facial features, hair color, eye color, disease resistance etc. but then somehow intelligence lined up to be exactly equal in every group everywhere on the planet.

Imagine being raised in modern America, educated in regular public school that teaches race-blindness and living in a society that treats MLK as a hero. Imagine being a Democrat who thinks Obama was a great president.

HBD did not confirm my priors. It doesn’t confirm the priors of the average person in the US. If it did, we’d be in a very different situation. People like Scott hate that their commitment to facts an interest in genetics leads to HBD. (Scott will write about the Manhattan Project being a Hungarian Jewish high school project but he’s not going to write about the other side of the genetic coin for all the obvious reasons.)

As a libertarian, I hate it because it’s nicer and easier to sell people on the benefits of freedom in a world where glaring racial disparities could be rectified by simply removing barriers.

So motivated reasoning (and social desirability bias) are in effect, but mostly pushing in the opposite direction than you think. Hanania criticizes all the HBDers who really do seem to lean in to what closely resembles trad racism, but even bad people can be right sometimes.

“Epistemic humility” is great, when it’s not used as a weapon to downplay clear evidence for inconvenient conclusions.

The genetic biomarkers that indicate genetic lineage also indicate significant non-genetic differences or environmental and social causes as well. The genetic markers that indicate race also point to factors such as: blood serum lead levels; air quality/pollution exposure; poverty and its associated effects and a complex interplay between sub-cultures and the wider society around them.

That's easy to test. Just see if the genes are just as predictive in poor people and rich people or in black and white people. There is enough genetic diversity you would find people with high levels of both the good and bad genes in all groups.

The American black living situation was plausible some time before the 1960’s. It actually showed up in things they are good at today like athleticism.

Today the living situation isn’t bad by any historical standard. It’s not worse than any Jewish diaspora where everyone hated them. It’s not worse than post WW2 Japan/Germany. For general Europeans things like the plague have been cited as a good thing (sounds stressful) because it increased demand for labor and led to human capital formation in the peasant class.

Environmental factors obviously do matter. It seems apparent that communism really does harm a society. But they don’t seem to be the cause for achievement gaps.

A lot of the solutions to environmental factors seem to make the situation worse especially modern liberalism. Stop and frisks is blowing up on Twitter but it does seem like that correlated very well with lowering NYC black homicide rate. And I am personally very partial to Christianity having overall good effects on the African American community versus modern liberalisms sexual values. Modern liberalism is probably fine for the high IQ San Franciscan but the lower class I believe does better with stricter social rules.

Nobody here is saying environment doesn’t matter at all.

But also you can do comparisons where you try to control for environmental factors.

“Stress” isn’t going to cut it as an explanation for such a broad, consistent finding, which extends beyond African Americans specifically. For instance, I doubt it’s “stress” that causes whites to have lower math scores than East Asians in America.

For instance, I doubt it’s “stress” that causes whites to have lower math scores than East Asians in America.

Culturally, they have been dealing with things like 'civil service exams' for literally over a thousand years. It's so culturally ingrained into them that they tend to out-study their European brethren. When they reach higher education this over-performance tends to evaporate.

civil service exams' for literally over a thousand

Yes, an easier path to reproductive success for those with demonstrated ability to perform intellectually.

Their posterity just study alot because it's their culture?

Civilization exerts a selection pressure.

I’ve heard that theory but I’ve also seen pictures of the math grad students at Harvard and the US math Olympiad team.

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