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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28415 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.

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.

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