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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.
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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.
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.
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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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