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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:
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 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.
Also
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:
"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:
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.
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.
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Thanks for doing the detailed rebuttal.
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