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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.

I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?

The HBD discourse is fueled by people freaking out over representation in high-status classes like successful CEOs, scientists and Ivy League applicants. People get into those by being outliers on a standard distribution in talent, and this amplifies small initial population differences. A relatively small difference in mean IQ between populations that looks inconsequential in everyday tasks can still end up making the tail of people capable of becoming theoretical physicists have a 2x overrepresentation of people from the higher mean IQ population.

Europe and Japan do have differences in height, weight, IQ, etc. on average, they just aren't huge ones.

We know that IQ is partially heritable. Doesn't that demonstrate that genes can be relevant?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country#

Sort by height and notice how many shithole Balkan states are toward the top, and how far down you have to scroll to reach even the most prosperous Asian countries. Your hypothesis, that the human genome doesn't have enough variation to allow for meaningful population differences in genetically complex traits, is trivially falsified by the evidence you claim we're not bringing.