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I think he is correct. I find HBD plausible in principle, but it's terrible political tool in practice. For one, its radioactive and attracts a high proportion of radioactive supporters. Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks. It purports to partially explain a wide variety of complex human behavior of ill defined groups. Interesting in principle; a bad policy tool for a nation that focuses so much on the individual (culturally and legally).
The viability of standardized tests, colorblind policy, and merit-based immigration vetting all depend on either their outcomes being race-neutral, or HBD being at least tacitly accepted. The strong belief that all racial groups are equal, combined with the demonstrated fact that they are not, means you have to give up or distort standardized tests and merit-based immigraiton vetting, and discard colorblind policies.
This is what's frustrating about talking to "roll the clock back twenty years" temperamental liberals. Let's say you manage to return to a norm of colorblindness and implement effective tests for merit in immigration, education, and criminal justice, all while keeping HBD a studiously quiet truth only known to geneticists and a few internet edgelords.
What is your answer when the black professional class all but evaporates? Or when the AP math and science classes at your local inner city school are entirely asian and white? Or when the black arrest rate increases after a 'fair' new colorblind policing reform?
The answer is that your fancy meritocratic tools get torn down and replaced with racial quotas again.
On the contrary, what is the HBDer’s answer? “Just suck it up, that’s life fam, sucks to be you I guess”? The “promote HBD as an explanation” argument has no answer to what happens when the erstwhile black and Latino professional (or otherwise) class says “I don’t care about your bullshit race science, go fuck yourself”. Are you gonna fight some kind of race war against 50+ million people spread out across the entire United States? Since when is that desirable?
The “promote HBD as an answer” position seems to imagine that all the groups that are publicly identified as genetic losers will just roll over and take it, “oh yes, Sir, I suppose whites and Asians really should be in charge then while me and my children are destined to be poor forever”. That seems pretty unlikely.
The policy answer is race-blind policies that treat individuals as individuals and don’t create double standards for certain categories.
Race realism/hereditarianism/HBD is the explanation for why certain disparities will persist in a fair playing field.
This is basically the same situation as Damore faced. It shouldn’t be tenable for it to be a major scandal and firing offense to state well-evidenced facts about reality. The Overton Window has to shift.
Except it won't, because those who would seek to do so lack the power to do it.
Hard evidence and the freedom to tweet are already changing the online discussion of it.
It’s the same issue with gender preferences.
I don’t think the current mainstream position can hold indefinitely.
Why not? Or at least, if not indefinitely, at least for a few more centuries? So long as one side holds all the power, they can just use that power to suppress all the "heretics" who disagree — see the Medieval Church. One good, hard Albigensian Crusade against HBD, and…
Cancel culture doesn’t have the power of the medieval church, thankfully.
But mostly because genetic science is casting light on the finer and finer details of our traits and so it won’t be easy to bury one’s head in the sand.
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