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Notes -
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 think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
Poverty sticks. If your parents lived their entire lives without wealth, then you're going to start with no wealth and little investment, you're going to take on debt and take short-term solutions over long-term investments just to stay afloat, you're not going to be able to afford a car to get to the better job you were offered 35 minutes from home, or you'll lose the job when your shitty used car malfunctions and you miss a day. Etc. The basis for all of capitalism is capital accumulation, money making money through investment or collecting rents, and that's a game where starting conditions and your initial pot matter more than anything else.
Poor education sticks. If it was illegal for your great-grandparents to be taught to read, and your grandparents were taught in segregated schools that barely treated them better than animals, and your parents were seen as per-linguistic savages because they spoke a different dialect than their teachers and were put in slow classes and neglected because of it, how well are they going to educate you as an infant, how well are they going to help you with your homework, what kind of relationship with the school and the state are they going to train you to expect? The US absolutely has social and cultural 'classes' that tend to run in families, and coming from a family with a history of poor education makes it a lot harder to escape your class.
Minority status matters. If you are making a movie you may as well appeal to the largest possible audience, white people. And if you want to appeal to white people, you may as well have a white main character. And if your main character is white, a white writer and white director and a white makeup artist and hair stylist will probably provide a more authentic voice and feel to that character. None of that's discrimination, it's just smart business decisions... and you can make the same argument for the management of a company that sells clothes aimed at white people, or customer service jobs in a majority white area, or etc. It's not discrimination to want to mentor up-and-coming employees who you have a lot in common with and see yourself in and enjoy hanging out with, and hey look for the majority white managers those appealing mentees overwhelmingly tend to be white for actually truly non-discriminatory reasons.
And etc., across every aspect of life.
And these aren't just drags on the system that slow down the process of everyone attaining their 'natural' place in the hierarchy. They're mutually-reinforcing process that actively push the people on the bottom further down.
If your career doesn't advance as fast because your boss wanted to mentor someone they felt more in tune with, then you might have to work longer hours and have less time to help with your kids homework, you might be in a lower-tier position that just fires you when your car breaks and you come in late instead of a higher-tier position where that's fine and no one cares, you might retire with less savings and your kids will need to spend their money and time on caring for you in your old age instead of getting themselves training and slack to look for better positions, etc.
I feel like there's a libertarian logic which expects people to be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the position in life that their natural talents naturally oblige them to. And I'm here to say that, while that story is not impossible for any (single individual to live out, that is just not how hugely stochastic processes involving millions of inter-related causal factors and hundreds of millions of people work, at all.
When you average across hundreds of millions of people, all of those stochastic factors that make it harder or less likely for one newborn infant to have a life trajectory towards their full potential than another really add up.
And if no one is making any conscious effort to correct for those factors - if we have no diversity initiatives and no AA and no social efforts to lift up disadvantaged people and no policies that care about this at all - if we just leave it up to chance and the standard grinding gears of the economy and society and government, then things are not going to sort themselves out quickly.
I don't expect 100% of the first generation of hugely disadvantaged people to experience zero discrimination to completely solve the problem and attain their genetically-proper level in their lifetime. I don't expect 100% of their children to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their grandchildren to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their great-grandchildren to attain it.
I have personal experience with families and their family histories and trajectories that span great-grandparent to great-grandchild. I can see how family circumstances flow over 4 generations, and I can have an intuitive sense that while there's definitely room for variance and changes over that timeframe, there is not an actual 0% casual relationship between the financial and social circumstances of the first and last generation. Not even close.
I admit that I don't have the type of intuition needed to guess what happens after 10 or 15 generations. If our systems of capitalism and government and society don't undergo any big changes in that time, then I still expect the correlations to exist somewhat even over those timeframes, but I really don't know. I can admit that maybe that would be long enough to erase them, just through entropy and simulated annealing, if no one was making any intentional effort to erase them otherwise.
But, that those differences would disappear in 60 years since the Civil Rights Act, even if we pretended that that date was the end of all racism and discrimination in the country. No. Fuck no. Come the fuck on.
People's grandparents were educated under segregation. People's parents couldn't buy homes or get out of slums due to redlining. People in the prime-age workforce today grew up under the anti-ebonics backlash that treated them as stupid and illiterate for being fluent in a non-standard dialect and refused to teach them in a language they understood.
Lots of people overcome those disadvantages, but stochastically they will drag teh average very far down. That's what the word 'disadvantage' means in this context.
So when you say there is 'mounting evidence', my reaction is 'since when? I would expect the timeframe to be hundreds of years, so the fact that the gap has only closed a little in the last 40 years seems like not much evidence to me, pretty close to what I'd expect. And the modern debate over HBD and cancel culture isn't even 40 years old, it's like 10 years old, there absolutely should not be appreciable changes in the data that could count as persuasive evidence over a timeframe like that.
Which makes me wonder if the 'mounting evidence' is less of 'we have a general model of how we expect this process to evolve over time under each hypothesis, and the data is favoring one hypothesis to a decisive degree', and more 'I've been talking about this issue for much of my adult life and nothing has changed in that timeframe, so it sure feels like the situation is unchangeable and will never change and anyone who doesn't admit that is delusional'.
Or maybe the 'mounting evidence' phrase does refer to the entire trend over the last 50 years, and you just expect much bigger changes over that timeframe. It's just the difference in intuition.
Which of course gets back to the big difference in philosophy and intuition between classic liberals and progressives.
The liberal position is 'erase discrimination from our laws and our hearts, and you're done. Without those hard barriers, people will rise to their natural level, we'll have a true meritocracy, no one will have anything to complain about, the world will be just and fair.'
And the progressive position is 'Well, that's a good start, but you don't actually live in the most-convenient-world where that's all it takes. There are inertial factors that keep formerly poor and oppressed groups poor and disadvantaged far into the future, there are persistent structural factors that disadvantage minorities for totally non-discriminatory reasons. Those forces push away from a meritocracy, so if you want a meritocracy you have to actually study what those factors are and apply some type of corrective against them. Those forces have nothing to do with the individual and are fundamentally unjust, so if you want justice you have to go out there and make it yourself.'
And this gets to the fundamental difference in intuition between the left and the right on things like AA and diversity initiatives and minority scholarship grants and etc. The right sees a situation where two resumes arrive and you care about race when evaluating and sees a process that pushes away from meritocracy. The left sees a system where many people never produce a resume that represents their full innate potential because of systemic factors working against them, and sees a correction applied against those factors as a long-term pressure towards a meritocratic equilibrium.
Of course, this is me once again saying 'people who think like me look at the whole picture and the full complexity of the world and have sophisticated thought about how to correct it, people who disagree with me just look at small atomic situations and have simplistic thoughts about how to react to them and never consider the macro-scale implications of that policy'.
There's an extent to which that just feels true, like, the right is more focused on individualism and individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and what is right-or-wrong behavior when two individuals interact, and is inherently suspicious or dismissive of systems-level explanations that rely on stochastic process and probability distributions over outcomes over generations, right? Being derisive towards that type of academic-sounding socialist/communist egghead bullshit is part of the brand, right?
But there's also an extent to which I feel like that must be wrong, where probably everyone can model how their opponent reacts to individual bounded scenarios but can't simulate their larger complicated systemic worldview, and therefore concludes their opponents don't have such a systemic worldview to begin with.
I certainly have the experience of people on the right describing people on the left as though they are motivated by individual-level hatred of white men instead of macro-level concerns about how the overall structure of the system unfairly and dangerously advantages some demographics.
Am I making the same myopic mistake when I say the right views this question through the lens of individual achievement and personal responsibility and misses the larger systemic/stochastic factors that produce national trends in the data? Or is that just literally actually their position?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on that bit, it's a place I could learn something about people's positions and worldviews.
I'm going to go kinda hard on your comment, not because I didn't wish many of the ideas were true, but because the evidence against them is so overwhelming.
There has been social interventions - in pro-'oppressed' direction. Affirmative action, government transfers have been helping black families for decades. Yet by many metrics blacks in America are doing worse than they were in the 1950s.
You might also find instructive the experience of the Chinese attempt in the cultural revolution to neutralize richer / more well-educated families by seizing their wealth, or outright jailing and even killing them. Yet just a few decades later, the same surnames who had wealth and status before found themselves overrepresented at the top of society.
If minority status is such a burden, why do Jews do so well economically almost everywhere around the world? I would argue that history has been even less kind to the Jews than to African-Americans, yet I don't think they form a permanent underclass in, say, Germany? Similarly, why do Chinese emigres tend to academically and economically dominate in most of the countries they emigrate to?
Regarding the rest of your post - I will agree that racism is keeping back many black American families. Where I DISAGREE is that most of this racism comes from the left, largely via the bigotry of low expectations.
I think you and I can agree that raising children in married, two-parent families is by far the best for them. Are you familiar with the black out-of-wedlock birthrate in America? Over 70% of black kids born in America are to unmarried women. Mostly, people don't talk about this, as it's considered impolite. But every time I've heard of this mentioned as a problem it was by people who were either conservative, or prefaced it first apologizing that they "didn't mean to echo conservative talking points". In other words, it's not conservatives that have put together the system of generous welfare benefits that makes all this possible.
As another example - look at education. I think you and I can agree that disruptive learning environments can absolutely fuck over a lot of kids and significantly impact their chances at a well-paying job in the future. And nothing is more disruptive than kids beating the shit out of others (or even you!) in school. Yet, because the perpetrators are also black, American educators are loathe to actually punish them. This was most evident in the Obama administration's guidance to 1) reduce punishments and 2) have greater rates of equities in punishments.
Look at Oregon governor Kate Brown signing legislation that allows kids to graduate high school without proving they can read, write, or do basic math - explicitly citing that current requirements disproportionately hurt black and brown kids. Look at school boards in San Francisco voting to stop teaching algebra before high school because those classes were disproportionately not-black.
Look at predominantly black cities all around America - how they spend $20, $30k, sometimes over $50k a year on students - and often have schools where not a single student is proficient at reading (or alternatively, math). Look at how they turn a blind eye to institutions that utterly fail their students as long as their motivations sound nice. If you actually cared about black kids succeeding in school, shouldn't you make noises to address the failures of, say, lebron james' school, which throws money at kids and yet is utterly failing them academically?
Look at how the media and government treat charter schools - some of which (Success Academy being a prime example) actually have great track records of helping poor black and latino kids achieve academic success. But because these places have strict behavioral requirements, the media would rather talk about how kids are sometimes being disciplined too harshly.
Right, this was posing a hypothetical.
I am not proposing a generic theory of 'any race that has bad things happen to them will be economically disadvantaged forever.' The world is too complicated for that to be true. I was talking narrowly and specifically about black americans, because I think that's the primary motte of the culture war version of this conversation.
The holocaust was very very very bad, I don't really see any point in making value judgements about whether it was 'worse' than chattel slavery or w/e. But it was a singular event. It wasn't multiple generations living as chattel without education, with it being illegal to teach them to read. It wasn't more decades of segregation and redlining and so forth. It wasn't the long development of a separate oppressed culture and dialect. All of the very specific things I mentioned in my post as causal factors, don't really apply to that situation.
I mean, ok, obviously I disagree with some of your points and characterizations, but my point was about HBD vs other causal factors for racial gaps. It sounds like you are listing a bunch of additional non-genetic factors that cause racial gaps. Does this mean you agree with me that there no strong evidence for HBD explaining racial gaps in this specific instance, because of things like the problems you list?
I think that there are many non-genetic explanations, many of which which exacerbate genetic explanations (for example, generous welfare policies enabling dysgenic selection).
If you don't believe in HBD, may I ask you - do you believe in HBD anywhere? Do you think all 'races' do not differ in height (I am aware of the effect of diet - such as many East Asian countries gaining several inches of average height in the last two generations). Do you think there is no West African advantage in sprinting, or East African advantage in distance running? If not, how do you explain the dominance of people from various 'races' in certain sports? If so, why do you think group differences can only be possible outside of cognition?
Yes, I believe in HBD. I'd really rather not think about it - because intragroup differences are often much larger than inter-group differences. One of the smartest kids I knew growing up was Black. One of the best athletes was Indian. But none of that changes what I see as overwhelming evidence for differences between 'races' (and I understand the fuzziness of the word). The only two defenses I've seen against HBD are "many of the people who've done this research are bad people with bad motives, who maybe use bad methods sometimes", and "hey if you believe this, we're going to tell everyone you're an odious racist".
Again, motte and bailey.
I don't believe there's sufficient evidence that black people are incapable of economic success such that we should conclude all current inequities are 'natural' and gear policy towards that conclusion. I don't believe there's reason to think that immigration is innately dysgenic and we should close the borders for that reason.
Are various populations different than some other populations by at least some amount on some metrics? Yes, trivially. Random variance alone would make that true, and I don't believe that's the only thing at play in every possible comparison of this type that you could make.
But this isn't the 'random facts about genetics and population statistics' thread, it's the culture war thread. The culture war over HBD is related to politics and policy concerns, and I don't think the people on the HBD side of that war have sufficient evidence to justify any of their policy proposals, or their general aesthetic and ethos on the topic.
If the thing you believe is just the incredibly trivial fact that some groups are at least somewhat different from some other groups on some factors based on population averages, but you don't agree with policy proposals that use specific types of racial inferiority as a bedrock premise, then my advice is that you should not say that you believe in HBD.
The 'some groups are different in some ways' thing is, as you say, trivially true and obvious. The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby. The obviously true thing doesn't have or need an acronym, this project is what 'HBD' actually means to most people, and if they react badly it's because they're reacting to that actual project, not the obvious motte.
If that's not your project, but you heard someone in the HBD movement say the motte and thought to yourself 'Well I agree with that, I must be an HBD believer', I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with. As someone in progressive spaces, I'm very used to the phenomenon, and the signs are easy to recognize once you're looking.
If that is your project, then that is the thing we actually disagree about, and stop trying to paint me as disagreeing with the trivially true motte.
This reads to me like deliberate weak manning. At minimum you should probably reference a more specific example than "the HBD movement." For example Charles Murray is probably credibly part of any putative "HBD movement" but if you described him as "acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies" then I would say you either didn't read him, didn't understand him, or are willfully misunderstanding him. I assume there are some people out there using the (as you suggest) "trivial fact" of HBD for purely racist goals, but I have never personally encountered such a person.
I wasn't going to actually moderate you for the earlier quote but when I got to this one, it pushed you over the edge. I suspect we all get to be someone's useful idiot, sometimes, but "the only reasons you could possibly disagree with me here is that you are evil, or stupid" is not really a permissible discussion posture under our ruleset.
I think maybe the advice I want to give you here is to try to keep your arguments addressed to other arguments, rather than making them about (general or specific) people.
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