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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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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:

  1. Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)

  2. Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)

  3. People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)

  4. 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:

Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss. The idea of sleeping with very short men fills many women with revulsion. The severely handicapped are a drain on society’s resources. And so on.

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 don't have time for this right now, but I'll leave my flag in the sand and say HBD is wrong. I'll just leave this quote here I found on reddit that does the same job as me taking the time:

Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.

Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.

Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.

Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.

Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)

IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.

Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.

There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.

Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".

Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.

Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.

Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.

Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.

  • -38

I think it's clearly true that humans are a lot less biodiverse than is possible or normal for other species, and that the range in human cognitive ability and behavior would be a lot larger if older human populations were still around.

Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.

I mean, some African subpopulations seem to do a lot better than other African subpopulations, but it's reasonable to compare American whites to American blacks even if you don't generalize that to all of Africa so I don't think this proves much. I think it's reasonable to not expect the properties of American blacks to generalize to Africa, but that isn't the core of HBD so whatever.

Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians

This is kinda ridiculous. You can tell what a non-mixed person's ancestry is by looking at them. There are extremely clear associations, you can get something looking like a map of europe by doing (something like a) PCA on genetic variation. Yeah, there's no single entirely correct categorization, but no single entirely correct categorization exists for fish either, and I think we can talk about fish. And different ancestry groups have differences in so many different traits - skin color, kinds of athleticism, body shape, hair, etc etc etc - that it's not implausible there'd be a statistical difference in intelligence.

Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)

... I mean, there's a whole literature on this, but IQ tests have strong associations with achievement and capability in every area. And just like, anecdotally, I can personally observe that some people are clearly much smarter than other people. And, funnily enough, when I get these people I know to take IQ tests, the ones I judged as clearly much smarter score ~130+, and those that I didn't don't.

There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms

No, this is because valuable complex traits are highly polygenic - many different genes have a small effect on the trait. This is because any variant that has a strong positive or negative effect is highly selected for/against, so the only genes with remaining variance have small effects.

Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".

The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.

Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community

So, this is a subtle trick. The comment's been attacking several things as foundational to HBD - the construct validity of IQ, the relevance of heritability, genetic explanations for traits like intelligence and personality that are claimed to be genetic, the relationship between genes and race. And then we say "HBD operates outside academia and is unknown in genomics". This is true, if HBD means "race genetically causes low IQ". It is profoundly and either maliciously or negligently false if we take HBD to include the validity of IQ, polygenic scores, and the heritability of and genetic explanations for intelligence. Those are well studied and in significant part accepted in academia. The positions this comment takes, especially about the validity and heritability of IQ, are not what is currently believed in academia.

Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.

... okay? This is "every progressive organization was funded by SOROS, a globalist jew who loves criminals and hates wites" tier. Funding doesn't make something false, Soros has funded plenty of good causes.

Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ.

Yep, and anti-HBD people do bad things too. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the big names! Or consider modern research policies that just ... ban the use of biobanks to research the relationship between race and IQ.

I'll also link you to this, which probably does a better job than me, but I like writing anyway.

And if this is all too abstract and not connecting, try this - for a direct demonstration of one of the practical consequences of HBD, jewish overrepresentation. Once you've seen it it's hard to stop seeing it. But it's not necessarily a (((conspiracy))), they're just smart.

The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:

Overall, Black children had an adjusted +0.83 µg/dL blood Pb (95% CI 0.65 to 1.00, p < 0.001) and a 2.8 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (95% CI 1.9 to 3.9, p < 0.001). When stratified by risk factor group, Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/

And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.

The simple way to settle this would be to:

A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.

Has anyone actually done this?

  • -10

Has anyone actually done this

As described before, the are thousands of variants responsible for variation in intelligence in existing populations (as distinct from 'responsible for intelligence', there are many more nucleotides sequences that are necessary for intelligence and don't have any variation in the population because you're disabled or dead without them). This is the only paper I could find: http://pfigshare-u-files.s3.amazonaws.com/2134951/NineHits__3_5.pdf and there's a graph inside it which shows that the populations HBDers claim are low IQ have lower polygenic scores for intelligence. Now, it's just one paper, I think it's as likely to be biased/wrong as it is to be meaningful. There isn't more research into this because as I said it's considered racist, and in order to do a proper study you'd need a lot of biobanks and research approval to get the data, and they don't want you to be racist. They even restrict research that's only tangentially related: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there

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