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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29919 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.

  • -39

Bluntly, a lot of this is really unsophisticated or just non-responsive. I'm not going to address each piece of the Gish Gallop, but let's take this one:

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.

Who the hell thinks this is how any kind of biodiversity is generated? Yeah, genetic drift, founder effects, and other random or stochastic processes result in differences between populations that are non-adaptive. I have no idea why someone would think this is even worth mentioning in an attempt to demonstrate that there are not meaningful population-level differences between groups.

The whole post is kind of this way, with snarkily presented factoids that don't have anything to do with addressing their opponents. It's a fun ingroup signal for people that also don't really know anything about the topic and want to dunk on the outgroup though.

Bluntly, a lot of this is really unsophisticated or just non-responsive.

It's not like much, if any, of the Pro HBD stuff that gets posted here is any better.

If we're being blunt, it ought to be pointed out that HBD as it is most typically advocated and defended here on theMotte is a normative belief rather than a descriptive one and should be judged as such.

  • -18

If we're being blunt, it ought to be pointed out that HBD as it is most typically advocated and defended here on theMotte is a normative belief rather than a descriptive one and should be judged as such.

What do you mean by that?

Exactly what it says on the tin.

  • -21

That's not helpful.

Let me clarify. What normative beliefs do you see HBD as being?

HBD posters on theMotte generally fall into two broad categories, strict bio-determisnists, and reflexively contrarian intersectionalists/identitarians. Both consider evaluating individual people on the basis of race/ethnic membership to be the "correct" / "rational" means of understanding human behavior and both deeply resent the Anglo/American traditions of individual responsibility, agency, and merit. They derisively refer to the norms of equality before the law and evaluating people on the basis of individual ability/merit enshrined in the US Constitution as "blank slatism" and it is the destruction of these norms that is their primary motivation.

Okay, I think I would generally say that I accept some form of HBD, but reject everything you just said.

I think different groups have different traits on average, and that some part of the variance is probably due to genetic variation. That's all.

I'm not a strict biodeterminist; environment, culture, etc. matter too.

I'm not an identitarian, I don't think it's important for most groups to cultivate racial identity (cf. Gal 3:28); there are far more important things.

I do think it's rational to make judgments based on race, in the same way (but to a much, much lesser degree) than you might make judgments based on sex, but in both cases, those judgments are mostly only relevant before you get more data—you learn more by directly observing than by priors.

I am heartily in favor of Anglo-American norms of responsibility, agency, and merit. In fact, this is one of the main reasons that I think differences in racial averages are worth talking about (at least, when discussing policy): because they're often used as evidence that the system of responsibility, agency, and merit is actually racist, acknowledging that there are differences helps to defend the best parts of the system we are in. As it currently exists, it's often legally problematic to test for qualifications, because different races do worse on it on average, leading to the dropping of tests and less merit across the board. It would be better to just be a meritocracy and accept that the racial distribution will be more uneven than currently.

I see blank slatism as something distinct from equality before the law, and evaluation based on merit. The latter two I am in favor of, the former I think is incorrect.

What I mean by that is, yes, there are genuine differences between people. (Shocker, men and women are not the same.) But that doesn't at all mean we should drop merit or equality before the law.

Perhaps I'm unique in this, but my sense was that many people who would say that they affirm differences between racial populations are pro-merit, though that's certainly not true of everyone.

Do you also find me repugnant, and mostly making normative claims?

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