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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 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:
This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.
To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.
The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.
I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:
Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?
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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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?
There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.
See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity
Yes, this is true.
Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?
Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.
My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.
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People often mean very different things when they say "most common ancestor".
Do you mean the person such that every single person living today has as an ancestor somewhere in their family tree? This person is a mere 3,000 years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html
Do you mean the time from which every person living back then was an ancestor to everyone living today. That's about 7,000 years as you mentioned.
Do you mean the person from which a certain locus in all modern living humans descends from? This person is about 50,000 years ago (this is highly dependent on the locus though)
Do you mean the person from which all of a large block of the DNA of all living people comes from? This person is about 300,000 years ago (see e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam, the guy who all modern extant Y-chromosomes are descended from) and isn't even an anatomically modern human.
Do you mean the person from which all of our DNA is descended from? This organism is many many millions of years old and isn't even human.
The first two cases really don't mean much when looking at modern humans. For instance you could have gotten a fragment of Chromosome 1 from this person while I got a fragment of Chromosome 17 from this person (if we even got any DNA from him in the first place, which in itself is pretty unlikely), and it's perfectly possible that people living in East Asia preferentially got Chromosme 1 fragments from him while people in Europe got Chromosome 17 fragments from him (because his descendeds which moved to those locations carried those specific parts of his genome there).
Same with the second case, just because every human being at that point was both our's ancestors doesn't mean anything about what proportion of those ancestors we have and these proportions can be very different, from Wikipedia:
It's the third and further things which matter for how much genetic variance there is between two groups, becuase at that point you can directly point to specific portions of the genome and say that for both of us that ancestor provided the DNA at this location.
Those numbers are way too low.
The 3000, if you read the link you put, is using a way oversimplified model.
The 7000 is clearly false given the separation of the Americas long before that, and very low rates of admixture since aside from the last 500 years.
You don't actually need to have any DNA from any specific people generations back in your ancestry, the recombination could and often does go the wrong way.
Your overall point is good, though, that things go far enough back to matter, and that mere common ancestry doesn't mean an enormous amount.
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There's plenty of room in the human genome for large differences in polygenic traits or Japanese and Norwegians would be the same average height.
Edit: Not to pile on to this comment excessively, because this applies equally well to many others, but posts like this were what really turned me into an HBD guy. You present a fully general argument against population level genetic differences in literally anything, apparently without noticing that there are plenty of such differences that are completely uncontroversial.
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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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To be clear, do you acknowledge that the motivated reasoning is present both ways?
Yes absolutely.
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Those would show up as shared environment in twin/adoption/sibling studies. We see, universally, low shared environment in every research method tried. These hypotheses have been tested and found wanting.
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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:
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.
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I don't know enough about all the points to literally refute every one, but everything I can understand about what's written here is almost complete nonsense.
The very first thing:
Almost all experts agree that people were in North America 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that this may have happened even significantly earlier. That someone could claim that ~7000 years would be enough for everyone currently on earth to share an ancestor is self-evidently completely nonsensical.
See:
Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
In a nutshell, if you take a White or Asian person, they are about as different or as similar as say two White people are.
Most variation is neutral and due to genetic drift and the accumulation of, new, mostly neutral allele variants. This doesn't change the fact that people can vary genetically on socially relevant traits like height, IQ and skin color despite being genetically similar.
Amazonians are relatively light skinned, but nearly identical genetically to their dark skinned Peruvian neighbors. Both Europeans and North East Asians are light skinned due to convergent evolution despite their large genetic differences. Both Peruvians and Amazonians are genetically more similar to Europeans than they are to North East Asians, because they have a lot Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry from people who used to live in Siberia, the same as Europeans.
Yet they don't look or act more like Europeans than the North East Asians do, because of culture and selection and the fact most variation is neutral.
Yep, two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10 phenotypically important loci will present much more differently to each other than two individuals who have the same genome but are different at 10,000 neutral loci.
Counting all loci as being equally contributing to differences in phenotype between separated groups misses the fact that the common differences between two groups have been selected to disproportionately have phenotypic impacts.
Hence you can't compare a mutation on a locus that's different between populations X and Y vs a mutation that some people in Y have and others don't and they say the impact the mutation has on the individual must be similar in both cases, hence that mutation makes people just as phenotypically different as the one which segregates the two populations.
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I'm pretty sure you're wrong on this, Amerindians are somewhat closer to East Asians than Europeans. People living in Siberia weren't same as Europeans. and Amerindians are product of mixing of Siberians and proto-East Asians.
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wrong e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png
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Iff you consider only a small fraction of differences.
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The claim above is nonsense, but not nonsense for the reason you are saying. 5,000-15,000 years is roughly the time for all humans to share ancestors. Plus the identical ancestors point doesn't mean those people were your ancestors, it's either they were your ancestor or have no living descendents today.
However just because you share ancestors doesn't mean you get DNA from them in equal amounts, or that you even get DNA from them at all (for context given how recombination works you have ancestors a mere 500 years ago you don't carry any DNA from, indeed you don't carry any DNA from almost all of your ancestors 500 years ago). From the Wikipedia page on the identical ancestors point (I recommend reading it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point
Add in the fact that somone who appears only once in your family tree 7000 years ago has basically a < 10^-50 (or thereabouts) chance of contributing DNA to you living today we can pretty safely say that modern Japanese people do not have any genetic ancestry from Norwegians because as I said above geneological ancestry and genetic ancestry are not the same.
The differing proportions in how much of your ancestors were living in place X vs Y at the identical ancestors point still lead to large scale group geographic phenotypic differences, even though everyone has the same ancestors (as a set, but not in proportion of their genetics that made it down to you) not too far back in the past.
Honestly someone who knows about the identical ancestors point but then does not mention the differing proportions is sending off a massive red flag that they are acting in bad faith because they are absolutely smart/well read enough to know better. I wouldn't trust much of whatever else comes after they wrote that.
That feels impossible. From a quick google:
I think the ~5k-15k number is a theoretical number that one comes up with if one ignores selection, geographical barriers, and anything else that makes mating not some kind of random walk.
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I've banged on before about Lynn and his agenda and his absolutely shoddy 'data', so I'll just applaud from the sidelines here.
Lynn’s data is only critical in discussions that reference his absurdly low estimates for some countries based on extremely flawed reasoning and his own personal biases (for example against the Irish).
For major population groups in the United States, data on the standardized testing of tens of millions of people is available and categorized. A reliance on Lynn’s studies here and there is unnecessary.
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He's right on Lynn, from what I've read, but the comment overall is horrible.
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... Racism?
Or, more charitably: you're variously making unsubstantiated declarations of fact that are not accepted into evidence yet, defending a motte that's entirely different from the bailey people are actually caring about, cherrypicking a couple of statistics that support your view from the entirety of human history and civilization which has literal billions of such metrics you could have chosen instead, and presenting a bunch of disparate and unrelated phenomena and demanding a singular explanation for all of them at once.
Maybe the tiny sub-sub-population of Ashkenazi Jews has an average advantage; good for you, the motte is about whether black people are too stupid to participate equally in the economy, and whether we need to shut down the borders because allowing generic 'immigrants' in will make us dumber.
The claim that adoption studies show kids following racial outcomes rather than parental outcomes is not a fact in evidence, and you would need to do a ton of work to establish what you actually empirically mean by the claim and that it is true, and then the answer for that individual claim would probably be something like 'half those adopted kids were still raised in poverty for the first 5 years' or 'people who put their kids up for adoption have worse genetics to start with and provide bad fetal environments' or 'yeah, we told you racism of various types exists and affects people's outcomes, good job demonstrating that.'
I have no idea what your claim about Tamil Nadu actually means in empirical terms or whether it's anything resembling true, but if it is I have no idea what economic and cultural and historical factors obtain in that part of the world, and from your fluency in English I bet you don't either. By one dumb metric Jeff Bezos alone represents 1% of US GDP, how sure are you that whatever metric you are invoking here is actually much less dumb than that? Based on your knowledge of the region and its history, how sure are you that something local variant of bigotry and discrimination akin to racism can't possibly be the explanation?
Etc. The answer here is 'that sounds a lot like a gish-gallop, and there's a reason people don't respond to those'.
Shit, I must have deleted my comment (you’re right, it was pretty low effort) the same minute you posted your response. I’m very sorry, please do make this reply elsewhere.
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Sure, but this isn't super relevant, since there clearly is variation? We know a bunch of traits are heritable and vary between individuals.
This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.
People conflate a small handful of groups (Khoekhoe, Hadza, Pygmies, etc.) that are actually very diverse and different with subsaharan Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, I believe it is still true of subsaharan Africa that it's more diverse. But I don't think it matters. When the question is "can I treat this as a group to run statistics on", you can pretty much always do that, with whatever group you care about (left handed people would work just fine, and they aren't even endogamous). But it's also closer than that, as my impression was that in general, most subsaharan africans were more closely related to other (non-exotic) subsaharan africans than they are to the people who left Africa. That could be wrong, though.
Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.
I've been led to believe that g is one of the psychological findings that holds up best. IQ tests are meant to measure "that statistical thing over there that shows up in everything."
I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.
Okay? Your point?
A whole lot of traits are very polygenic, and it makes sense that intelligence would be one of those. I don't get the point of your last sentence. Are you really arguing that "genetics is complicated, therefore it can't be genetic"?
It was my impression that the epigenetics stuff was pseudoscience. Sure, microbiomes could be heritable (I think?), but I don't think "it could be different microbiomes, so it must not be genes, at all" is a valid conclusion.
And why, exactly, do you think they are outside of academia? Why are you putting the blame on them, and not academia? There's obviously a taboo. Noah Carl was ousted from academia for trying to do things like this, I believe. Is Razib Khan not a figure in the genomics community? I'm also pretty sure I've seen some survey showing that most academics in the relevant communities believe that the IQ gap is partly due to genetic factors. Talking about journal publications is problematic for the same reason.
Oh, and mainstream academic institutions are perfectly neutral. Tu quoque aside, "motivated people donated to them" is not the same as saying they're wrong, it just means you need a bit more caution.
Yeah, you shouldn't be extrapolating data and then treating that as if it were additional information, which is what I'm led to believe Lynn did. I'm not familiar with the other people.
No, most of those were mostly irrelevant, and the rest were wrong.
I'd be open to being convinced that HBD is wrong, or at least, closer to being wrong, but it would need to be with better arguments, actually engaging with the data. Nothing that you've mentioned here has even addressed the point that these statistics vary by race, and attempted to explain it. Evidence of the effects of environmental factors, especially culture, could be helpful.
Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.
It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.
I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?
Not quite plausible, though getting much closer. The oldest American sites are from right around 15000 years ago. I wouldn't expect too many people to have Native American ancestry. (Yes, if I remember correctly, Athabaskans and Inuit etc. peoples are later, but I don't think that's enough to matter.)
Humans have much, much more diversity than cheetahs*, though also quite a bit less than chimpanzees. Cheetahs are extremely low in genetic diversity. It's silly to say that there isn't a significant amount of diversity when it's obvious that humans vary substantially among many traits that we might consider significant, and when many traits are heritable.
Yes, of course. Disambiguating would take some care, investigation into what effects environmental/sociocultural factors have, etc. It would be odd not to recognize the possibility (and I would expect it would have some effect). And as pointed out, race can act as a proxy for genetic ancestry, since non-exceptional subsaharan africans will, I believe, look genetically more like each other than they do like non-subsaharan africans. It would also be odd not to recognize that genes could play a factor.
Assuming that IQ tests match sufficiently well on to our usual concepts of smartness (probably, but with only a 4 point difference, and IQ tests evened by construction, I'm less confident than usual), then yes, it would follow that women would be smarter than men; the tests said so. We could investigate causes, sure, to see whether they're innately smarter or due to the environment, but that wouldn't change that there'd be a difference.
You could investigate to what extent groups differing in whatever factors might be lowering IQ would differ in IQ. (Adoption studies could be one avenue to pick up on some sources of variation, different countries, etc.)
*the graph on page 91
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I’m going to leave your arguments about scientific practice and appeals to authority to someone else, and note that nearly everything you write about population history is wrong.
No, not every human alive is descended from every other human alive 7,000 years ago. Humans had already dispersed by then; I’m probably a descendant of every western hunter gatherer and early European farmer and yamnaya on the landscape 7,000 ya, but of no sub Saharan Africans or aboriginal Australians from after the ice age. And your statement about genetic diversity in Africa is also not true; technically speaking, pygmies and Khoisan are farther from any other human population than any other human population is from any other population… but the vast majority of sub Saharan Africans are descended from early Niger-Congo speakers, who are an identifiable genetic cluster like eg Europeans or orientals.
Even leaving out the San, Pygmies, etc, subsaharan africans do have greater genetic diversity than non-africans—their bottleneck was smaller than the out-of-africa group's, if I remember correctly.
I'm not sure what the Bantu expansion looks like genetically.
But I don't think this means that you can't model them as a group, at least when we're in the context of talking about group representation and affirmative action. It's not like other groups aren't composed of a bunch of smaller groups that also vary (elites vs. commoners, if nothing else).
And yes, the 7000 years point is obviously wrong—very few people today outside of the Americas would be descended from the average native american 7000 years ago. It's also irrelevant.
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Don't do this.
The purpose of this forum is to be a discussion group. This is why we don't allow people to just drop bare links at the top and say "discuss".
So either participate in the discussion, or don't. If you do not want to participate the correct action to take is to not post.
Sorry, I won't do that again.
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If you're going to post something, you should be willing to defend it.
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This is just an arrogant demand to close ones eyes.
And yet you can look at a man with purely sub-Saharan African ancestry and one with purely Scandinavian ancestry for at least several millennia, and you will be able to tell the difference.
I checked Wikipedia.
Emphasis mine.
Furthermore:
and
So we can reject a 7000-year-ago Identical Ancestors Point as being both wholly unproven and irrelevant even if true.
This is simply a non sequitur, though I will note that the usual separation is "sub-Saharan Africa", not Africa as a whole.
This is just blowing smoke. And the discovery that self-reported race can be robustly predicted from medical images, with many different modalities, demonstrates that race is physical. Race may sometimes be hard to categorize, but there's a real thing there and we've at least done an OK job of categorizing it.
Construct validity is a property of a measurement, not of the thing measured.
It's Gaussian because studies done by Terman and others based on the IQ of children using earlier tests (which were not forced to a Gaussian) came out reasonably close to Gaussian. And yes, g is an output of factor analysis, though whether it is a mere artifact or not is not known -- claiming it to be a mere artifact is simply assuming away its relevance. Anyway, for this and the previous claim to be able to debunk HBD, you have to reject the concept that some people are more intelligent than others and that we have ways of measuring that. Without that, you haven't debunked HBD, you're just complaining about the crudity of the tools.
I'm pretty sure HBD proponents do care about genes. But just because determining the actual mechanisms behind HBD is difficult doesn't mean HBD is false; it's not even evidence for the proposal. Mendel didn't know shit about DNA either.
Non sequitur
Yes, this just means HBD is anathema, not that it's wrong.
Ditto, even if true.
Even if true, fraudulent evidence for a proposition is not evidence against it.
None of this erases e.g. the difference in various standardized test scores between black and white Americans, nor demonstrates a non-heritable (or even heritable non-genetic) explanation for them.
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This just means that human level intelligence is exactly sitting around a Great Filter. And variations between the “inbreds” range from can form “Hunter gathering tribe” complexity to can make “rockets that leave earth” complexity.
I have no doubt if I took subsaharan Africans and filtered them for 500 years for IQ that I could arrive at Ashekenazi level Jewish average IQ.
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This is obviously wrong in at least the pretty clear case of the Ashkenazim.
It’s also wrong because we observe average differences between populations on polygenic traits like height, and evolution didn’t stop at the neck.
What an embarrassing statement to make about what is the single strongest predictor social science has.
Wait until you learn about IQ proxies and how often they’re used in studies of all kinds. Also, this writer doesn’t know enough to know to separate psychometrics from psychology.
You can and maybe even should ignore all the studies done by these HBD types. There’s immense bodies of evidence in just normal science if you care to pay attention.
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If you have no reason to put a particular prior on a distribution a Gaussian is absolutely the best one to go for (because for a given mean and variance it is the maximum entropy distribution).
Besides, we do have good reasons for why intelligence should be Gaussian: if something is an aggregate of lots of different additive factors (which pretty much everyone agrees intelligence is) then by the central limit theorem the combined thing will be gaussian.
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I don't know if any of the our resident HBD obsessives are still around, so maybe you'll get a full response to this, or maybe not. All I'll say as someone who really doesn't want HBD to be true is be extremely careful making these kind of bombastic rants. Back when this was a subject discussed with some regularity around here, watching people come in hot like this, and getting refuted point by point, was pretty radicalizing.
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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…
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Why should the 300 million yield to the 50 million, rather than vice-versa?
Yield isn’t binary. The present is clearly undesirable, although in my opinion so is ‘let them rot’. For better or worse, nobody’s going back to the Old World. Some peace, ideally a lasting and prosperous one, is desirable. The question isn’t about yielding but about what must be done to ensure a high quality and functional society.
Discipline, order, a decline in promiscuity and a restoration of marriage, an extreme taboo on children out of wedlock, more limited divorce, strong male role models including male teachers for boys. Even limited affirmative action, to create black elites in professions like medicine and law who will return to black communities professionally aren’t unjustifiable. All this requires money, and whether it’s for police or other programs it won’t be done without (what is ultimately) the tax contributions of other groups.
And, without being facetious, one cannot forget that they did yield, and it ultimately led us here.
I see no reason to believe peace is possible. Jefferson had it half-right:
He didn't predict defection of the liberal elite, of course. It took Orwell for that, with the alliance of the high and low against the middle.
The question is exactly about yielding. Do the elites keep forcing whites (and Asians of all sorts, and probably eventually non-black Hispanics) to self-flagellate as 'racists' and continue bending and distorting everything in favor of URM/POC/etc while being unable to hide the extent of the distortion? Or do we quit doing that and let the chips fall where they may?
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The same as the answer of Jews or Asians when whites complain about them doing too well.
Yeah, and while that answer works it’s a good one. But will it continue to work?
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It’s not the underclass you have to convince. It’s the lawyers and the police force, as well as a democratic majority of the country.
You can’t convince someone that they didn’t deserve position X, any more than you can convince a looter that they can’t afford nice things. One of the reasons for having a police force is so that you don’t have to.
You can also sweeten the pot; I’m not actually a pure meritocrat, a certain amount of redistribution doesn’t bother me. But it’s much better to do it with your eyes open than, ‘This is all temporary, in 25 years none of it will be necessary. Oh, wait, it’s still necessary, our society must be fundamentally irredeemable.’
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Uh, the Latino professional class are mostly there on merit or something close to it, it won’t just evaporate. Yes, there will be far fewer black med school admits, but nothing about HBD suggests that actually existing black doctors should lose their jobs.
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yes_chad.jpg
HBDers can even appropriate a pre-existing set of insults and condescending phrases currently used against white and Asian males who object to affirmative action: “skill issue,” “sucks to suck,” “you’re just a sore loser,” “if you were truly merited you’d succeed regardless.”
Black lives mattering more and catering to and coddling the egos of black (and latino) egos may be the current state of affairs, but it’s not some fundamental law of the universe, especially one where colorblindness is occurring.
Note that the inverse of affirmative action is not colorblindness, but rather massive racial preferences in favor of Asians and whites relative to blacks and latinos. The left has sufficiently controlled the narrative such that even wrong thinkers treat the Overton window as ranging from colorblindness to infinite affirmative action in favor of blacks and latinos.
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Well, given some of the people of this type I talk to, the answer is that this will take time. If we "roll the clock back twenty years," return to a norm of colorblindness, etc., we buy ourselves a decade or two, which gives us the time to quietly develop the technological solutions — either genetic engineering to fix the HBD issues (see @mitigatedchaos here), or else we develop the AI singleton
god-kingthat either immanentizes the eschaton or turns us into paperclips.Should note that for the record, I answer all requests from the left to silence the HBDers with "you first; show that you're serious about not supporting 'racial consciousness' and 'corrective' racial discrimination," so realistically I don't expect to take any actions to silence HBD discussion during the next 10 years.
Only people like tracingwoodgrains have moral standing to even make the request, and they're not powerful enough to make it binding at this time.
At which point, those lefties just ignore you and keep on "supporting 'racial consciousness' and 'corrective' racial discrimination" (and there's nothing you can do to stop them)
They don't need you to "take any actions to silence HBD discussion", they'll do that just fine themselves.
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Why can't it be like something like the NBA - where EVERYONE can see that certain groups are vastly over- or under-represented, and it's still understood to be almost completely based on merit?
It’s interesting that the NBA is your example, because it’s an example of overrepresentation that probably isn’t genetic- other major sports leagues aren’t that black, and basketball rewards height and hand-eye coordination- things blacks are unexceptional at- more than, say, sprinting speed or hitting puberty early- things blacks have an advantage at. It’s also really easy to tell how well players merit being where they are, and as far as we know those are simply the best players available.
It’s probably cultural reasons, not genetic ones- blacks really like basketball and everyone knows it, so they become good basketball players and not good baseball players. There might be some HBD around the edges, but most of it is that blacks like basketball a lot.
Sprinting is the obvious one. Also marathons.
Why doesn’t white privilege from all the fancy coaching help them here? Does white culture really not highly prize athletic performance?
It’s pretty obviously not “blacks just like basketball so much more than whites” that explains black overrepresentation here.
Tons and tons of American white boys, far outnumbering blacks, try as hard as they can to make it big in basketball and football.
And there’s a lot more white football players than in basketball. It’s reasonable to think that culture is the main reason for that particular discrepancy.
Blacks make up over half the NFL so they’re still overrepresented by a factor of four.
Culture doesn’t cut it there either as an explanation because both whites and blacks have very strong cultural motivations for those two sports.
Where culture does tend to explain things is when blacks aren’t overrepresented because it’s a sport where black kids are less likely to have a shot or interest. Famously, the Winter Olympics don’t have a lot of Africans on the podium. The NHL is very white and that almost certainly is explained by culture and not by skating genes. Similarly, baseball has a different cultural situation.
Blacks make up over half the NFL in part because they hit puberty earlier, and this is a sport where physical size in high school really matters to whether you get a career or not. They’re also better sprinters, which matters a lot in football.
That being said, blacks are also more willing to accept their sons being injured or missing educational opportunities for the sake of an athletics career, which is very relevant for football. So I think there is a strong cultural component, and that a key piece of evidence for that is the stars being much whiter than the league as a whole, although still probably blacker than genpop- the stars are presumably a pure-talent selection, and we would expect that to match the distribution of talent more closely than any cultural factors.
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I wasn't actually even trying to use an example where genetics is the main difference. My point was simply that we should understand that disproportionate representation can come about through other reasons than 'racism'. I agree that culture is a big part of it. If kids in Asia didn't spend so much time studying for various exams and more time playing basketball, there'd probably be more basketball talent produced (though note that I'm saying nothing about proportionality).
Having said that, I do think genetics is a part of it though. Other countries are also crazy about basketball - like, say, the Philippines, and you don't see a mass influx of Philippine basketball talent into the NBA every year. I think fast twitch muscles also help in playing defense, for example. Height also helps one be good at basketball, and I'm not sure how many 6'7 Asian dudes there are.
When you do decide to chime in, do so politely, please.
One week ban.
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What happened here? How was puntifex soliciting an opinion from you?
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Since when does leaping ability not matter in basketball? Which is definitely a think hbd types would point to as a black edge.
From 1984-2022 only one white person won the nba slam dunk contest. 2023/2024 a white person won named Matt McClung won but the competition is weird and filled with g-league players and only one NBA star participated. Honestly looks like white affirmative action.
Obviously other abilities matter in basketball too, but a big one is my launch point for my shot is higher than the defenders ability to block that shot which is heavily aided by jumping ability.
I just have a huge urge to use a cliche but “tell me you’ve never been dunked on without telling me you’ve never been dunked on”.
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You’re forgetting other obvious factors such as leaping - something which involves fast-twitch muscles - and wingspan, which is an incredibly important physical trait in the NBA. Blacks have significantly different bodily proportions than whites; their arms are proportionally significantly longer, as are their legs. Hand size as well. The bodily proportions particular to blacks are especially well-suited to basketball.
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Traits like height, sprinting speed, hand-eye coordination, etc. are approximately normally distributed. That means even small differences in mean or variation matter a lot on the tails. If we are talking about the highest levels of play where only people 2+ standard deviations out can even compete, then even the smallest differences matter more, exponentially more. It's not something that can be consigned to the margin, it's almost the only thing that matters at this level.
Look at someone like Shaq, he has no skill, he's just a big guy who could bully the court with his size.
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Because the left controls the narrative. Underrepresentation in the NBA? Git gud whitey. Underrepresentation at medical schools? That's racist.
I don't disagree! You should read my question as a wistful "why can't we be treat things that non-black Americans do disproportionately well at like we treat things black Americans disproportionately excel at"?
Or, why can't we strive to change our institutions to be less racist (albeit in the opposite direction from what everyone thinks)?
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Well, you’d have to go back to cultural dysfunction arguments. Progressives will still call them racist but you can still peel off some percent of minorities.
And then the progressives can pull out the adoption studies and demolish your cultural dysfunction arguments, leaving you with racism again.
Wait, do progressives really pull out the adoption studies? That's a risky move.
No, I'm saying that in this counterfactual world where HBD was completely off the table, they could defeat the culture argument with that.
They won’t though.
Besides if they started pulling out adoption studies then progressives themselves are saying they believe in race realism and the GOP is believing in race realism but using a polite euphemism for it.
In a world where HBD was completely off the table, adoption studies simply measure the effect of culture. If achievement follows the child's race instead of the family's race, culture is ruled out, leaving you with racism.
In the real world, it's possible the populations of children of different races are in fact, not statistically identical. But to get that result you have to allow for HBD, not rule it out because it's yucky the way polite anti-HBD conservatives would.
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I may be wrong but I think this is explicitly untrue legally. AFAIK, if you can demonstrate a necessity of hiring in a way that causes a disparate impact, and your methods were not arbitrary (standardized tests are usually used as a defense), then it's perfectly legal.
Are there people making ignorant or bad faith cases about the arbitrariness of the standardized tests? Of course. But as far as I can tell, they lose in court.
Burden of proof of necessity is on you, and if the complaining party can suggest another method of hiring which would solve the same problem without the disparate impact, they win. Obviously they don't have to suggest something which works (how can you tell in the case that it was not used) or is even vaguely practical, just something which sounds plausible to the arbiter.
The process is the punishment
First you have to get to court. Which means having the administrative process run to conclusion, Which means getting through the EEOC. Which is rather friendly to disparate impact arguments of the right valence.
See point about burden of proof.
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Sure, and then when you use those tools and a disparate racial impact is found the courts find you've run afoul of the Civil Rights Act.
Yes, the disparate impact standard needs to go, and should be a top priority.
How do you expect to convince the legislature or courts to reject the disparate impact standard except through convincing them HBD is true? If it isn't true disparate impact makes perfect sense. If I believed in my heart that every group really was fundamentally equal, I would love the disparate impact standard. Nothing else would make sense!
Yeah, it definitely helps.
Differences in everything else would also matter. Cultures differ, life opportunities, etc. also matter and anything that's influenced by these could have disparate impact in some direction or another.
Pre-existing widespread disparities can cause disparities in otherwise fair measures, and are not indicative of discriminatory intent, the latter of which was what the civil rights act was supposed to address.
There are a pair of long effort-post replies I made to a mutual on Tumblr (who also posts here rarely) that I should probably slightly edit into an effort-post here, on the legal-academic understanding of "racism" and civil rights law, starting with an argument I encountered pushing back on the usual criticism of Griggs, and extending through a sort of steelman of "Kendiism" (including references to Kendi's works and definitions).
To try to tl;dr summarize, "discriminatory intent" is irrelevant. The EEOC stands for "Equal Employment Opportunity Commission," and they define "equal opportunity" as the absence of "disparate impact." It doesn't matter if there's no discriminatory intent by any party, the mere fact that something (such as IQ tests) causes an ethnic minority to have a lower likelihood of being hired makes it presumptively forbidden. This may not have been the intent behind the civil rights act, on the part of many of its supporters (though I've seen people argue that for many of the more academic sorts, addressing "disparate impact" was always the goal, and "discriminatory intent" mattered only in that it was theorized as the primary cause), but it's how the enforcement bodies, and the academic consensus, very quickly came to interpret it. And, as they say, personnel is policy, therefore, so long as those same people are in charge of enforcement, no amount of "no really, this is about discrimination, we really mean it this time" from legislators is going to stop them from targeting "disparate impact."
That's probably fair. That said, a favorable supreme court ruling might be able to make a little of a difference. The law as it exists is clear enough, just badly misinterpreted. I'd be interested in seeing the effort posts. Could they mandate some standard of evidence, with it specified what sorts of things could count? (explicit evidence of intent counts, ratios that are off does not)
If legislators really wanted to rein in rogue agencies, I bet being able to sue individual employees for agency misbehavior that they participated in would do the trick, though that could be kind of extreme and lead to further breakdown of the government.
They could try, perhaps, but if the EEOC decides to ignore that and stick to the current (academic) consensus — "ratios that are off" matter, "evidence of intent" unnecessary — what is the recourse, then
Requires a number of factors that I find unlikely, most notably cooperative courts. AIUI, there are many precedents holding a broad immunity to this sort of thing, and I doubt they'd like to weaken those. And, of course, even if Congress grants you the ability to sue, they can't grant you the ability to win. If the courts find against the plaintiff and rule that there was no "agency misbehavior" in 100% of the cases brought before them, then does it really matter?
What breakdown?
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It is a defense to disparate impact along protected class lines if it can be shown that the discriminatory factor is a business necessity. I'm less confident in how this plays out in practiced, how many bullshit claims of prevailed since the CRA, and how much bullshit claims have trailed off since.
Tons of US companies including elite hedge funds and so on, not to mention the US military itself, use extremely g-loaded standardized testing in recruitment. All your lawyers have to be able to prove is that people who score better on the test do better at their jobs, which should be trivial. Cases where organizations have lost (there was a fire department one semi-recently iirc) usually happen because they’re so incompetent they forgot to collect the data in advance of getting sued.
Even if that’s “all” your lawyers have to do (just draw the rest of the owl), that certainly may not be trivial due to range restriction, Berkson’s paradox, and normal distribution tail effects (e.g., Gladwell’s Fallacy).
IQ and (hypothetical) job performance could be strongly correlated in the applicant pool, but weak or even inverted among the employed.
It’s not trivial demonstrating that height is predictive of tennis and basketball performance using data on ATP and NBA players, respectively. Some fans, including hardcore fans, are even under the impression that it can be negatively correlated in some ranges. “Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic show that the optimal height for tennis is around 6’1”-6’2”, and players like Del Potro or taller are just too tall” is a common sentiment.
This is the whole SAT aren’t predictive of college performance. It’s not predictive once you have already filtered for SAT skills plus other categories.
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Also, the HBD strategy requires that almost all whites become GOP voters. That seems unlikely in the near future. The other strategy is the Bannon strategy of aiming for 60% of whites, 40% of Hispanics and 15% of blacks. That’s achievable for the GOP, but probably not if ‘awareness of HBD’ is a major party pillar.
I think this is where HBD is misapplied as a heuristic if the goal is a colorblind meritocratic society. There are 40M blacks in the US. Plenty have merit for various jobs, things get weird at the tails, but there is a skew is already roughly reflected in broad achievement. From a quora post "what is the IQ of blacks"
"It’s about one standard deviation lower than whites or about 85. In practice, this means that individuals at the upper end of the curve are massively underrepresented. Look at two rather meritocratic statistics: 1) about 1% of NIH grants are awarded to black scientists 2) about 1% of CPAs in America are black. In either of these examples, there isn’t a big push to have candidates get external support or preferences (e.g. medical school or Ivy undergrad) so blacks are underrepresented by about 10 fold, which is what would be expected by a bell curve shifted to the left by one standard deviation.
Tally for black achievements (14% of U.S. Population):
1% NIH Grants awarded 1% of CPAs 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs (19 out of 1,800 recorded over history) 1% of American billionaires 1.8% of Law firm partners (virtually zero 0% at big NYC law firms) 2% of U.S. Air Force pilots 0% of Nobel prizes in Physics, medicine, chemistry ~1% of Nobel prizes in Economics (1 in history, note some years multiple recipients creating fuzzy math) 0% of Fields Medalists (considered the closest to Nobel for math) Another way to look at the issue of black intelligence is to pick an IQ required for a demanding job and see how many individuals fall in that category. Some researchers have suggested it takes an IQ of 130 to become a professor, senior executive, physician, tech entrepreneur. One could argue this is a floor, not an average. In the general population, about 2.5% of people would have an IQ this high. If the distribution curve is shifted to the left one SD, only 0.13% or about 1/17th as much (1/17th of 2.5%) of the population reaches this level. This suggests only one out of 770 American blacks would likely be capable of such professions.
This is all explicitly legal (a non-arbitrary business necessity must be demonstrated for disparate achievement to be perfectly legal. Standardized tests are fine). So you'd want to build merit based coalitions which doesn't lump ill defined groups together. HBD is less useful because its too broad. Coleman Hughes has collected wildly disparate outcomes at the group level within the squishy race categories, and HBD misses all of that. There are certainly edge cases of unqualified candidates being pushed forward to everyones detriment (such as the Barpod sadfunny ATC episode), but such instances have been challenged in the courts repeatedly, with ruling which work with HBD anyhow (ie demonstrating the necessity of disparate outcomes for organizational functioning).
HBD is not a "heuristic", it's an explanation for why your purported colorblind meritocracy seems to be roughly sorted by race. Without that, you've got basically "racism", "culture" (which both doesn't hold up and quickly gets blamed on racism, perhaps in the Lysenkoist way Questionmark used above), and "Huh, I dunno, seems odd" which is taken as "racism but we won't admit it".
One could argue, but one would be wrong. There are definitely professors and executives who couldn't meet that. Or add two single digit numbers without using their fingers. Probably tech entrepreneurs too, though I don't know about successful tech entrepreneurs.
No I mean using that a explanation as a sorting or policy heuristic. Suboptimal imo. Take the analogy of gender differences and firefighters. Biology explains the difference. All else equal, males will make better firefighters in many circumstances. Is biology the best policy tool are political talking point. I'd argue no. Are there females who could make the cut? Sure. And hiring differences in firefighters has successfully defended against disparate impact (people will argue the test doesn't demonstrate a necessity, but I digress). There is prob a better analogy using evolution (explanatory) to sort or guide something is less optimal than extant sorting or guiding policies. Hope I'm clear enough. But yes, HBD is not a heuristic, but the OP opened that analogy.
If you want to say "HBD not racism or culture explains much of the disparate outcomes", then yeah, fine. I agree. Nevertheless, I'd argue that taking about it in political or policy debates is usually suboptimal imo because the flack (just and unjust), better tools, the fact that society is often sorted that way anyhow. HBD could really illuminate understanding of reality.
It's optimal, it's just terrible. If you give up HBD and someone claims a test has disparate impact, you have no defense unless you can claim the test is measuring something real. And that's HBD. That the left has successfully taken that explanation off the table means they keep winning; there's no way to counter without putting that explanation back on the table.
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All those stats you cited prove systemic racism, which we need a progressive government to eradicate.
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HBD isn't a policy tool. It's merely an observation about the world. Standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting are all compatible with HBD, it merely predicts that the results will be racially "disparate".
And since the disparate impact is one of the main arguments against merit-based policies, HBD is relevant as a defense thereof.
How so? If the argument is that IQ tests are forbidden in hiring because they cause blacks to be hired less often, thus denying them "equal employment opportunity," the reason why they do so is irrelevant. HBD is a defense against the claim that "disparate impact" is evidence of "invidious discrimination," but I've seen people make the case that much of the legal and academic sectors aren't actually making this claim — they take eliminating "disparate impact" regardless of the cause to be the goal, at which point HBD is irrelevant. Explaining why the disparate impact occurs, how it's a product of biology, does not excuse the disparate impact.
But the disparate impact doctrine is much harder to defend without "all races are equal", so it makes sense as a first step.
Is it, though? I suppose it's not clear on what you mean by "disparate impact doctrine." I'm probably going to have to do that effort-post. But there's a difference between the "disparate impact is evidence of the racial discrimination that civil rights law is intended to fight" position, and the "we define 'racism' as the existence of disparate impact, and the purpose of civil rights law is to achieve racial equity regardless of causes."
There is the view that blacks should not be "overrepresented" in the prison population even if they commit more crimes — even if they are genetically predisposed to higher crime. I've seen someone actually argue and defend this view. It is the position that it doesn't matter if "all races are equal" or not — in cultural terms, genetic terms, whatever — it is our moral duty as a society to make them equal in terms of life outcomes, regardless. That this is what the "fairness" moral axis demands. That "equity" is a terminal moral goal, good in-and-of-itself, and either you share that fundamental moral value, or you don't (in which case, you are a racist moral mutant and an enemy to be defeated).
Yes, both of these are arguments against meritocracy in practice. The former is refuted by HBD, and while the latter is not, it's also weaker, because it relies on a moral axiom that is harder to defend and less shared in the mainstream.
Hence, HBD weakens the case.
And what does "the mainstream" matter? So long as the elites share this moral value, they don't have to defend it, they just have to forcefully impose it on the powerless peasant masses.
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You don’t get past the radioactivity without shifting the Overton Window re: point 1.
Let me reemphasize that I also agree with the criticisms he made re: points 2-4 in his description.
What I’m not understanding is how to get point 1 to be commonly accepted based on what he wrote.
These are great. Would be a shame if we stopped using them because of incorrect beliefs about the root causes of group differences…
I don’t see how we get back to that glorious past without a broad acceptance of point 1. I’m not sure what Hanania calls that (race realism?) to separate it from HBD (2-4), but it seems trying to downplay it hasn’t worked and won’t work.
This is essentially what I am earnestly claiming, because I do see how we get back to equal protection without explicitly acknowledging point 1. The courts have been doing this since the 1970's, clarifying that disparate impacts are fine so long as a non-arbitrary business necessity can be demonstrated.
That is a level of optimism I don’t think is justified given the consistent trend the other way the last 50 years.
Sure, the current Supreme Court and many judges out there are sane on this issue, but the problem is a lot bigger than just the courts.
I am optimistic, especially compared to what I gather is the median for themotte. I think institutional bias over fake racism claims is an issue, but Bayesian thinking leads me to think it cannot possibly be a primary concern (ie it cut the other direction for a long time so that is the initial given, and you update towards the current state with examples of it cutting the other direction. Sanity checking my guesswork seems to indicate that outcomes are in line with expectations, and have been for decades (given both the priors, and the explanatory assumptions of HBD). Each individual example of the current bias is infuriating, but I don't yet see dispassionate quantitative reasons to think it has large consequential effects (although I'm open to such reasons).
I agree it’s possible since the current equilibrium is not stable, but if I adjust to that level of optimism myself, I also become more optimistic about point 1 being commonly if quietly accepted in elite circles (in the same way that even a lot of people that dislike markets don’t outright deny supply and demand when push comes to shove).
If the sanity waterline rises then I expect the two to be positively correlated, in other words.
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Because the media portrays anyone who gives the slightest whiff of agreeing with these ideas as being practically indistinguishable from from Nazis. So naturally the only people who talk about agreeing with this stuff are people who don't care about being called literal Nazis.
But really, everyone kinda understands HBD already. It's just that you're not allowed to talk about it. The hundreds of millions of people who watch the NBA or NFL and note the lack of, say, Indians or Chinese, nonetheless don't loudly complain that the NBA must be anti-Indian or anti-Chinese.
Oh I totally agree with this assessment. This was true when Murray published The Bell Curve, which is milquetoast compared to HBD (ie it was explicitly agnostic to genetic factors). The radioactivity remains. HBD is the path of most resistance, justly or otherwise, so the realpolitik renders it almost useless in practice. Any substitute is already superior. Moreover, I would argue that HBD has plenty of epistemic problems, which get only magnified in individualistic societies.
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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.
The obvious reply to that is "why do Asians do well?" Shouldn't it take hundreds of years for them to catch up too? (Of course, Asians weren't quite as disadvantaged, but I wouldn't say they had a hundred year head start either.)
It seems like the rapid economic advancement of East Asia is an argument against hard racial hereditarianism. Because the HBD arguments goes that Sub-Saharan Africa is poor, underdeveloped, and wartorn because black Africans are just have bad genes. But if we grant the HBD premise that EAsians are, for genetic reasons, more intelligent than whites, blacks, American Indians, Arabs, etc. then it becomes clear that a people with high "genetic potential" can spend centuries mired in poverty, before some environmental stimulus induces rapid development. Because prior to the mid-point of the century, many EAsian countries were as poor or poorer than many SSA and Latin American countries. Someone in the 19th or early 20th century who claimed EAsian poverty was for genetic reasons would have been on as solid footing a someone who claimed the same of SSA poverty today, but he would have been wrong.
You’re switching from outcomes of various groups within America to globally at a country level, which makes it more complex.
North Koreans are shorter than South Koreans. We know pretty strongly that’s environment and not genes causing that difference. But when we can control for environment sufficiently and remove it as a barrier, as in the case of malnutrition, it’s probably going to be genes setting the upper limit on height.
Also we can now compare performance on international tests and observe outcomes for various immigrant groups around the world over time as well as at the country level. If there weren’t consistent trends then that would be strong counterevidence. But there are quite consistent trends.
I misread the comment and assumed we were talking about the races on a global scale.
Why do you think east Asia was significantly poorer and more underdeveloped than Europe for so long if east Asians really have more "raw" intelligence (g or whatever) than Europeans? What do you think the barrier was in that case; why did they need to adop European tech and institutions rather than developing their own equivalent (or superior) ones?
Markets work if they aren’t strangled and the Industrial Revolution didn’t arrive everywhere the same way.
Japan was closed off, then it rapidly industrialized, then after WWII it rebuilt and became a juggernaut until an aging population slowed things down.
China and Korea had a real bloody time of it. Then South Korea was able to rapidly grow with US protection and eventuality China loosened up on the central planning and also made significant gains. North Korea remains a basket case.
Now we see if they can possibly do anything to avoid population collapse…
Well you're saying that East Asians abandoned inefficient economic policies and adopted the efficient ones of Europeans, but that's besides the point. If you accept the premises that inborn genetic ability (however it is measured) is the primary determinant of national prosperity, and that Asians are equal to or higher than Europeans in measured ability, then it becomes strange that East Asians had to play "catch-up" at all. Why was it the Europeans who in the first place developed the technology and industry necessary to generate unprecedented wealth?
Luck matters.
History is full of strange contingencies and many books have been written trying to explain why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in Western Europe and not somewhere else. Britain having easily accessible coal was pretty important, for example. Lots of people believe Christianity had important cultural effects that led to intellectual and economic freedom and the resulting innovation.
The correlation in modern times between national IQ and wealth is a modern correlation. Inborn ability can be constrained from reaching its potential by the environment. China is still hobbled by bad policy and underperforms its potential, as is North Korea.
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Re: “European” tech and institutions:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
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You know what? Once Portuguese visited Japan in 16th century, they got some Japanese slaves. Slavemasters owning both African and Japanese slaves noticed stunning difference between two. Pretty soon, enslaving East Asians was outlawed.
Where can I read about this?
I don't remember where I read about this, wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Japan has some links
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And the rapid increase in height in Japan is an argument against hard physical hereditarianism.
There are certainly things that can hold down development besides heritable low intelligence. The most obvious is Communism (thanks to the Kims for demonstrating the quite clearly). But this doesn't mean heritable intelligence doesn't exist, and we have other information demonstrating that.
I don't think heritable intelligence doesn't exist.
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Except Japan existed and was developed and rich despite having no natural resources. They almost immediately matched the European nations once they started trying. China also matched and exceeded Europe prior to the 19th century. I'm sure some racists thought they were inferior, but no one who actually looked at the history of Africa and Asia would find them comparable.
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I am not an expert on this topic, but first google result, The US Asian population has doubled since 2000 and has gone up 40x since 1960; today, 57% of Asian Americans were born in a different country, and 30% live in California.
Basically, the averages for Asians in the US are dominated by recent immigrants who start out relatively affluent and don't have the family history of oppression that a chinese person whose ancestors worked on the railroad might be able to attest to. And they tend to cluster in places with high cost-of-living, which translates to 'high income' in national averages that don't adjust for that.
And this isn't true for, say, blacks in the US, of whom 82% are native-born descendants of slaves, and cluster more in southern states with low cost of living.
I've tried a few times to find data on average income/etc for Asian Americans descended from eg chinese railroad workers in the old West vs recent immigrants in the last generation or three, but haven't had any luck. It may be that Asian immigrants so vastly outnumber the 'native' stock of Asians in the US that interbreeding has rendered this distinction meaningless, which I don't think it has for black populations.
What about Jews? Jews started as poor immigrants with a history of centuries of persecution. And it didn't take 300 years for them to catch up.
When you say immigrants, are you saying 'to the US', or some other thing?
If you mean the US, first of all I'd ask you support your claim because it doesn't actually sound correct to me, and second of all I'd say that well educated and affluent people being forced to flee at one specific time to a place that gives them full rights and opportunities is not the same as centuries of chattel slavery and segregation.
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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.
I'd largely agree with this when it comes to identification and advice, actually?
The claim that different selected groups of humans have some genetic variation between them seems obviously true but also not particularly interesting. Yes, there's some minor genetic variation across the human race as a whole. So what?
The interesting and controversial part is the answer to the "so what?", and the problem I have with so-called 'HBD' is that their answer to that question, as far as I can tell, firstly massively outstrips the evidence they refer to, and secondly frequently appears to be both malicious in its intent and destructive in its policy goals.
Are there people who identify with HBD who aren't malicious or destructive? Sure. No group is homogenous. But it seems to me that enough of them are, that the general direction of the vague group of people that we refer to here as 'the HBD movement', is such that for as much as the motte is apparently true, the bailey is such that we should definitely avoid it.
Nara Burns makes a fair point about individuals below. I'm not going after Charles Murray or anything. But when he says that he has "never personally encountered" a person who advocates HBD with racist goals, I'm just confused, because, well, I've read the Motte.
it looks like you're using circular definition here.
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Gosh it sure is convenient that being discriminated against takes hundreds of years for a population to recover from. I guess the complete and utter failure of progressive environmental intervention to even begin closing the gap over the course of generations doesn't mean anything. Nope, we have to let them have the reins of society all the way into like Star Trek times before we can notice that nothing they're doing works.
If the descendant effects of discrimination worked the way you need them to work to keep progressive orthodoxy viable, someone on one of these forums would have coughed up some compelling historical examples among other groups at some point in the last X years of having this argument. Instead it's the bog standard usual, the one thing anti-HBD types always seem to have for us: A bunch of just-so excuses for why this or that counter-example involving Jews or Asians totally shouldn't count.
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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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This seems like an overestimate to me. Have you seen the studies on how in places like china, people who were part of the regime were, after the communists took over, much poorer, worse off socially, etc., but in two generations, they now are again the ones in power? This would make it seem like a tendency towards being an elite could well be heritable. You'll respond to this that there are substantial cultural differences (they raised their children differently) which is entirely fair and reasonable.
When I look at what is holding black people back, I don't think the left's policies are well aligned. Setting aside IQ sorts of things, there are obviously real problems with US black culture that no one really is trying to fix—the high rates of sleeping around, low rates of marriage, high rates of divorce, low rates of fathers present, glorification of crime, less savings and financial responsibility, higher levels of dependence on welfare, and all around less of a vision of what a healthy life looks like and more of an emphasis on taking nice things now. Or at least so I have been led to believe.
The solution, apparently? Affirmative action, which does little to deal with most of those, and instead promotes black people beyond their level of ability, leading them to systematically be less competent and hurting those who genuinely deserve the positions they have earned by their own ability. Affirmative action literally makes racism justified—I should rationally expect that a black person holding a position is less competent than a white person holding the same position, for most high status jobs!
This is true for many other progressive policies: opposition to prosecution of crime leads to more crime, which makes black culture worse. Not stopping shoplifting reduces the presence of stores and leads to higher prices. Opposition to SATs, because of racial disparities, when in actuality SATs are more equitable and better measure merit at the top levels than the metrics more easily gameable by wealth.
The attempt to argue for systemic racism, and simultaneously defend black culture, when the systemic racism is black culture is unhealthy. Bush was not wrong when he spoke of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
As it currently exists, if a black person is capable, they will have no problem reaching the upper echelons of society (though they may not be as respected when they get there). They will have preferential treatment at every step of the way.
One thing that makes this make more sense than what you are suggesting: black immigrants do better than their children, who do better than their grandchildren, I believe. Many see this as a genetic regression to the mean (I'm not familiar enough with how that would work), but it could also be due to that the children/grandchildren end up more captured by the harmful culture. Under your model, they would have successful parents, and so should be more successful.
What then should be done? I'm not sure. Legislation could surely be passed, tax/welfare incentives could be adjusted to promote a healthier culture. Policing should increase (and the carrying out of the sentences, racial disparities be damned), drugs etc. should be kept out to the extent possible. Focus on literacy, mathematical ability, and so on seems reasonable, but whatever's going on with the schools is surely not working, so there needs to be a better plan than "dump more money at it."
Similarly affirmative action, etc. even if we decide that we need to have some sort of program to fix disparities, should be tested to see if they actually work. Do these programs cause (not correlate with) the children of the beneficiaries to have substantial better life outcomes? And if so, is it worth the negative externality of forming a stereotype of black incompetence? Worth the promotion of those who are best at exploiting whatever the grant systems are over those who are best at being productive?
Perhaps this depends on what you mean by meritocracy. Dropping of regulation would lead to a meritocracy, on average, in that, whoever is most fit for the position would get it. Perhaps it would miss those who were born with whatever capacity but do not currently have it. Then, should we push harder for a meritocracy for children?
The study on this topic that I'm familiar with also found that economic success of the children of pre-revolutionary elites was mediated by an expressed belief that "hard work is critical to success" (when it was controlled for the gap dropped by 75%) and that this expressed belief was in turn mediated by having a living parent. Among the children of pre-revolutionary elites whose parents were dead (and who thus were not raised by them), there was no significant difference in expressed belief from the general population.
I can't interpret the math for myself because I'm bad at statistics but the authors say:
This would actually seem to suggest cultural transmission rather than genetic.
Likewise (with the same caveat on my end that I'm bad at statistics) the authors of the study on the rebound of southern slaveholders after the Civil War which has been cited elsewhere in the thread claim:
(They end up concluding that social networking was the most important factor)
Thanks, that's good to know.
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I agree! Even if you multiply a number by .8 every decade, after 300 years .1% still remains. However, crucially, I don't think that a .1% - or even 7% - remaining difference in racial wealth or achievement gaps is a huge political issue. And then it's plausible again that the gap closes faster. How long closing the gap to that takes depends on how quickly someone who has average genes, but is poor, mixes into having average income.
I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway. There's just so much going on in society that it's quite hard to figure out cause and effect. The thing is, there are other much stronger lines of evidence, like the fraction of of black people in the top .1% of intelligence being so small, the gap in IQ or standardized test scores, etc. And once you believe that for other reasons, it's a simple explanation for existing income gaps. But I'll go through this first:
And yet, the absolute poverty rate has absolutely plummeted. All of our great-grandparents lived in conditions that, by today's standards, were truly horrific. Yet, here we are. The vast majority of Americans aren't in any sense poor. The relative costs of food, rent, transportation, etc are cheaper than they've ever been. And many of the people I know personally who are high-income or high-status had average income parents or grandparents.
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite (~50%) heritable. It makes sense that, over multiple generations in a deeply connected modern world, people would cluster along these lines. And that it'd be difficult to distinguish without careful looks this effect from 'poverty keeps people down'.
I think the material abundance of modern life sinks ideas like 'poverty rationally forces you to take on debt and short-term solutions' - you can just not spend much money on non-must-haves, save, work, etc. The poor people I know all attest that poor people are worse with their money than middle-class people, act less rationally, etc. Yeah, it's a distribution, there definitely are smart people who are poor for one reason or another, but not anywhere near enough to explain most poverty or even racial income gaps.
This is why there are so many (bad) papers to the effect of "poverty makes impulse control worse", "epigenetic effects of poverty", etc. Unfortunately, they're methodologically poor and don't replicate.
I mean ... universal education. Six hours a day, five days a week, being directly taught in every subject. This system has taught the vast majority of kids, smart and average and below average, rich and poor, over the past few centuries. Like, it's a significant component of why modern life works at all - the hyper-smart kid who's randomly born into a middle-class family does well on test scores, gets into a top college, specializes in something, and goes into industry from there and designs a chip or writes scripts for a movie or trades bonds or whatever. And even if the average person doesn't go to a good school, they can excel once they've gotten a job and then be promoted based on their competence and rise from there. Both of these have happened constantly, for any given successful person if you go between 0 and 3 generations back most paths terminate at someone whose parents weren't well off but did well in school or an occupation. Poor education mostly doesn't stick. Yeah, it sticks in some cases, but I don't think most. And even granting that, modern technology helps even more - a kid in a bad home can teach themselves english with TV, they gain knowledge and skills just by having fun on the internet, etc etc etc.
Or, quantitatively, take a look at this, a visualization from a paper (i'm not super confident that the data for this is correct, but I'd be surprised, but not terribly so, if it was wrong enough to affect the conclusion): https://viz.theinequalitylab.com/Animations/1-mobility-rates.html
Your theory would predict that being bottom 20%, or bottom 40%, is 'sticky'. Yet, 40% of children of whites in the bottom 20% made it out of the bottom 40% (and 27% of black children). In the second poorest quintile, 29% of white and 14% of black children make it to the top 40%. It seems like poverty is a lot stickier for blacks than whites. Being rich is a lot less sticky for blacks and whites though! Go look at the visualizations, it's quite striking. Curiously enough, the numbers for the 2nd top quintile seem a lot starker than for the poorer quintiles - i.e. in a relative sense poor blacks and whites have somewhat similar rates of existing poverty, but richer blacks drop out of the rich quintiles a lot faster than rich whites. This isn't at all what you'd guess if stickiness of poverty was what was driving racial income gap differences. And again this is where the multigenerational trauma or poverty habits or whatever research comes in, but that doesn't replicate.
I mean, this illustrates the other problem. If you've watched any popular media recently - there are ethnic minorities everywhere. Even Biden notices it. This is an explicit effort on the part of the progressive-leaning people who make up the media. If some sort of implicit bias in media makes it harder for minorities to get jobs, it's more than made up for by this. We're basically discussing black people specifically here, and:
And, despite this representation, the SAT score gaps aren't closing. The progressive arguments were a lot harder to rebut sixty years ago, when 'structural racism' and 'patriarchy' as described today were manifestly real and significant. But people with similar beliefs to you been hard at work dismantling them. And, you know, some of these gaps did close, especially for women. But the remaining gap is very difficult to explain along the same lines. I'm sure you've heard all about the test score gap before, so here's something:
But to demonstrate racial IQ differences, I think the clearest example is just that ... there are so few black people in high IQ professions. Like, nobel prize winners in math and science, top scientists in general, CEOs, and to a lesser extent anything intellectually demanding. And just anecdotally, any community that's very g-loaded just won't have a noticeable number of black people. I wonder what the rate here is. And the dual of this, of course, is that asians and especially jews are very overrepresented in those areas. And again anecdotally, any community around something that requires high intelligence has heaps of jews and asians. If you read around on wikipedia articles on pure research mathematics, there are jews (2% of US population, less internationally) everywhere, and barely a black to be found.
This can't be primarily explained as a poverty or racism effect. Plenty of these people were average income as kids, or had average income parents. There's clearly a strong race effect after you control for income. So many successful historical figures began their lives as poor or middle class Jews. And yet there are enough rich black families that you'd expect a lot more successful black pure mathematicians than there are.
And, to be clear, by my argument this is no inevitable somber fact of nature, but could be fixed by just modifying a small fraction of the nucleotides in the human genome of each (future) person. Or maybe large-scale selective sperm donation, but that's not really socially plausible in anything resembling today's environment.
(I think a better version of this post would have a lot more numbers and data, but w/e those are my thoughts)
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
Thanks!
The first thing was more of a composition error - I mean to imply that the whole basket of traits were somewhere around 50%.
The second mistake was just implying something incorrect though. I know that, I just wasn't paying enough attention while writing so broadly.
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Ignoring race, poverty doesn’t stick nearly so much as genes, so all of your examples about generational issues don’t imply what you want them to.
Again ignoring race, your example about poor education over generations is even more unfortunate, given what a strong proxy that is for intelligence.
Some people just aren’t tall. On average, their offspring probably won’t be very tall either. Height and intelligence are both highly heritable and assortive mating tends to reinforce these things.
Moreover, we have multiple examples of groups that faced intense discrimination and disadvantages and it took a generation or two to catch up or exceed society averages, not centuries. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants that came to the US did not tend to come from privileged positions and suffered a great deal of adversity. They do pretty well for themselves.
The classic example is the Ashkenazim, a group of Jews that ended up being evicted to northern Italy, having a genetic bottleneck (and some admixture with the locals), moving into Central Europe for some centuries and growing in size, and then being forced eastwards through Europe all the way to Russia. Centuries of near-constant persecution. Many cases of having to move and start over. Intense generational trauma.
And yet that adversity hasn’t stopped them from being so successful in so many places and fields that it fuels conspiracy theories that are popular on both left and right. Even right here on the Motte if you can believe it.
It’s not a coincidence the Ivy League discriminated against Jews as it more recently has against East Asians.
The mounting evidence is a combination of evermore time, money, and effort trying to rectify gaps and that not working, various twin and adoption studies shedding light on the balance of nature vs. nature, and progress on genetics.
The issue and underlying science is a lot bigger than the sustained achievement gap of one particular minority in the US. The politics sure does revolve around it though.
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Your post was so long and so wrong that I really struggled to finish it, but I managed and I'll respond:
These narratives about oppression and its relation to economic achievement sound plausible but if you really look into them they just don't hold up at all, ditto with the vicious cycle of poverty argument espoused by you and Terry Pratchet (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned).
Exogenous shocks to family wealth generally don't have that much impact on long-term outcomes. Here's an article on slave owners after the civil war: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191422 . Basically their wealth rebounded, despite the loss of a huge amount of property. This finding seems to replicate in an incredible range of times and circumstances.
You see a similar dynamic with pre-Cultural Revolution elites in China. Despite being prevented from attending university, rusticated, struggled, and generally oppressed, pre-Revolution elites rebounded basically as soon as they were allowed to, it did not take 300-500 years. This was after a concerted effort to destroy their position as elites and prevent them from regaining it. The source for thus is The Son Also Rises by Greg Clark, which you should read as I think it completely refutes the worldview espoused in your post.
And of course the examples of Asian-Americans (weird the internment of Japanese during WW2 hasn't resulted in long-term underachievement) and Jews in the US and Europe are also completely at odds with the huge effects of past/present discrimination that you posit.
Why do Asians and Jews do better than the majority if being a minority is so deleterious? Why do black immigrants?
Yes, obviously nothing will change quickly, that's why colorblindness died as a political goal. The question is what is the cause of this disparity. If the cause is genetic then diversity initiatives will not help. If the cause is cultural or anti-black discrimination, diversity initiatives might be worth dealing with the less competent hirees/admits. You seem to just assume it's not significantly genetic though, I'm not sure why.
This position is simply incoherent. Blacks do worse on every standardized test that could reasonably be called cognitive from the SAT to Fire Chief qualification exams. Given this, it doesn't make sense to believe anything other than that blacks are less qualified on average for cognitively demanding jobs. Whether this was caused by past discrimination or whatever else doesn't change the fact that by every measure we have, we should expect black underrepresentation in anything cognitively demanding. Even if you believe the cause of this gap is purely environmental, it's Kendyist wishful thinking to say that there is not a real racial "merit" gap such that affirmative action means hiring worse candidates. If you're for affirmative action despite that, it's fine, but these little memes about not being able to put together a resume or having the opportunity to get experience are incredibly unrepresentative of reality.
Yes, you're making a mistake. I don't think you have any idea of the nuances of the debate or of anything you discussed in your post. Handwavey "conservatives think like this.... liberals think like this" posts are generally bad and yours was particularly bad and irrelevant in this context.
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Chinamen were once an impoverished minority with legal disabilities, you know.
More to the point, you don’t have to go back in time to see the black/other minority group difference in abilities show up in differing rates of upward mobility- Hispanic upwards mobility right now is a pretty good example. And factually black upward mobility has been highest not when they had the most help, or racism was weakest, but when the economy was booming- eg, the 50’s, the 90’s, etc. This is what we would expect if racism wasn’t the main cause of black underachievement; the amount of affirmative action given is not a constant, so if that was the determining factor you’d see a different trend than ‘how’s the economy overall’.
The civil rights act bans individual level or intentional racism, which is pretty much a solved problem(at least in the white to black direction). What you’re arguing is the effects of generational racism/poverty, which the civil rights act doesn’t actually address.
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A fairly unhinged estimate. Jewish refugees and Chinese immigrants have shown quite definitively the answer, in America, is closer to 20 years. Almost all of your subpoints are simply wrong, and/or disconnected from what is happening in America. Poor education does not stick, indeed, in America, blacks are furnished with better education than anyone else (save for the part where they are in classrooms with other black kids). Black kids raised in the top 10% households commit crimes on rates on par with white kids in the bottom 10%. The problem is clearly not some legacy, unless that legacy is an internalized cultural one. An internalized culture that would be stronger by orders of magnitude than any other in the US from 1950 to today, and it also would have to have magically also spun up a high bastardy rate as part of its legacy.
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No, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and flatly contradicted by multiple streams of available evidence.
First, there's the historical example of East Asian and Jewish Americans. Yes, recent immigration from East Asia has been selective, but East Asians had already pretty much caught up with whites by the late 60s, before selective immigration really got going, and I don't think there was ever much selective immigration with Jews, who were already so overrepresented at top universities that Harvard imposed quotas in the 20s, when antisemitism was still a very real problem.
Second, poverty just isn't that sticky. The intergenerational rank-rank elasticity of permanent income (i.e. lifetime earnings) is about 0.4, meaning that on average, the children of parents at a given permanent income level will regress about 60% of the way to the 50th percentile.
Note that that 0.4 elasticity is not purely due to the stickiness of exogenous poverty, as much of it is due to the heredity of cognitive and personality traits. The true exogenous effect of parental income is considerably smaller than this. What this means is that we can expect regression to the mean in just a generation or two. This is commonly observed with truly exogenous poverty, e.g. with Vietnamese refugees.
Finally, rapid regression towards the mean was observed with black families during and for approximately one generation after the Civil Rights Era. And then it stopped, and has now been stalled out for two generations. We now see downward mobility of black men born into families with permanent incomes above the black mean, even when below the white mean. In other words, black men regress towards a lower mean than white men. It's tough to pin this on the the intergenerational stickiness of poverty (even ignoring the aforementioned fact that it's not actually that sticky), but is exactly what we would expect to see if there were a genetic basis for the achievement gap.
Raj Chetty says that this isn't consistent with a genetic basis for the gap because black women don't exhibit the same degree of downward mobility, but the case of women is more complicated because the shortage of reliable black men means that black women are more dependent on their own incomes than white men. Furthermore, black women from middle-class families are especially well positioned to benefit from affirmative action because they're less likely to have criminal records than black men. Finally, black women still do not exhibit the upward mobility that we would expect to see if their parents' poverty were truly exogenous.
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How do you think the Hausa or Fulani are likely to respond if an Igbo comes up to them and says that, actually, on account of his people’s average IQ being at least one standard deviation above the Nigerian average, they ought to be in charge of the country and occupy the majority of the top jobs in Lagos and Abuja and so on? How do antisemitic white nationalists respond if you tell them that actually it’s a good thing that Jews are disproportionately in positions of power because we are, in fact, significantly smarter than them on average and that effect is exacerbated in the long tail at IQ 160+ (so we deserve it really)? Sorry incels, you’re just ugly, Chad deserves his roster and you deserve to die a virgin because he won the genetic lottery and you lost it.
All these positions exist. I’ve heard every one of them in real life myself. I agree, largely, with all of them, because I was born a rich and OK-looking Jewess and I have worked with a number of very competent Igbos. The logic that I deserve what I have suits me.
But these arguments make their interlocutors very angry. They certainly don’t serve to reduce the social tensions that exist between groups even when some inequality between them is inevitable. “Yeah, akshually we should be in charge because SCIENCE proves we’re naturally better than you, sorry, sucks to be you I guess” is not a viable mode of long-term social relations without a radical and unlikely reversal of the entire post-1789/1776 project.
That’s the point Hanania’s making.
I don’t think you’re engaging with the issues I raised.
I don’t disagree that a lot of HBD types are dumb and selected for disagreeability and/or liking racism, not better traits. But that’s what you get when social desirability bias really punishes witches or anything close to it.
“We deserve it really”
I mean yeah, inasmuch as anyone deserves the fruits of their labor and natural abilities. Believing foul play is involved instead seems well-proven to lead to bad outcome for the Jews. Open competition, markets, and meritocracy are going to let talent rise and we plainly see group imbalances all over, like in sports.
Ultimately, in the West at least, individualism and equality under the law seem like the best option, but denying reality seems unlikely to help.
(Also, it is socially acceptable to punch down at incels so maybe the status quo there isn’t great.)
I don’t really disagree with you at all. I think the answers to these positions are nuanced, though, and I think that the message that pushing HBD sends to members of lower performing groups is detrimental to social cohesion and to a well-functioning economy because it inevitably leads to backlash.
And it is relevant that when you ask HBD proponents what policy implications they draw from it there are usually a substantial number of them, even though HBD by itself doesn’t prescribe any particular policy, it’s just an explanation. And in a rare moment of agreement with Darwin / @guesswho, I think we should be honest that this is actually in large part about black and white people in America and their relations. And so if we listen to a lot of HBD proponents like Murray and ‘accept’ it and dismantle those programs that largely benefit those communities, and abolish / criminalize affirmative action and so on, do we really think that the social problems we see in black communities are going to improve? That issues with eg violence are going to improve? It just seems very unlikely to me.
I’m not saying the current system is good because it isn’t. But I often think HBD activists are very naive about the reasons why stuff like affirmative action was implemented (often by politicians who were pretty racist). It wasn’t because of Robin Di Angelo logic, it was often because they didn’t want to see the country burn.
Problem is that the anti-HBDers are not standing in place: recent anti-policing pushes have made black communities worse off.
It's not simply "keep what works even if you have to lie about it". The other theory has motivated policy that is now not only hurting black people but affecting others, with no sign of stopping.
The latter is a much less attractive status quo.
A black guy gets shot by police at the wrong time and the country may burn anyway.
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A more generally reactionary view lets you propose programs that might actually work, once you're no longer putting effort into ones that don't work! One of those is just genetic enhancement - just like it's easier to replace a broken machine than to fix one, we know the genetic 'recipe' for whatever kind of people we want, and we can just birth more of those. There's no reason this has to hurt ethnic pride - there are plenty of well above-average black people on any quality, one can just use their genes. Even if you can't say HBD, universal genetic enhancement still works.
It's not gonna happen, but the best way to solve the criminal underclass (as a relatively small % of the black population) is just paternalistic interventions into criminal communities. Think moldbug's proposal of "give Black churches sovereignty over black criminal youth". I think if you gave some elite absolute sovereignty and let them be totally unclouded by political affiliation - whether progressive, conservative, or wignat - they wouldn't find the issue that hard to resolve on a technical level. But, yeah, that's just not happening, at all.
So even with the significant restrictions of liberalism, I think it's highly likely that a smart and driven elite with accurate beliefs could significantly improve things. In terms of crime, just imagine police that just used technology and strength of numbers to effectively enforce laws around drugs, theft, assault, with a focus on rapid and consistent prevention and punishment, even if the punishments weren't that harsh. The hour-level action of stealing or dealing would just become unappealing, and it'd plausibly stop happening. This isn't even, really, a HBD belief, but it's the kind of thing an Effective Altruist in a political culture that actually understood that affirmative action and anti-racism just don't work anymore might get behind.
And, honestly, I don't think ethnic underrepresentation in positions of power is itself a huge issue. Ethnic nationalism in America is just much less intense than it is in Nigeria. Representation of minorities in the media or politics is most of what the average person notices, and that comes naturally anyway as minorities cluster physically and being a pop star or comedian isn't as g-loaded as being an engineer. I think all of the push for higher minority representation in positions of actual power comes from other elites, and there won't be any riots if that just becomes deemphasized because elites don't care anymore.
Yes, I pretty much completely agree with you, and I think Hanania and Moldbug’s ideal policies are probably similar, he’s just saying that tying them explicitly to HBD is poor political strategy.
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You can subsidize the underclass without wrecking meritocracy and lighting money on fire for interventions that won’t work.
Keep in mind in the essay Hanania lists Murray as a good example, not a dumb HBDer. There’s also decent evidence that appeals to my libertarian biases that the various government interventions hurt more than they helped. Sowell writes a lot about this.
So if all Hanania is saying is “be like Murray and not an edgelord” then I don’t disagree with that, I’m just confused a bit by how he framed his essay.
I gotta say it’s a bit funny to think HBD types as unaware of the racial imbalance in “mostly peaceful protests” and such.
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Wouldn't HBD being accepted in this case simply solve the problem by enforcing the laws now that it would no longer be "racist" to do so? That's even assuming the racial spoils programs aren't just replaced by income based programs which would largely affect similar groups.
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And it burned anyway. More than once. Perhaps a different approach is necessary.
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But if HBD is true, the Igbo or Jews will disproportionately occupy higher positions, and you need to explain it.
Realistically, the alternative to "we deserve it because we're smarter" is "we don't actually deserve it, we're just oppressing you", which is clearly worse for racial relations.
HBD as a fact of nature is already leading to racial tensions via disparate outcomes. The Hausa or white supremacist are already angry because they don't have positions of power. Discussing that there's a good reason isn't the problem. Denying discussion of the good reason, leaving oppression on the table as the only potential explanation, makes it worse.
Sure, a politically color-blind world, where race is considered about as relevant as hair color and no one cares about racial distributions of anything, would be preferable in practical terms, but that's not the world we live in. And in such a world, HBD could simply be a nerdy niche topic that no one except a few scientists cares about. HBD isn't the problem here.
I don’t think Hanania is necessarily even disagreeing with you. After all, he clearly believes in HBD. But his point is that shouting it from the rooftops is bad for race relations. HBD publicity proponents say ‘no, actually if we just explain why these groups are over/underrepresented, people will accept reality and return to meritocracy’. Hanania says this is naive, and that it will only lead to more resentment.
More resentment than shouting from the rooftops that it's oppression? That seems unlikely to me.
Will it immediately fix race relations? Certainly not. But I don't think it will make things worse either.
You're missing the implicit point that it only matters if the currently favored groups "accept it". If race relations are bad because lower-class (or even middle-class) white people are upset at racial preferences for those groups, it's OK for them to be told to “Just suck it up, that’s life fam, sucks to be you I guess”. But if race relations are bad because currently favored groups notice they're underrepresented in good things, that's a problem that needs solving.
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I've seen (some time ago, I don't remember where) two cases of people arguing exactly the opposite, one in the case of whites-vs-POC, the other in Jews-vs-gentiles (the latter, IIRC, was arguing, in part, against one of Scott's posts, and had a quote or two from Turkheimer). The argument is that someone in the "underrepresented" group who sees the "overrepresentation" of the other group as a problem, and believes it is because of some behavior the overrepresented group is choosing (that they are "cheating" in some fashion, whether via secret plots by the Elders of Zion, racist cops shooting unarmed black men, or whatever), then the initial goal will be to make them stop the behavior.
Sure, this is bad if the overrepresented group isn't actually cheating, because you can't stop doing something if you're not doing it in the first place. But suppose you persuade a person in the underrepresented group who cares about the overrepresentation that said issue isn't due to "cheating," but an inevitable inherent characteristics of overrepresented group, well, maybe he'll say "okay, if they're not cheating then it's not really a problem." But, both essays argued, this is relatively unlikely — most people who have a problem with the "overrepresentation" have a problem with the overrepresentation itself, not the "cheating" that purportedly causes it.
So instead of a guy who sees Jewish overrepresentation among "elites" as a problem to be solved and thinks said problem is due to Jewish bad behavior, you get a guy who sees Jewish overrepresentation among "elites" as a problem to be solved and thinks said problem is an inevitable product of the existence of the Jews. You see why that's worse, right? Same with the other case; instead of a black man who thinks he's being kept down by whitey's racist actions, you get a black man who thinks he's being kept down by the continued existence of white people (the view once expressed, on a now long-defunct blog, by one "Solomon Wong," that "anti-racism" is "white genocide"; that, since white people cause people of color to "underperform" simply by existing (and that it is this, not low pigmentation or European ancestry, that is the inherent, defining characteristic of the white race), the only way for people of color to defend themselves against this "vampiric" attack is to eliminate white people, and thus white genocide is Good, Actually).
Both works ended up arguing that, instead, the "proper" way to address this issue is to wage the Sailerian "War on Noticing" to keep people from becoming aware of the overrepresentation to begin with. In the Jewish-vs-gentile case, the advised strategy was simply to have anyone who points out Jewish overrepresentation "cancelled" as a "Nazi" until everyone stops Noticing. In the white-vs-black case, it was that we didn't do "colorblind liberal individualism" hard enough. That while we got (WEIRD individualist) white people to "not see race," and to care only about their own individual well-being and not the relative position of their broader ethnic group, we didn't do enough to bring a similar lack of 'racial awareness' among blacks, and that we need to try again, harder and more deliberately this time, to bring everyone around to Not Noticing.
The Holocaust happened both because people didn’t like the Jews and believed them to be inferior.
If you have strong racial animus it’s probably not the case that a proper understanding of genetics will help. But, historically, neither has the opposite.
You’re not going to get the “just stop noticing systemic racism” genie back in the bottle because we already blew past the compromise of colorblind liberal individualism, and now that’s racist.
Only way out is through because you have to get enough of the elites and activist class to be willing to go back to the compromise. You don’t get concessions by having a quietist tradition that concedes defeat in the cancel culture war.
Oh, I personally agree. But still, as you note, "it’s probably not the case that a proper understanding of genetics will help" either.
And I don't see that happening, either, because the elites and activist class won't be benefited — in terms of their relative power and status, at least — by going back, not compared to the current ideological progress.
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I know this is completely tangential to your point, but hasn’t the law of diminishing returns on IQ kicked in long before that point for most managerial and other high profile roles, university professors excluded? I was under the impression that aside from things like theoretical physics, pure mathematics, maybe some kinds of historical research and coding problems, a few finance positions, and philosophy, being smarter than a given cut off didn’t actually help much, and having 160 IQ CEO’s of non-startups or 160 IQ politicians or media personalities was a waste of a 160 IQ potential?
I mean it definitely seems like Ashkenazi should still be overrepresented, with having 50% of population above 115.
I had the opposite impression, that it was useful across the board, but I don't have the data at hand to look.
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In my experience, there's not really a point at which high IQ stops having very visible benefits for anything practical. People just get ... better, more capable, at everything. Better understanding why you asked them to do something and accomplishing your actual goal instead of goodhearting, figuring out things to do themselves, in general just understanding everything better and doing better. Just in my personal experience, there's a significant correlation between IQ and being good at sports, or being funny, or being a good musician, or...
There's definitely relatively diminishing returns, - a 160 IQ restaurant manager is a better restaurant manager than someone at 120 IQ, but the relative difference is just lower than the significant difference between a 160 CEO and a 120 CEO which is in turn lower than between a 160 top-level theoretical physicist vs 120 who can't do that. I'd still definitely rather have a 160 IQ maid than a 110 IQ maid, but that's obviously a poor allocation of resources (and also very unpleasant for the maid).
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I decided to weigh in properly first, before I respond to anything below.
I find it incredibly ironic that this topic which deals with a whole host of complex environmental, social, cultural and yes genetic factors that are interlinked is being reduced to what amounts reductive reasoning. The genetic biomarkers that indicate genetic lineage also indicate significant non-genetic differences or environmental and social causes as well. The genetic markers that indicate race also point to factors such as: blood serum lead levels; air quality/pollution exposure; poverty and its associated effects and a complex interplay between sub-cultures and the wider society around them. The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
Also
See: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/268066#Improving-parental-nurturing-skills-vital
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
The American Black population is simply exposed to a greater level of stress, and this affects them both individually as well as socially within their segregated communities. They are affected both at a personal level and by the effects of this psychopathology on a wider level within their communities as they are exposed to crime at a much higher rate than the rest of the non-Black population. These effects are passed down both through both genetic expression as well as their cultural environment. These factors carry down through multiple generations as unless the environmental causes can be ameliorated, they will persist into future generations as long as the environmental factors that caused it are still present.
Your post is indeed incredibly ironic; In the beginning of the post you try to obfuscate an unfavored finding by claiming it's just too complex to understand, and then in the last paragraph you reduce everything to a single incredibly convenient theory, namely that it's all just stress levels and if we just fix that, everything else will fix itself as well! Very nice, if true.
Stress levels probably have some minor effect, but most of the research in this field doesn't even attempt to control for genetics or causality in the other direction. I happen to be a postdoc in biomedical research, so I just took a glance at the study your article is referring to (which wasn't even linked in the article, lol), for anyone interested: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1761544
It's... not good. Or to be more specific, it's designed to be incapable of resolving the question you want it to resolve. They test a single theory, namely that income directionally causes everything. They don't even attempt to test the alternative, they only test against the null hypothesis, that income is unrelated to everything. Something nobody thinks anyway. Not that I'm surprised, this is just par for the course of the field.
Your other paper is well-known, but mostly very misleading. It's pretty much on the same level as the paper that found that men and women don't differ significantly if you take a list of 100 random biomedical traits, and therefore men and women are mostly the same; Sure, the former is obviously true, but nobody disputes that and the latter is just a complete non-sequitor. It's misleading on three levels:
First, his investigated measure ω merely tells us that two population are somewhat overlapping. It tells us very little about difference in means, which is what we're usually interested in. In fact, his finding of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European is absolutely compatible with large average differences between the groups.
Second, it's again just an assortment of random genes, but we usually care about specific sets of genes relating to known phenotypic traits. For a particularly simple example, you can't counter "they have phenotypically different skin colors, and we can show that these relate to differences in genes A and B" with "well we can show that over all genes in aggregate the differences are pretty small, so DEBUNKED". But obviously this is only ever applied if people dislike a particular gene/phenotype interaction.
Third, the most damning by far, and I'll just quote the paper itself:
"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:
So he finds that this core claim, the claim why you're quoting the entire paper in the first place, only holds for closely related populations (duh) or if you wilfully ignore the majority of the genome. His example of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European, do you want to take a guess how many loci he used? 10.000? 1000? Nope, it's, wait for it, ... 50! I guess he himself is excused bc this was 2007, he probably would have wanted to do 100 loci but his Prof told him they only have money for 50, hah.
Spending a few hours compiling a long and detailed post debunking HBD is particularly uninteresting to this forum and would be like trying to teach a pig to roller-skate, a waste of time and annoying to the pig; however, on the other hand spending a few hours proving how strong the genetic effect is on the population would be wonderfully received. I invite you to spend the time and that post-doc giving all the people here what they want to see, they will love you for it. Go on, I would love to see some actual evidence for this phenomenon.
RenOS lives in Germany. I'm not 100% on the laws there, but my understanding is that doing such a postdoc might actually get him thrown in jail.
HBD certainly isn’t illegal in Germany. Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories (the Holocaust/antisemitism and ‘advocating the overthrow of democracy/the constitution’). For garden variety un-PC speak Germany is probably better than anywhere in the Anglosphere except the United States, admittedly a low bar. Germany actually has very strong protections against being fired for political speech for example, Höcke was legally declared a fascist, called the Holocaust memorial a disgrace etc but is still technically a registered high school teacher (he doesn’t teach on account of his political election). All the SPD could do was declare that if he returned to teaching they would try their best to have him fired, but it’s unclear they could do so.
If by "relatively liberal" you mean you'll get fined rather than sent to prison (probably), then yes.
What German speech law does HBD violate? As far as I’m aware there are in fact German evolutionary psychologists who openly argue in favor of HBD, and they haven’t been fined or even fired.
I'm not a lawyer, let alone a German one, but there was a pretty big story during the refugee crisis, where a German couple got fine for a pretty milquetoast Facebook post. It doesn't surprise me German HBDers remain more or less unmolested because the way laws are applied tends to be pretty arbitrary, but that also means they can suddenly decide to change their mind, and persecute them.
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Thanks for doing the detailed rebuttal.
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Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.
Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.
It would help if the other side, in all the ferocious arguments that have gone on over the years, ever made any observations that were genuinely inconsistent with HBD. Instead it's always a litany of alternative explanations for an HBD-consistent world.
Like I guess Igbo find Nigeria less stressful than even reasonably well-off American black dudes find California or Ohio or whatever? Certainly couldn't be all that vaunted African genetic diversity at work.
There's never a decent competing model of intelligence backed by consistent observation. Just a grab bag of reasons that things might not be as they clearly seem, most of which don't hold up very well.
Alternative explanations which don't hold up to cursory examination. And then the faux-reasonable demand that we accept that we have insufficient basis to judge between these explanations, and therefore the status quo of rejecting HBD (because it's repugnant) is fine.
I feel like HBD is actually the less surprising hypothesis and should be the default. It would be such an extreme coincidence to have separate human populations living with different selection pressures for thousands of years to the point that they have different skin colors, heights, builds, facial features, hair color, eye color, disease resistance etc. but then somehow intelligence lined up to be exactly equal in every group everywhere on the planet.
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I'd be fine if the left would, in fact, show some humility on this question. Pretty much all traits that we have looked at are ~30-70% genetic, and vary accordingly along ethnic lines, so the humble HBD position is just that. And nobody generally has a problem with this finding on any other trait, it's just the moment intelligence is involved people go crazy.
And if anything it's the other way around; Most HBD advocates I'm aware of don't claim it's all genetics, just merely that genetics is involved. On the other hand it's the left that wants to claim it's 100% environmental or that it's a magical kind of genetics that doesn't vary along ethnic lines. This post is a perfect example, he tries to reduce everything to his own pet theory, stress levels.
We’ve know since Stephen Jay Gould that evolution didn’t apply above the neck.
I’ve never had anyone who knows much about biology (and doesn’t try the very dumb trick of denying IQ) explain how height (obvious and uncontroversial) differs from intelligence genetically.
Both are polygenetic and can be severely affected by environment (particularly malnutrition, historically), and can differ across races, but we simply can’t deny the height achievement gap.
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Imagine being raised in modern America, educated in regular public school that teaches race-blindness and living in a society that treats MLK as a hero. Imagine being a Democrat who thinks Obama was a great president.
HBD did not confirm my priors. It doesn’t confirm the priors of the average person in the US. If it did, we’d be in a very different situation. People like Scott hate that their commitment to facts an interest in genetics leads to HBD. (Scott will write about the Manhattan Project being a Hungarian Jewish high school project but he’s not going to write about the other side of the genetic coin for all the obvious reasons.)
As a libertarian, I hate it because it’s nicer and easier to sell people on the benefits of freedom in a world where glaring racial disparities could be rectified by simply removing barriers.
So motivated reasoning (and social desirability bias) are in effect, but mostly pushing in the opposite direction than you think. Hanania criticizes all the HBDers who really do seem to lean in to what closely resembles trad racism, but even bad people can be right sometimes.
“Epistemic humility” is great, when it’s not used as a weapon to downplay clear evidence for inconvenient conclusions.
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Nobody here is saying environment doesn’t matter at all.
But also you can do comparisons where you try to control for environmental factors.
“Stress” isn’t going to cut it as an explanation for such a broad, consistent finding, which extends beyond African Americans specifically. For instance, I doubt it’s “stress” that causes whites to have lower math scores than East Asians in America.
Culturally, they have been dealing with things like 'civil service exams' for literally over a thousand years. It's so culturally ingrained into them that they tend to out-study their European brethren. When they reach higher education this over-performance tends to evaporate.
I’ve heard that theory but I’ve also seen pictures of the math grad students at Harvard and the US math Olympiad team.
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Yes, an easier path to reproductive success for those with demonstrated ability to perform intellectually.
Their posterity just study alot because it's their culture?
Civilization exerts a selection pressure.
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I don't think that's the mainstream position. I think the mainstream position is a series of concentric lines of defense.
The first line of defense is "how dare you!?". The point and sputter, as Sailer calls it. An attempt to dissuade the opponent from even breaching the subject of whether different people have different aptitude, without addressing it. Might involve siccing the mods on the opponent, or arguing that Something Must Be Done abut the fact that such a discussion can even take place, on sites where mods aren't available or sympathetic (i.e. twitter).
The second line is to deny that measurement is possible, i.e. IQ denial. Expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
The two-and-a-half is to acknowledge that individual differences exist, but group differences don't or are irrelevant. Lewontin may be invoked.
Only after those we're approaching what you postulated as the mainstream position. Even then, the primary focus will be on present oppression, i.e. it will be argued that the result in education continue to diverge because the black students are underfunded or otherwise discriminated against. Only then, after it's shown that funding is often negatively correlated with test scores, it may be admitted that inherent group differences exist. Very cautiously and tacitly, as it may get the admitting party into hot water from the people who stopped at layer one.
I wish my comment on this topic hadn't been nixed by the reset, but anyhow in brief:
Well, it does apply; however, the coalition on the left are heavily into a one size fits all approach -- higher education -- due to their own deep investment within the educational establishment or having been a product of it. The professional management class (PMC) simply does not respect anyone without a higher education, nor do they respect blue collar vocations or vocational education. Immigration isn't a big deal for people who have jobs with high cultural context (much of the PMC/white collar workforce) and they have significant barriers to entry to their professions. On the other hand, unrestricted migration and the closing of many blue-collar workplaces along with the heavy restrictions on development in heavy blue coded states means that there are narrow windows in both aptitude and time for a young 'disadvantaged' person to potentially rise up and get away from grinding poverty should they have been unfortunate enough to be born into it. All that extra money being poured into education (administration bloat) is essentially a blue coded jobs program with exceedingly little to show for it in terms of ameliorating poverty and hardship.
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That's easy to test. Just see if the genes are just as predictive in poor people and rich people or in black and white people. There is enough genetic diversity you would find people with high levels of both the good and bad genes in all groups.
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The American black living situation was plausible some time before the 1960’s. It actually showed up in things they are good at today like athleticism.
Today the living situation isn’t bad by any historical standard. It’s not worse than any Jewish diaspora where everyone hated them. It’s not worse than post WW2 Japan/Germany. For general Europeans things like the plague have been cited as a good thing (sounds stressful) because it increased demand for labor and led to human capital formation in the peasant class.
Environmental factors obviously do matter. It seems apparent that communism really does harm a society. But they don’t seem to be the cause for achievement gaps.
A lot of the solutions to environmental factors seem to make the situation worse especially modern liberalism. Stop and frisks is blowing up on Twitter but it does seem like that correlated very well with lowering NYC black homicide rate. And I am personally very partial to Christianity having overall good effects on the African American community versus modern liberalisms sexual values. Modern liberalism is probably fine for the high IQ San Franciscan but the lower class I believe does better with stricter social rules.
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I think people generally don't think it's 100% genetic, at least, if they know what they're talking about.
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This is just a typical study pushed by "pro-nurture" people who want to assume that correlation=causation and don't think to control for any genetic confounding (poverty causes low IQ rather than parents' genes that cause low IQ causes poverty). Hardly some kind of slamdunk on anti-HBD people.
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I'm just going to throw this into the ring because, skimming the comments it hasn't come up yet, but it fundamentally changes the game.
The first commercial gene therapy received FDA approval in 2017. More received approval after, and more are in the works.
In 2000, it took over 10 years and $2B just to sequence a single genome. Now, sequencing costs are under $1,000. Genetic engineering is no longer science fiction and is now a real (but expensive, at around $500,000) technology. All that is necessary is that the industry continues to advance at this pace for another 20-30 years, and the situation with genetics will be fundamentally changed.
Most libs, even most very smart libs, have not heard that genetic engineering is now a real technology, or have not internalized it into their world model. Like many of the contemporary far right, they are stuck in a despair trap based on genetic fatalism. They are convinced that if something is genetic, it cannot be changed except through bloody methods.
Only once genetic engineering becomes as routine as heart surgery, hitting two degrees out on people's social graphs, will they automatically realize that it's a thing and start to understand the implications. However, smart liberals could potentially understand the situation early if someone told them. If so, they might be peeled off the SJ coalition.
If we're going to get genetic engineering tech in 30 years anyway, then heavy moral investments in either "corrective" discrimination or social darwinism don't make sense at this time; at the very least we'd want to see what genetic engineering can't do first before we go all-in on either left-racism or right-racism.
The old WW2 theories of inevitable Malthusian total war were upended by TFR of developed countries falling below replacement around 1973, a gap of about 34 years.
Edit: Gonna be honest here, I'm actually surprised you guys haven't noticed this and started including it in your maneuvers. In 2013, Scott wrote,
In 2014, he wrote, "Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable." Yudkowsky and Scott are the leaders of 2012 era Rationalism, and while Yudkowsky didn't have a lot to say about this, it's a pretty straightforward interpretation that Scott's position is that we should hold the line until something like a broad spectrum genetics industry comes online. This would then be sort of the 'default,' unspoken Rationalist position.
I'm embarrassed to admit that though I was aware of CRISPR, I wasn't aware of the 2017 gene therapy until 2023 (I found out around the time Doom Dance was released). Is it just me and (by extension) the people who read mitigatedchaos that noticed? Should we assemble sources and ask Scott to write a follow-up article?
Look at the way we treat LLMs, the only intelligence we have complete root access to. Intelligence is dangerous. If we get workable genetic engineering, it will not be used to produce intelligence but to produce meekness.
I believe that's likely to be a future issue and cause a split within the contemporary left coalition as genetic technology improves, resulting in a shift in the makeup of the coalitions.
I have proposed the term "Biosocialism" to cover "the elimination of genetic inequities that are an obstacle to the formation of a global, classless society." Governments have an insurance-like incentive to reduce genetic diversity, and markets are also likely to be a homogenizing force, meaning that this is likely to be a future conflict. I think we might want to get a solid body of theory set up first, so that we're in a better position once various aspects of the genetics industry undergo political polarization.
They arguably have an incentive to reduce phenotypical diversity. They don't have much incentive to reduce genetic diversity, except so far as it reduces phenotypical diversity. Neutral selection theory is true and most genetic diversity is neutral. More genetically diverse groups like the Khoisan or Pygmies aren't more phenotypically diverse than other more homogenous groups. All non-Africans put together are less genetically diverse than the Khoisan put together, but the non-Africans display a much wider range of phenotypes, because genetic variation is largely neutral in practice.
Flattening out the distribution of realized traits has similar problems to flattening out the distribution of underlying genes, as I'm sure you realize.
Additionally, what the genetics industry actually detects will be what they pay to detect, so there could end up being a reduction in underlying genetic diversity even if there are many variants with the same overall outcome naturally.
Yes, but, most variation is neutral.
All that data is there for you to look at yourself. No one denies the actual data, because it is true.
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imho, the genome and genetic engineering is one of the biggest letdowns of the past century. The idea or promise of harnessing thee genome to improve or optimize life has not materialized except for select/limited instances. Cancer treatments have not improved much, only detection. Yes, there has been progress in immunotherapies on certain type of cancers, but not on the more common sarcomas.
The hope of modifying humans is still in the realm of sci fi, and see little reason for this to change. After a century, the state-of-the-art treatment for obesity is an injectable that effectively turns people into anorexics, not something that rewires the brain or other aspects of metabolism to make people thinner
We just sequenced the genome for the first time around the year 2000. We haven't actually been at this that long.
IMO, it should be given another 30 years before categorizing it with commercial nuclear fusion in terms of 'indefinite' difficulty.
the main problem is the things we want to treat or modify , like weight, are highly polygenic or only partially explained by genes
I think what's currently being done is that first someone does a GWAS study to figure out the markers for whatever we want to control, like height. Then in vitro fertilization techniques are used to make dozens of fertilized eggs, they're all sequenced, and you look at the markers given by the GWAS study on each and pick the one you prefer. That's not do-everything genetic engineering yet, you're still rolling the same old dice, but now you can roll them on the lab bench, look at some of the numbers early on and pick the one you like best.
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Is it likely that you can inject someone with boost-my-IQ? It'd work on eggs and sperm or embryos, I get that. We could do that today? But could you really upgrade a mature adult's intelligence significantly? Nootropics seems only to eke out marginal gains.
It seems like that you would be rewiring brain cells, a complex task. Is there even much spare volume to work with once the skull finishs growing? With sufficiently advanced tech you could do anything, I think uploading is possible after all. But civs that can do that are in a whole other league.
Maybe.
I'm sceptical that you could get the ball rolling for just 800K but I'd love to be in the civilization that just does it, on the off case it would work.
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Not an expert on this by any means but I have seen some encouraging results on in vivo (as opposed to in utero or in vitro) gene editing. Here's a sample paper discussing the state of the field. There's also a further question whether in vivo gene editing for intelligence would produce the kind of behavioural impacts we care about; as far as I know, that's an open uncertainty.
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I expect this (and IVF+polygenic selection) to mainly have the effect of those already smart selecting for IQ, which might worsen disparities.
It's also worth noting that current fertility trends are having a dysgenic effect—it's not like within-group IQ is fixed.
Right now gene therapy is mostly focused on severe monogenic disease, either crippling or lethal disease, where the high price and potential risk are worth it.
When it comes to health, such as heart health or lifespan, in general, between { strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, strongly positive } gene variants (as subjectively defined - I am not making an "objective" ranking), I would expect relatively few { strongly positive } to exist. { weakly negative, weakly positive } will be somewhat difficult for the industry to detect, and if each gene editing operation incurs risk and expenses, are likely not to be targeted until later. { strongly negative } should be easier to detect, has a stronger moral and political case to support it, and is likely to be funded by governments for insurance-like reasons in combination with political reasons.
I think we should expect a lifting of the left tail of the health distribution, rather than much of a boost at the high end. There are natural limiting factors in that the more edits someone makes, the farther away the kid is from being "their" kid, so it's likely that relatively few people would pursue something as radical as DNA synthesis, at least around 2050. Beyond then, it's more difficult to predict. There may also be ideological manias around 2050 that might distort the response.
I'm mostly thinking about it's probably going to be the rich and tech-friendly who use it most, who I'd expect to be higher IQ on average. You're probably right, though, that it would work best to stop the strongly deleterious, but I assume with statistics and with the current cheapness of getting genetic data, it's probably pretty doable to get more information.
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We are in a golden age of biological research, CRISPR for instance is an incredible tool because it lets scientists/technicians cut the genetic code at an exact point. Furthermore, we are also at the point where our knowledge of genetic determinism is going to increase exponentially as this is literally one of the best use cases for machine learning -- multivariate analysis on extremely large datasets. We will be able to analyse not only the effect of genes, but also the interaction between different genes over the whole organism and compare that to other combined genotypes.
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A rare miss from Hanania. Much of the piece is just railing against people he doesn't like using group differences for their own political projects. Obviously this happens, but these people are incredibly fringe and have no power (although you'd be almost forgiven for believing otherwise if you spend a lot of time on twitter). Hanania seems to pretty much acknowledge he believes HBD is true in the essay, so I won't even get into that argument in this post.
The reason talking about HBD is important is that so much policy is based on the false premise that not-HBD. How can you even begin to attempt to fix education without addressing the inevitable racial gaps in ability grouping and standardized testing? Hanania's example about the politician slickly changing the subject is very stupid imo. Cofnas is right that smart people and the elite opinion-makers that have an out-sized influence on politics and policy will not be convinced by these cheap tricks. If you want to eliminate the injustice and (worse) inefficiency of policies based on blank slatism then you need to convince the intelligentsia. These people will not be convinced by changing the subject. I think popularizing HBD is much more likely than western elites saying "liberty is so great that it's worth racial inequality". That tradeoff has already been rejected. What might work is the knowledge that correcting disparities via school lunches or iPads for schools or preferential admissions/hiring will not work.
I do have some sympathy for the argument that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really work and political movements aren't based on good arguments. Even the environmentalist position, as long as it acknowledges the achievement gap which is pretty much impossible to deny, entails blacks in the US being underrepresented in any meritocracy. Of course, progressive environmentalists will never say that "obviously affirmative action means less-qualified applicants are hired, but those applicants are less qualified because of lead/food deserts/redlining/racism so it's good and right to balance those disadvantages out" even though that's the logical consequence of acknowledging the achievement gap and being pro-AA. The coherent position is rarely the one stated or defended, but Hanania's argument that we should therefore not talk about HBD doesn't follow. Arguments are soldiers, but forcing progressives to twist themselves into knots trying to explain why non-blacks so struggle to run 100m in under 10 seconds is a good rhetorical tactic. There is an enormous corpus of literature that's essentially blank-slatist racial cope, identifying environmental causes for black underachievement which can only conceivably be remedied by the types of policies Hanania has spent the last few years fighting. I don't see any rhetorically viable response to this corpus from an opponent of DEI or whatever the race-communism buzzword is these days other than HBD. Basically, I agree with Cofnas and don't think Hanania really refutes him.
It's also very strange to cede the idea that truth has value in political discussions. Falsity has costs. Propagating the truth about Lysenkoism wouldn't have destroyed the USSR or communism as an ideology but it may have saved many lives. Talking about HBD is likewise not a silver bullet, but if it's true then there's a lot of alpha in acknowledging it, if only to reduce the inefficiency of policy based on false premises. Also, Humans are irrational but that doesn't mean there's no advantage in making arguments based on true rather than false premises.
I'm not sure if Hanania is really trying to distance himself from his Hoste days, if he's making some attempt to increase his mainstream palatability, or if he just genuinely has a bad opinion. Whichever it is, not talking about race differences is how you get SCOTUS opinions saying that "in 25 years, affirmative action will not be necessary". That quote from the Grutter case upholding affirmative action is a direct link between the false premises Hanania doesn't want to correct and the laws that he wants to change.
For those reading this who are unsure of the facts but have noticed that many proponents of HBD are obnoxious and/or have politics you find objectionable, let me just say that autism is a superpower and the truth of a statement is completely orthogonal to how it's used in political discourse. In general, you can have whatever moral or aesthetic preferences you want, but you should be interested in having as accurate a view of the world as possible, if only to implement your preferences effectively. There's room for progressives who want racial preferences in embryo screening or genetic engineering to close the achievement gap! Effective politics may be possible without concern for the truth but effective policy is not.
I don't consider it much of a "rare" miss. I find Hanania's writings increasingly incoherent across the board, and I think he is generally searching for an odd niche to try and maintain relevance now that his actual big splash in has waned. Trying to balance takes in the anti-woke sphere to ensure you are "respectable" tends to put you into a land of comments that are either uninteresting, or fallacious, and thats where this one, and a lot of them recently, have landed.
I think he’s putting out a lot of good information and content at what seems like a rapid click to me.
But in finding his overall voice he seems incoherent to me.
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If he were really trying to ensure that he was "respectable", he would not mention HBD at all. Instead, what he is doing is almost systematically pissing off both the left and the right at the same time, burning bridges on both sides. I respect him for that, it takes courage. Plus I think that both the left and the right should be mocked, so I enjoy that he riles them up.
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He's not trying to be respectable, he genuinely believes most things he says, and just likes being inflammatory in all directions, I'm pretty sure.
I usually like his writing.
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He's become utterly unbearable on X (it's the same joke ad nauseum. Wegeddit, the IDF are the good guys) , but I wrote that off as Twitter basically becoming an engagement farm for him while substantive posts go on Substack. You can actually maintain these positions - Bryan Caplan both accepts HBD and is for immigration - but Hanania specifically comes across as a troll looking for an audience.
Reading his response to comments here... Maybe I'm crazy, but I can't see how he isn't playing dumb (right down to standard tactics like "there's no taboo on talking about this")
It's hard to disagree with the commenter's charge that he's refusing to answer "well, why not open borders but no Muslims?" because it'll either reduce to an "unPC" take from our supposed contrarian or force him to bite the bullet on accepting Muslims, which he also doesn't want to do for obvious reasons.
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I think his point is valid that it's not something to go out of your way to bring up because it looks bad to many people, but yeah, you could well end up in situations where you have to bring it up.
I think given the relevance to so many current political issues, and the fact that so many elites and so many policies operate under the belief that it isn't true, it's actually just important to talk about in general. I agree that most of the people who do talk about it are cringe, but that doesn't affect the need to talk about it.
There really doesn't seem to be any way to respond to the progressive objections to Hanania's preferred positions other than to talk about it. If blank slatism is true, doesn't the free market just perpetuate the underclass status of an ethnic group that could otherwise be just as successful as others? Aren't we missing out on a huge number of doctors and engineers by not trying to remedy the environmental factors causing such a huge disparity in every measure of cognitive ability?
The problem is that it reads to me as having a higher chance of biasing the typical person against you rather than for you, unless done very carefully.
You could point to culture, but yes, it's to answer that sort of question when it might be most reasonable to bring it up.
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Cofnas misunderstands the progressive impulse. Cofnas’ proposal is the equivalent of telling the commissar “well, you see sir, if we allow capitalism, private property and great wealth inequality, we’ll all be richer”. This is true, but it’s not the point. The point is ‘equity’, the point is that ‘private property is inherently exploitative’, the point is that racially disparate outcomes are inherently wrong, regardless of cause.
Progressives won’t be convinced by the “HBD supports meritocracy” argument because meritocracy isn’t axiomatic for them; equity is. DEI doesn’t require a lack of HBD, DEI can easily adapt to HBD, the central shibboleth of leftism is “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. The distribution of ‘ability’ is not hugely important.
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I agree, as I said it's completely possible to be a pro-DEI race-realist, it's just that it would necessitate a different narrative and a different set of supported policies and rhetorical positions. I think Cofnas believes (and I agree) that progressivism wouldn't survive the necessary shift in rhetoric and policy advocacy. I think you also underestimate how rational people are. There are some true believers but I think you underestimate the extent to which people are willing to change their mind based on facts. Look at the shift in attitudes towards the Soviet Union among western intellectuals after the Hungarian and Czech revolts and their suppression by the USSR. There are certainly some people who are beyond convincing, but the ascendency of this worldview requires the cooperation of so many people that I can't believe the zealots are more than a small fraction. I also don't see any better arguments, so if you value argument as a political tool at all I'm not sure what the alternative to talking about HBD is.
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Who, uh, doesn't spend a lot of time on twitter? Matt Yglesias spends a lot of time on twitter, and often quote-tweets these fringe far-right figures. Tucker's writers breathed the twitter-far-right environment both when he was at Fox and now. Random smart people I know IRL follow all sorts of people on twitter. Even many years ago the social network for the "liberal media" was ... twitter. And a lot of relatively mainstream right-wing media figures follow various far-right people on twitter. Sure, the far-right doesn't currently have *power, but it certainly has influence. And most of the far-right does mix in the 'statistical differences in IQ' part of HBD with white identitarianism.
His point is sort of that 'not-HBD' is a key part of the logic justifying affirmative action, but not actually a key part of the political resonance of affirmative action for almost everyone. The political resonance is just that people really really don't want to be racist and really really want to help the poor black people helpless in the face of structural factors. Someone who's an earnest progressive activist isn't going to be receptive to HBD, it just doesn't do anything for any of their motives.
And in terms of those motives: Scott Alexander clearly believes races have different average IQs. But he's a liberal so he doesn't make a huge deal about it - it just doesn't feel good. Whereas someone like ZHPL or Fuentes do believe races have different IQs, and they buy more into the whole far-right idea cluster so they make a huge deal about it. Hanania's significantly more liberal, so he doesn't really want people to become ZHPL or Fuentes, so he doesn't want to make a huge deal about race and IQ. Also, maybe emphasizing race and IQ puts you in a coalition with the 'nazis', and then the nazis are toxic to the public, so your cause loses.
As he says at the end:
(I'm not agreeing with his position here, just trying to explain it)
He'd say 'yeah, we already tried to convince the intelligentsia, see the Bell Curve, it didn't work'. But - does that mean we should stop trying? Just because it's not enough doesn't mean it isn't useful to promote HBD on the margin. Some of the intelligentsia (eg Scott and the many mainstream people who respect him) clearly are convinced, and that can't hurt the Right or Freedom or w/e.
I think the right-wing Overton window is already shifting in the HBD direction, partly because Musk bought twitter and allowed it to be discussed. In real life though, it's still absolutely unthinkable and career suicide to talk about it frankly. I take your point though, the idea does actually have (increasing) power just because of it's popularity on twitter. Maybe we'll see that translate into real life in the next decade.
It's a fact that obviously helps the right more than the left because it torpedoes a core left-wing belief about the world, but in the end it's just a fact, like evolution, that can be used to justify whatever policies the arguer wants. LKY seems to have instituted affirmative action in Singapore partly because of his race realist beliefs. I think it's really asinine to assign facts a political significance in and of themselves, even if it happens that currently one political faction likes talking about it more than another. It's not hard to argue for largely the same things leftists are arguing for now while being race realist, but I think discourse and policy would be less dysfunctional were leftists forced to do so instead of making magic dirt arguments.
I agree this is his point but I disagree with him. I think a drastic shift in the Overton is possible simply by popularizing knowledge of HBD-related facts. I think many people are genuinely unaware even of the achievement gap, let alone the evidence for it being largely genetic. The NYT runs an article about selective highschools having an issue with diversity every couple of years, not sure how that would even be news unless people weren't aware of the achievement gap. In my interactions with people I don't reveal my actual views so maybe they don't either, but I get the impression most people are simply unaware of the kind of stuff you see on race realist twitter. If that's really the case, I think there's a strong case that talking about it can change peoples' minds.
I also really dislike the argument that because wignats like talking about it no one else should lest they be associated with wignats. Politics is primarily about preferences but facts are actually important as well. Yglesias has a relevant piece on this https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-strange-death-of-education-reform-3f5 wherein he pretty much says that denying the achievement gap exists is stupid and harmful. I think a similar argument can easily be made from a liberal perspective for not denying that the gap is significantly genetic. Preventing wasteful policies that are based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is reason enough to talk about it. There's a great quote from HBD-archon Greg Clark about this:
"This is not an “ugly” fact. It is not a “beautiful” fact. It is just a fact. This fact helps explain why it is so hard for societies using the levers of social policy to eliminate group disparities in outcomes. It is a fact that we should be aware of in thinking about inequalities of income and wealth."
The evidence will only continue to grow, I think eventually it will just be too much to deny. Even with the taboo on talking about it and researching it, even with institutions like the NIH forbidding research on it, it's just inevitable that if HBD is true it will become undeniable eventually. If it's true then the sooner it's acknowledged the better for crafting effective policy, so if you believe it's true I think you should want to convince people. Of course, taking the position Scott Alexander tacitly confessed to in his Kolmogorov And The Lightning essay of not talking about it to save your social status is completely fine too, you just shouldn't discourage others from talking about it.
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You put it very well.
I got the sense Hanania was punching down against his younger self and all the dumb conservatives that annoy him. I don’t really come away from the essay understanding what his preferred approach is.
What’s funny is Hanania has quite literally written about his autism as a super power so it’s really full circle.
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Hanania has basically taken a view that politicians should just adopt views to win elections. That sounds truthy but it also means you abdicate leadership.
Abortion is certainly one issue with this. It might be an election loser but Pro-life seems a very good policy and a cultural view that is extremely good if I want my society to be strong and growing. If you look at the entire pro-life package it’s better than the opposite which is sub replacement level fertility in core American ethnicities behind American success. Having people just accept they got pregnant at 20 is a good thing on both the male and female side. The male well is expected to go bust his ass for the next 20-40 years and settle down. Long-term they likely end up happy. And our nation grows. A fertility cult is much better than a “I need to find myself” cult.
On HBD the right needs an argument against open borders and it’s really the only thing that is intellectually solid. All the evidence points to low IQ countries being politically unstable. They haven’t developed into functional lower class populations with functional upper classes still leading society forward.
I do not believe I could make a strong anti-immigration argument without using HBD. The best I could do is believe in HBD and make arguments based on things I don’t believe (like the Chinese are sending in military age men to conquor America internally)
With the explosion of population in Africa it seems clear to me Europe won’t exists in 70-90 years and is going the route of S Africa. The US I thought was relatively protected but now it seems like a lot of migrants on our southern border aren’t coming from just the America’s.
Why do you see it as crucial to argue against immigration?
A persons income correlates more with average IQ in their country than their personal IQ. This implies that lowering a countries average IQ will not function by having the smart people pull the low IQ people us but will have the high IQ people pulled down.
Mostly due to political instability and institution quality. America could probably fit a billion people easily. If we added 700 million people from low IQ countries it would lead to bad political outcomes. The existing American people would become less productive and poorer.
Should we try to import as many as we can of those who have good economic/political views? (e.g. pro-market)
I don’t care about views. That’s too easy to game.
I’m fine with letting in anyone who can score a 1300 on the SAT or equivalent test.
But there is no political coalition that would agree to IQ testing for immigrants. The left gave up on that in education.
I suppose the H1B does this somewhat.
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This would suggest more homogenous European countries (not to mention China, Japan) would have much higher incomes than the USA, when in fact the opposite is true.
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You're switching between "pro-life" as "anti-abortion" and "pro-life" as "pronatalist conservative". The literal policy of being anti-abortion does essentially nothing for fertility rates. The "entire pro-life package" only promotes fertility rates to the extent that it's the entire conservative package, and even US conservative fertility rates aren't that high. Being "pro-family" or pro "making it easier for families to have children" politically toxic in the way that being anti-abortion is.
I am confused how banning abortion won’t boost fertility. People are still going to have unprotected sex. Which means pregnancy. Which leads to having a kid. The guy gets hit with obligations. Now they get sort of married. Love their kids and probably make more at a younger age.
Behaviors often come before beliefs.
People who get abortions really don't want to have kids. It disrupts their entire lives. I'd expect something like a 2-7% increase in the fertility rate (compare to increases in state with abortion bans) - which isn't getting us above replacement - and those increases will mostly be among the sorts of people who aren't intelligent or bad at planning, which aren't what you want.
To get fertility above replacement, you'd want a significant culture shift such that more people actually want - and not just want, see it as a powerful social / moral good - to have children, and more than two children at that. And something a little bit like that is part of the conservative package - it just doesn't have much to do with anti-abortion.
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People will get back alley abortions, their family, friends, and neighbours will cover them. You'd see a rise in Infant Sudden Death Syndrome, and babies being given up for adoption.
You can't force people into being parents, or at least not so overtly. You need to convince them by making it more high status, virtuous, convenient, and cheap.
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You're mixing pro-lifers with natalists. Does the average number of children among pro-lifers and pro-choicers differ meaningfully?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
I haven’t seen it by pro-life/pro-choice but religious attendance is likely a good proxy for pro-life.
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Probably. Red tribe fertility is like 2 and blue tribe fertility is like 1.3. Obviously those are imperfect proxies, but my personal experience of blue tribe conservatives is that they probably have a tfr north of 3, despite their small numbers, and within the red tribe more conservative views are strongly correlated with more children.
Obviously there’s a lot of non-abortion related explanations. But in an American context prolife conservatives have a high-by-developed world standards tfr, and nothing we know about pro-choicers indicates they have an elevated TFR. We probably can’t get specific data which isn’t crap, but everything we know about the question points towards pro-lifers having higher fertility by a lot. I would expect that this is more correlation than causation, though; America doesn’t have enough abortions to change the TFR strongly. It’s more plausible that an existing natality culture pushes people to adopt pro-life views.
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South Korea's fertility rate has been declining since at least the 1960s, but abortion only became legal there in 2020. Before then, people just got illegal abortions. The same would happen in the US if the pro-life package was enforced only by law, while people still wanted to have abortions.
US pro-lifers have developed no effective mechanism of changing whether women en masse get abortions or not. Trying to use law would fail just like in South Korea. Religion is no longer a serious influence on culture in the US outside of some politically marginal parts of the country - and for that matter, South Korean religiousness has not done much for their fertility rate. Long-term arguments about needing to support the future of society have little appeal outside some niche online forums like this.
Hanania is or at least pretends to be an extreme pro-free-market, pro-freedom-of-association kind of guy. So I am guessing that his answer to how to address the problems of immigration without arguing about HBD all the time might be something like "let whoever wants to come to the US come, but citizens and companies should be free not to do business with them and the government should not give them welfare". Which I'm not sure would work in practice, but it at least is a somewhat more defensible idea than "open the borders while changing nothing else about US law as it currently exists".
I'm not sure I agree with Hanania about the idea that appealing to pro-liberty arguments is more likely to get rid of anti-discrimination laws than appealing to "HBD" is. Most Americans just don't seem to be that libertarian. On the other hand, I somewhat agree with Hanania insofar I think that HBD's prospects as a force in US politics are very questionable and even if HBD became widely accepted, it would not necessarily do much to discredit dogmatic calls for equality. After all, what we now refer to using the euphemism "HBD" was by far the most popular attitude that white Americans had towards race differences just 80 years ago, but within the span of just a few decades that attitude completely shifted. So even if HBD "won" again, how would it retain its "winning" position against new futuristic versions of the call for equality?
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Hanania says:
But that's exactly what has happened, no?
Anyway. I believe that there are very few people writing cogently and effectively on any given topic, and they all know each other, so the bulk of discourse is advanced essentially by conspiracies. I think there's some Discord group where Hanania, Karlin, Yglesias and other such edgy dorks hang out. I suspect that some time ago – maybe around Scott's disappearance – they've concluded that the right is doomed politically (for reasons Trace describes with regard to the GOP) and just decided to cut their losses, concocting some compromise vision and rhetorical tradition. What we observe now is a product of that covenant – bloodless, by-the-letter, superficially reasonable essays that may feel very fresh to a tired culture warrior, but also make flimsy arguments that prove them having engaged in a bit of lobotomy as a gesture of goodwill to the liberal-progressive hegemony they wish to be forgiven by.
Rather than this schlock, I'd rather read Hanania's Discord messages.
btw
https://twitter.com/nooceleration/status/1760765496218026264
Tfw Karlin has no idea who Scott Alexander is.
I'm also not 100% certain about "Scott's disappearance". Do you mean immediately following the doxxing threat until he reemerged a few months later, or do you mean ongoing since the doxxing (ie, metaphorically, old Scott never came back).
Karlin (and Hanania) definitely know who Scott Alexander is, it's probably just not immediately salient to them that he went dark for a few months 4 years ago.
The former; I believe he wasn't literally non-existent back then, after all. I think this was the private start of this Great Reconciliation with the Big Brother discourse, which eventually made its way from the apex (Scottsphere) to the less plugged-in pundits.
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I came across this, too. It's not quite "Senpai noticed me," but it's definitely indicative of some lurkers.
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I think what happened is that Moldbug and BAP’s stuff (and to an extent Hanania’s) worked ‘so well’ and (often via Scott and others) was read by a broad enough - though still small proportionally - slice of ‘the elite’ (tech billionaires, powerful political donors, influential media figures like Yglesias and Klein, some people on Wall Street) that they began to be invited to actually meet these people. And when they did they realized what would be required to effect genuine political change, and realized that there was simply no way it was going to happen through either the established Trumpist or mainstream conservative movements in the US. Moldbug always knew this, to some extent, the only thing to be done is to convince elites, which is disastrous because progressivism is a patrician ideology designed to appeal to them. Smart reactionaries, people who aren’t tradlite evangelical Christians with two sons in the US military, these people (‘blue tribe’, whatever) are always going to be outsiders on the American right. They’re always going to be thrown under the bus. They don’t have Trump’s magnetic charisma and TV personality. Their natural constituency is people who already have great power and wealth, and so they move to them.
I think the biggest black pill for them was abortion, though. The right finally wins a great cultural victory decades in the making that requires the meticulous coordination of multiple Republican presidents over 30+ years, extensive lobbying, the invention of a whole legal apparatus in the Federalist Society to funnel anti-abortion lawyers into the judiciary and the participation of countless Christian movements and churches. And it was all to slightly reduce the number of poor black women having abortions. That was the great American conservative victory of the 21st century, the towering achievement. Nothing could be more of a black pill than that.
Man, that’s a good description of what a hollow and expensive victory it was.
But it was the strongest motivator for conservatives to try so hard for court control, and that is likely to pay dividends in other issues even if it hurts GOP elections (until they moderate down to safe/legal/rare).
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There are a ton of private discords and groupchats, but unfortunately the quality of discussion is usually the same or worse as what people post on their main accounts ime. And a lot of what seems like coordinated action is just people independently coming to similar conclusions.
Even BAP has, for whatever reason, made posts recently about how race and IQ/HBD is politically doomed. Imagine him and Yggy plotting together.
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Maybe, but Hanania harps on about the virtues of free markets a bit too much for me to believe that this is all just some shtick to deflect from his now-known past as a 4chan edgelord. I figure he's probably hiding a bit the extent to which he is a Hoppe-type libertarian, but I also think that his professed faith in free markets and meritocracy is probably largely genuine, not just an attempt to cover his political goal of ending discrimination law and bringing about free association.
I think that to some extent, he might also be leaning into his particular niche of being a provocative writer who gets engagement by pissing off both the left and the right - an activity that he seems to personally relish anyway, so it's not entirely a shtick.
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This sticks in my craw a fair bit because this is who, whom all over again. The truth will set you free, but point deer make horse is an easy way to tell who is on your side and who isn't.
In both his examples, the truth is not the problem - it's the very short men, women's sexual preferences, the severely handicapped, society, and resources that matter instead. You can crow in the streets all day about the emperor having no clothes, but that doesn't make him not the emperor, and if he can execute you and yours at will, you'd be damn certain that pretty much only the suicidal would say the quiet part out loud.
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A month ago he wrote an article about how women score 2-3 pts lower on IQ tests compared to men...hmm. So he wants to still be allowed to talk about it
They want the popularity that comes with courting HBD views, as Trace and Hanania both had viral success wit HBD articles or articles that lend themselves to an HBD-based conclusion, but not to cross into bad optics by attracting the wrong people.
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I think he's basically right about this, but I also think that basically no one does this in any meaningful political discourse. The reason it keeps coming up isn't because there are tons of wignats and wignat-adjacent figures making these arguments, but because of actual policy arguments where unequal outcomes aren't surprising and aren't actually strong evidence of discrimination. What's annoying about the posture that Hanania takes here is that he knows this! He wrote Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. The underlying premise behind disparate impact relies heavily on the underlying equality of groups, with the only acceptable explanation for differing outcomes being that someone did something discriminatory somewhere, even if they didn't mean to. Countering that with the more boomercon arguments that people just didn't get raised with the right work ethic or something is always going to fall on deaf ears because saying that a group is just culturally inferior doesn't sound any more charitable than HBD arguments.
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