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One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"
The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.
HBD is not a reason in favour of meritocracy so much as it is a reason against the current undeserved ethnic spoils arrangement we have. That exists by dint of the idea that all people are the same, and therefore all outcomes across groups should be proportionate, with no variance, and any deviation from that is necessarily due to -isms. By shattering the idea that all people are fundamentally the same, we remove any reason to think that outcomes across groups should be the same, which is an important step in shuttering the affirmative action industry.
Once AA and naked racial spoils agitation are removed we will naturally return to meritocracy.
Exactly colorblind meritocracy isn’t a stable political equilibrium. I guess I am a progressive in the sense that I do want to see society improve. Americas thirst to improve will always exists. 15% of the American population getting .5% of the seats at Harvard based on a colorblind meritocracy sticks out. All the disparate results will look like something we should improve. The solution back in the ‘90s was blaming black culture. Going back to rich white people lecturing on culture feels like it’s going back and is an example of a wrong policy solution.
The one interesting thing is the wokesters seems to have implemented Affirmative Action for the NBA’s slam dunk contest as the winner the last two years was a white guy with only one NBA star participating and the rest minor leaguers. We’ve gotten a black Harvard President and a white slam dunk winner. But I think it’s better having an old white dude running Harvard and watching Jordan dunk. I don’t think a meritocracy is sustainable without a general understanding of hbd. And I wish Hanania would speak directly on how his color blind meritocracy is going to be sustainable.
The bad black culture meme worked for about 50 years. When that didn’t fix things we got wokism. We aren’t going back to blaming culture and we need a new reason why.
Only through the lens of blank slatism and a pathological, reality-denying devotion to the idea of equality between peoples. Why insist on believing that evolution stopped at the neck? I cannot fathom it.
If you want to improve society, are you best off using your force multipliers on high value or low value propositions? Why bother spending billions bringing the dismal up to the lofty heights of "barely acceptable, sometimes" when the brilliant could do so much more with it?
Maybe it is time to start leaving some children behind.
Even places that lack the belief in the biological equality of different populations have mostly ended up with some form of racial spoils system à la affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia or on the basis of caste in India, or else simply tried to expel the higher achieving population as Uganda did with the Indians or most Medieval European states did with the Jews at one time or another. The stated explanation is usually some form of "disparate economic outcomes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups are an incitement to violence and the higher achieving group must either pay the rest of us a bribe for their own safety or get out."
Only in places where the different groups exist on a continuum, Latin America for example, do we see less conflict on these particular grounds (I suppose you could argue that the class-based violence that occasionally consumes these countries is a proxy for it, but poor black Brazilians hating their rich white overlords because they're rich and not because they're white seems like an improvement over our situation). It may be trivial to say that there would be no racism if we all interbred until there were no distinctions, but it seems like we might only need to go halfway or less to get that benefit.
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