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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.
What exactly do you consider an "HBD aware" set of policies? If you are going to attack a strawman, at least say what that strawman is. As a sort of HBDer (I never particularly liked the ring of the term, but please tell me what I am allowed to call the position that a lot of valued traits including in particular intelligence are heritable and different ethnic groups have different averages in them, without being lumped in with people who want to advocate for spoils for or collusion their own ethnic group), I don't recall ever arguing or wishing for anything other than colorblind and meritocratic policies, and the posts you regularly make seemingly just to try and remind people to associate the former with the latter are really rather tiresome. I'm struggling to understand why you are doing this - are you trying to troll us anti-racial-spoils hereditarians into surrender or meltdown because you think we're legitimising actual racists? If so, why even bother with the complete political non-force that are card-carrying racists? Is it because you think that they are unfairly associated with your political beliefs?
Then I ask you the same question that I keep asking and that no one here seems to have an answer for. Assuming for the sake of argument that HBD is true and that group differences are, as a rule, more determinative than individual variance, what of it? What value does "HBD Awareness" add over individual assessments of merit? Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?
I think like this question has been answered multiple times, and you never seem to as much as acknowledge the answer: the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is
casuallycausally involved in the outcome or its measurement.This argument is currently ubiquitous, which is not surprising because if HBD is false, it's compelling. It's also being used to justify a wide range of measures that I believe to be materially disadvantageous for most humans, morally repugnant and often also concretely detrimental to myself (since as a working academic I have encountered the gamut of measures from finding myself on the wrong side of quotas to being hit with pressure from above and busywork due to vocal individual students who underperformed while belonging to a putatively disadvantaged group). Do you disagree with the point that if HBD is false and yet we observe the outcomes that we do, measures such as quotas, embedding of political officers in institutions that produce excessive discrepancies, loyalty/attitude tests for workers in outcome-assessment jobs and mandatory reeducation are at least justifiable?
You offer up "colourblind meritocracy" as an alternative to HBD as if in the world where the consensus belief is not-HBD plus we must have a colourblind meritocracy, people would look at the differences in outcomes and just go like "shucks, guess we must try at the colourblind meritocracy thing harder". This strikes me as very far-fetched. Certainly, if I had an axiomatic belief in non-HBD, I would think the state of reality is horrifying enough to warrant most of what is being done, only more and better.
Does it though?
My impression is essentially that of @Doubletree2 below, with an additional coda from my reply to @Amadan;
"Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit."
See also Clarence Thomas' comments on Affirmative Action and the "soft bigotry" of low expectations.
Edit: Formatting
I could be wrong, but I don't think the poster you're responding to is opposed to "Anglo/American norms about the equality of opportunity and equality before the law," but is in fact arguing that we'd have them better if we accept something like HBD, because thinking HBD is false in a world where HBD is true tends to lead to the breakdown of those norms.
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It doesn't actually do this though, in practical terms, in a conflict/political context. If you respond to the blank-slatist-unequal-outcomes with "actually, black people are genetically less intelligent so there's no problem here", you're not just shooting yourself in the foot, you're shooting yourself in the face.
The person who makes the former argument already believes that society is full of people who believe black people are inherently stupider/more criminal/whatever and make real consequential decisions based on that belief. When you say then, "yes I do believe black people are inherently stupider and intend to make practical, perhaps policy decisions based on that, and here's all the science that shows I'm right", that is not a counter argument. It is exactly the opposite of a counterargument.
I'm confused as to what you are trying to say here, but it seems like you are conflating the signifier and what it signifies. Specifically, you seem to be taking the contents of the putative counterargument to be "someone exists who believes X", as opposed to the contents of X (and, implicitly, the evidence that would result in someone believing that). Of course my goal is not just to stand in the market place and announce to everyone that I believe in heredity-plus-group-average differences. Rather, my goal is for other people, including people like you, but at least people at the levers of power, to be convinced of it, so that they may make better decisions. Imagine, to take an example from your posting history, that you are trying to convince someone that election fraud in the US was not a significant factor, and certainly did not cause Trump's loss; but their reaction starts out with "What of it? Even if there was actually no election fraud, why do you care so much to prove that?" and then, as you try to respond that and/or point them at evidence for your position, they change their response to "I already knew you believed that there was no election fraud, so you are not telling me anything new".
As an aside, I don't think the word "inherent" adds much to the discussion here. What's the difference between someone being merely stupid and being inherently stupid? It seems that the usage here only serves to sound a little like "invariably", which is emphatically not what the hereditarian thesis is about - there exist plenty of intelligent/prosocial and unintelligent/antisocial members of any ethnic group.
Given the analogy youve made with election deniers (totally not the same structure at all), it's probable my point didn't come across.
When you said "hbd counters the [institutional racism] argument", I imagined someone actually making that argument in the context of unequal outcomes. I.e. Saying the real words to a real person, perhaps in a public forum, who has prior beliefs in the opposite stance (differences are due to systemic racism).
But, it sounds like that is not what you had in mind. So who is making the argument, who is the recipient, and what is the forum where the argument is occurring?
Asiding your aside: "inherent" seems to me to be the crux of the whole debate! I did not mean "invariably". If intelligence were easily malleable, making stupid people smarter would just be a matter of better education or nutrition or something. Yet the HBD stance is that your intelligence is capped from the moment you're conceived.
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I think the phrase 'HBD awareness' is being used specifically to side step the practical political realities of how unpopular the concept is. That is, I do not think most people mean a literal awareness campaign where they want to just go around and tell progressives that race realism is correct, or some such, and think that would work. I assume when 'HBD awareness' is being brought up it is normally presupposing a world where people are at least open to being convinced that HBD is correct, or already think that it is correct, and then reasoning about the possible policy realities from that point.
I think that "HBD awareness" serves same purpose on the Alt Right that "Race Consciousness" and "Social Justice" serve on the woke. That is as euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit that has become fashionable amongst queer theater kids but remains deeply unpopular amongst the general population.
It's arguments as soldiers all the way down.
It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.
As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.
HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.
The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.
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I was speaking specifically to this comment thread/similar comment threads here on the Motte and am not sure how people more generally use 'HBD awareness' in conversation.
From this thread, you said, paraphrasing, 'Assuming for the sake of the argument that HBD is correct, what does being "HBD aware" add,' and 4bpp, again paraphrasing, explained that HBD is an 'alternative to the normal structural racism argument used to explain disparate outcomes, with HBD we could stop enforcing disparate impact laws, because disparate impact would not longer be considered iron-clad proof of racial discrimination'. Finally Doubletree2 chimed in, yes I am still paraphrasing, saying that 'explaining HBD to the structural racism people would just convince them that structural racism is correct, cause you sound like a racist'. I was responding to what I felt was Doubletree2's confusion as to what was being discussed, and that nobody was using 'HBD awareness' to mean, telling progressives HBD things. In both your prompt and 4bpp's response it is a basic assumption of the thought experiment that HBD is accepted enough to inform policy.
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