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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.
People have given you the standard answers of it making your positions defensible, and the real world comes knocking and you find out that merit isn't evenly distributed.
And of course, that I want to believe what's true. I find all the population genetics stuff really interesting in the same way that I find linguistics interesting, and group variation just makes sense as a possibility when you're used to thinking about populations of humans and genetics. (Seriously, read some Razib Khan or something. It's fun! Polynesian navigators, steppe nomads and the spread of the Indo-European languages, the original Americans crossing through Beringia and killing off all the megafauna, neanderthal ancestry, etc. It's a good time, if your interests are anything like mine, and doesn't require that you be a racist or something.)
But I do want to know: what alternative do you prefer? Why are there still disparities? What's your picture of the world? Does the data support that?
(This is not at all to say my picture of the world is complete: I do want to know how much of differences are environmental vs. genetic, as I imagine it's a mix, and I would want to know how different groups ended up with different genetic effects: what cultures and environments shaped things like that, because I don't really have a good picture of that in most cases, and it does seem necessary. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to say that just like variation within-group along many axes has a genetic component, so does variation between-group, and it seems silly to me to confidently assert that it has a 0% effect unless you have data or reasoning as to why that would happen, to back it up.)
I'm not Hlynka- and in fact I believe in HBD even if I don't like it much- but I think that AADOS culture is just uniquely shitty and this is probably a bigger factor than genes. Furthermore, I think that this happened partly because the average black IQ is low, but that that's a minor factor, and a badly managed welfare state just has that effect on the urban poor, which blacks disproportionately are and were, and that one of the few continuing legacies of Jim Crow is, aside from incredibly annoying and pretentious activists, that most American blacks feel like they have more in common with each other on account of their race than they do with their white neighbors and coworkers, even when those other blacks live on the other side of the country and don't share a class background, which destroys the containment mechanism for trailer trash behavior in white communities. I'll also say that I think, but cannot prove, that southern culture is more vulnerable to that kind of undermining than average even if it doesn't have huge amounts of negative cultural memes in it itself, and this is the root of AADOS culture.
I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.
That's a very reasonable take. I think I agree.
EDIT: At least, that's probably the largest factor in the dysfunction found in black America. I'm not sure how much of an effect that would have on IQ tests, etc. But in terms of real-world effects, yeah, that's probably the biggest problem.
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