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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Race Norming

I don't see what the race norming scandal had to do with lying. As far as I understand it, it isn't facially unreasonable to estimate the past IQ of black people based on the black population mean instead of the general population mean for paying out injury settlements. I don't at all see how this is manipulating the data to reflect the truth. Especially since it's, like, for an injury settlement.

People who possess merit benefit from HBD awareness because if it succeeds 1) they don't have to keep pretending that they can't see the obvious correlations between race and achievement anywhere and 2) don't have to take 'affirmative action'-style hiring practices to hire supposedly high potential but socially disadvantaged minorities who will in fact perform poorly.

I don't see what the race norming scandal had to do with lying.

Charitably it might be more "trying to have your cake and eat it too" than "lying", but Hlynka tends to be cynical about his opponents. My example in that vein is a certain type of person suddenly defending the Ivy-League's "holistic" recruitment criteria, when someone points out they primarily discriminate against Asians.

As far as I understand it, it isn't facially unreasonable to estimate the past IQ of black people based on the black population mean instead of the general population mean for paying out injury settlements.

It might have been reasonable when settling the first case, for lack of alternatives. Once it becomes routine, I don't see an excuse for not simply testing each athlete at the start of their career.

I don't at all see how this is manipulating the data to reflect the truth.

It might give off a certain "working backwards from a conclusion vibe". Isn't the proper way to draw conclusions about group differences, to measure and aggregate individual results, rather than to say "this here bloke couldn't have been hurt by all these concussions, he was always a dum-dum, because he comes from a group of dum-dums"?

I don't see an excuse for not simply testing each athlete at the start of their career.

Except that this is exactly what the NFL had been doing since the 70s. The scandal, that is the behavior that users here were defending, was that the NFL got caught artificially lowering the Wonderlic scores of high-performing blacks "to more correctly reflect the baseline" (whatever that means) and (presumably) minimize disability payments to black players.

In other words, about as clear-cut a case of racial discrimination winning out over colorblind meritocracy as one could ask for. That a significant portion of active HBDers on the Motte came out against standardized testing and defended the NFL's behavior is a dead give-away for which side of the "meritocracy" debate they're really on.

I don't remember that debate on themotte, but I feel like this probably isn't an accurate description how that discussion went? I highly doubt the 'HBDers' were defending 'using a group mean instead of individual scores when the individual scores were easily available'

Wasn't that what you just did a moment ago?

No, my understanding was that I was defending using the race mean instead of the population mean. That was my vague recollection and seems to match a quick skim of articles I just googled. I'm not confident that that's what the NFL was actually doing, but that's what I thought happened.

Obviously using the race mean when you have actual good test scores from when those players were young is dumb, that barely even needs to be said

I wasn't paying attention to the story when it was in the news, or was being discussed here. Thanks for pointing it out.

That's fair, and to be clear I'm not holding this against you, but this is why I describe it as a "scales falling from my eyes moment". I've already eaten a couple warnings and a ban for making comments to the effect of "[User] is a lying liar and here's the thread that proves it." which is why I dance around it now.

I've already eaten a couple warnings and a ban for making comments to the effect of "[User] is a lying liar and here's the thread that proves it." which is why I dance around it now.

Please point me to where you were banned for accusing someone of being a liar, with receipts. I'm not being snide or playing gotcha here, I really want to see where that happened. But note that "I think this person is being disingenuous" or "I don't think the argument this person is making now is consistent with something they said in an earlier thread" is not proof that someone is lying (and I suspect that is what you're going to point at).

(Also note you may not be wrong about someone being a liar - there are quite a few people who I consider to be disingenuous on a regular basis - but don't make me remind you again that being right is necessary but not sufficient when calling someone a liar.)