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In a large thread about HBD, this comment https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187753?context=8#context was not replied. @OliveTapenade @guesswho @HlynkaCG @Questionmark
Since IQ scores are usually unavailable in large genetic databases, largest studies use "educational attainment" (EA, a variable dimensioned in number of years studied for individual's highest degree). Davide Piffer took polygenic index function derived from European populations and computed its values for some other populations, and plotted them vs their phenotypic IQs.
Of course, using polygenic index on another population than which polygenic index was derived isn't good. But this is bad in a sense that it is not accurate for estimating an individual from that another population (mostly because of linkage disequilibrium) but here we are interested in relative ranking of population averages, and they align fairly well. If using PGI to get another population averages was bad, we could predict it would be produce zero correlations and correlation -1 just as likely as +1. We could have seen bias associated with genetic distance from reference population or bias associated with relative position on PCA chart, but we don't. Maybe Piffer cherrypicked results? If so, why wouldn't be the best response to it is to re-do his analysis and show proper ~0 correlation?
Anti-HBD, what's your response to this? Why do you repeat "legacy of slavery" ad nauseam but ignore what genetics starts to explore? (link about mostly the same: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/sasha-gusev-wont-answer-basic-questions )
I'm confused- from your description it sounds like this study is just the pro-HBD version of those intersectionality studies papers which may or may not be completely made up, the data is too useless to check. Educational attainment as a proxy for IQ? Really? And the polygenic index derivation from European populations as a baseline just mucks up the data.
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I don't see where I've ever repeated anything about the legacy of slavery here, nor denied genetic variation, including in the case of genes linked to intelligence. What specifically do you feel I need to comment on?
EDIT: Reading the study, I find it interesting enough, though I have questions about confounders and scope. Still, more data is better, so thanks for the link.
Which questions?
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Like @The_Nybbler I am deeply skeptical of educational attainment as a proxy for raw intelligence. If anything it strikes me as a case of affirming the consequent. Simple truth is that I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts, just as I've met too many post-grads from prestigious institutions who I wouldn't trust to boil water, to take such claims at face value.
More generally I will reiterate my take from the previous thread. While Thomas Sowell does not address HBD directly I find it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in to pretty much everything HBDers post here. The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must
correctmanipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another context; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it exposes the fact that HBD as it is advocated for here on theMotte and more generally amongst rationalists is much more of a normative belief than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.Yes, I catch lot of flak on this forum for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding HBD is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra The Sequences and Scott Alexander, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask when evaluating a statement is not whether a statement is true or false, but "Cui Bono?".
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 does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
You lumping together those three categories and then saying they all are detrimental towards individual merit remains baffling given the arguments made by people in this very forum using HBD to defend individual merit against idpol and intersectionality.
Do you agree affirmative action hurts individual merit?
Do you agree HBD awareness hurts affirmative action?
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This seems to be a great time to bring up one of my favorite subjects when it comes to this debate. You know it, you love it, it's McNamara's Morons.
For those of you who might have missed this little tangent, during the Vietnam War, Secretary McNamara decided to lower the required score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test to as low as the tenth percentile in order to raise a bunch of cannon fodder for the Army. Shockingly, this experiment was a catastrophe. You can read the Wikipedia article here.
Now this particular instance, of someone coming into a complex field that actually intersects with reality and lowering the required scores on standardized intelligence tests, causing disaster to ensue, would seem to be a significant data point when it comes to the relevance of standardized intelligence testing.
I mean, you'd think so, right? Nonetheless I have been chasing this dude around the forum like the Terminator trying to get him to make a post that engages with the example in any meaningful way, to absolutely no avail, all while he continues to bang his drum about how meaningless standardized tests are.
If you happen to click, make sure you expand the comments on that second link. Look at where he goes "How is this an argument against individual merit?" out of literally nowhere, just completely arguing with someone who only exists in his imagination.
At this point I don't really expect any kind of worthwhile response, but I may as well throw this out there if he's going to continue to post about the subject and expect to be taken seriously.
I think it's warranted to quote this part:
When viewed in this light, we can conclude that the "experiment" wasn't actually an experiment at all, and was never designed to help either the armed forces or the recruited men, or to actually help the war effort, and was never meant to benefit society either, and ultimately did, in fact, fulfill its cynical political function.
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Yes you have been following me around and yes it has been kind of annoying partially because I strongly suspect you're a sockpuppet, and partially because you still haven't havent explained how McNamara displaying an attitude towards the lives of his nation's troops that would be more at home in a 19th century Tzarist Army than a 20th Century Western one is supposed to prove that generalizations about group differences in IQ are more predictive of future success than say living in a household with both parents present, or disprove the utility of colorblind policies.
You're just another single-issue commentor/vandal grasping at anything he can to justify his issue and his vandalism.
That's probably because I've literally never said anything about what the number of parents in a household does or does not predict, nor anything about the effectiveness of colorblind policy. This is absolutely some of the worst argumentation I've ever seen in this community. Seriously, what kind of response are you actually expecting when you try to call someone out for failing to defend arguments they've never made?
You consistently attempt to have these arguments in a fantasy land of your own creation, where progressive Democrats are supposedly HBD advocates, where everyone who argues with you is a supposedly a progressive even if they're actually some kind of right wing shitlord, and where everyone supposedly hates meritocracy regardless of anything they say about it, or whether they've ever said anything about it at all. It's absolutely complete bad faith and I refuse to humor it.
Especially since, again, you've already answered the question once, and all I'm doing is trying to squeeze your reasoning for it out of you. Let's harken back yet again to the first time I'm aware of that someone (not me) brought this subject up to you.
Them: "Wouldn't that suggest that people who think IQ measures something real and useful in real life might have a point? Guy comes up with idea of lowering the threshold on a mental aptitude test to fill a manpower shortage, and now his name is considered cursed for generations. This sure seems consistent with mental aptitude tests mattering in real life."
You: "No. If anything Robert McNamara illustrates my point that it is possible for someone with a high iq to be a complete moron."
See, at this point it hadn't yet occurred to you to just completely disengage on this subject and deflect by asking the questioner to defend some strawman argument, rather you just went ahead and said no. To which I can only say, cool, why not? You must have had some sort of reasoning behind your answer, right? So why are you working so hard to keep it a secret? I mean it's one thing to just lose an argument and stop posting on a given topic, there wouldn't be any reason to follow up in that case, but you insist on running around in circles perpetually banging this exact same drum. If you're going to do that, then I'm going to keep bringing up this extremely relevant historical example and asking for your reasoning on an opinion you've already expressed and continue to advertise.
And I am going to keep bringing it up. Not more than once per thread, ain't nobody got time for that, and I won't be the one starting any of the conversations, but each time someone else does and you wade in with the same old opinions? Yeah I'm pretty sure there's no rule against asking Hlynka to provide reasoning for his own statements on a subject he insists on talking about, so get used to looking at it. Don't worry, I'll make sure to rewrite it each time, maybe start including some highlights of other users asking you to stop shamelessly ducking, so that it doesn't just turn into copypasta.
If you insist on performing this ridiculous show of dodging and calling out strawmen, well I can't stop you, so instead I'm going to have you do it over and over again. Unless you give up entirely and stop responding, in which case I'm going to keep doing it anyway, for everyone else to see.
I'm way late, but I absolutely respect this energy.
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What is you point here? McNamara lowering IQ requirements for enlistment was a disaster, but if made by someone else with better attitude would have been a success? No?
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I say this as someone genuinely sympathetic to your position in this argument: You are conspicuously and repeatedly dodging /u/somedude's obvious point. If you aren't intending to dodge it, then you should go back and re-read the exchanges in that second link with fresh eyes; the point the people responding to you are making is clearly stated and straightforward and you have missed it. If on the other hand you are intentionally dodging, know that it is incredibly obvious and the virtuous thing to do in this circumstance would be to straightforwardly admit that they are making a good point or actually respond to the substance.
As I keep telling @aardvark2, I'm not dodging the question, I'm questioning the entire framework upon which the question rests. Is dingblat freater than fnord? Yes or no?
I feel like "Macnamara's Folly" is something that has been litigated and relitigated to hell and back, but upon review it hasn't really been touched since we move to the new site. So you know what @ArmedTooHeavily, you're a fair cop.
To rehash the arguments that I used to get into with TPO, Gwern, and others back in the day; I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that bay area rationalists in general and certain "dark enlightenment" thinkers in particular want to draw from them.
Robert MacNamara is an interesting and controversial character in that with the exception of some Civil War Confederate Generals he's probably one of, if not the, US historical figure with the largest split in emotional valence between tribes. The blue-tribe professional and academic classes seem to regard him as this brilliant visionary who used his education and intelligence to optimize all the things, bring balance to
the Forceforeign policy, and rationality to the military industrial complex. Meanwhile on the other side, the name of the man who lost Vietnam is a by-word for why technocratic rule by experts is a bad idea. While less so today there was a time not all that long ago where the surest way to start a fight in a VFW or American Legion bar was to praise Robert MacNamara.Going off on a tangent, the US military has always been a bit unusual in that even when it was a largely conscript force it remained oddly picky (compared to other nations) about who it brought in, heavily favoring the quality of its troops over the quantity. While less obvious today we can see evidence of this this in media of the 1910s 20s 30s and 40s where ostensibly fit characters are labeled "4F" and in modern echoes of the same such as Captain America. Point being that despite the popular conception of the ranks of "dumb grunts" being filled by little more than dumb grunts with few or no alternatives, this has not historically been case.
Coming back to MacNamara, McNamara was/is practically the posterchild for rational technocratic decision making, it's a big part of why he's so popular amongst a certain set, but it also made him kind of an idiot and an all-around terrible person. MacNamara being the very rational liberal and high IQ person that he was felt that the US military was leaving a lot of money on the table by not lowering it's recruitment standards. After all dumb grunts are just dumb grunts and what good are infantry really except as cannon fodder? Why shouldn't we as rational technocratic authoritarians lower the acceptance standards, skimp on the training, and throw bodies at the problem until it goes away?
The reasons not to just throw bodies at the problem are probably an effort post on their own this is the basic argument being made, and I don't see how Macnamara displaying a callous disregard for both military tradition and human life is supposed to prove that "niggers r dum" unless the specific tradition being disregarded is the one about equality before God.
As @Botond173 observes up thread I think that a user must be particularly stupid and/or naive to believe that "the experiment" was anything of the sort and that getting a bunch of non rationalist technocrat individuals killed wasn't the goal from the start
In the mean time @somedude is by thier own admission an account created for the specific purpose of picking a fight with me and @aardvark2 seems to be in the same boat in the sense that I don't think I've ever seen him engage in a discussion that wasn't about HBD.
This is not remotely true. He’s largely associated with expanding the Vietnam War, which did not go well, and Taylorism, which has long been out of fashion.
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We know, it's getting you to explain why in the form of anything resembling a cogent argument that's proven to be impossible. Reams of irrelevant musing about McNamara's beliefs aren't it.
Your schtick boils down to "I don't see how someone lowering test requirements to disastrous result is supposed to prove that tests measure anything important" but hey if you pretend the other guy spelled everything wrong and sprinkled in some ethnic slurs then you can still imagine that you came off looking like a winner.
And I've been getting away with it because you consistently make such dogshit arguments that there's no sane way to mod me for it. Like what are they going to do, tell me it's against the rules to expect you to provide reasoning for your statements? Order me not to notice when you try to call me out over subjects I have literally never posted upon?
They could try getting in my ass over my tone, but barely-obscured contempt is pretty much your entire gig, and frankly I do an infinitely better job of turning mine into posts that at least comprehensibly intersect with the other guy's actual statements. It'd be pretty ridiculous for anyone to jump to your defense over that while you stand around paraphrasing my arguments as "niggers r dum" at the exact same time.
Basically, cope with it. I treat you with exactly as much respect as you insist on treating the other side with, but at least I don't literally make up my own imaginary version of your posts and then tell you to defend arguments you've never made.
No my schtick is literally "I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that certain individuals want to draw from them." because we're not talking about IQ or SAT scores in isolation here. We're talking about lowering the requirements for the combat arms across the board, spatial, cognitive, physical, training, the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
That the results of this policy change were pretty-much what any competent planner would have predicted does not make them "disastrous" it makes them appear intentional, which in turn throws the more "charitable" interpretation of McNamara's policies preferred by the most vocal advocates of HBD awareness into serious doubt.
The observation that fielding substandard troops results in outsized friendly casualties is not revelatory, just look at the ongoing SNAFU that is the Russian Armed Forces.
Likewise, the observation that fielding substandard troops results in outsized friendly casualties, is not evidence that group differences in IQ (to the degree that they exist) are of greater signifiance than individual variance or other cultural factors. Nor is it evidence that such differences (to the degree that they exist) are a sound foundation for social policy.
In short, the facts as presented by yourself @aardvark2, TPO, Et Al are both incomplete and do not support the sweeping conclusions that you seem to be drawing from them.
As for the last bit...
...you get away with it because the Mods let you get away with it.
What predicted the substandard performance?
Why did and does the US military use it as a predictor?
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So are you trying to say that actually their problem was physical ability and training rather than their deficient cognitize abilities? Is that the argument I've finally compelled you to stand on? If so, I'll just say that is really, really, really not the impression created by anything I can find to read on the subject. I mean they weren't called McNamara's Meeklings, something else was at the top of everyone's mind
Nonetheless, this is a post that directly intersects with the content of my own, rather than some "nigurs r dum also I hate meritocracy" post you imagine me making, so congratulations.
Hey, show some gratitude. Anyone else would get slapped on the pecker immediately for that "niggers r dum" thing.
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You strike me as incapable of passing an ITT for the Motters here you argue with because you consistently fail to engage the points being made and instead make outlandish allegations.
Which part do you disagree with here?
(Note that these are descriptive statements. The normative implications are a distinct issue.)
IQ is real and measurable.
IQ correlates positively with a wide range of life outcomes, such as income and job performance.
IQ is significantly heritable, as e.g. height is.
Similar to height, genes set potential, and environment can prevent reaching it via e.g. malnutrition or head trauma or being raised by wolves.
There is a longstanding achievement gap on IQ between populations. A common ordering in a US context is Ashkenazi Jews > East Asians > Whites > Hispanics > Blacks.
Evidence exists that the differences in 5 cannot solely be explained by environment, and so, as with height, there seems to be a genetic difference between certain populations, on average.
Blank statists deny most or all of these. White supremacists tend to dislike the order represented in 5. Smart people trying to stay out of trouble definitely stay well clear of 6 and even 5 is dangerous to acknowledge (despite the issue being the whole point of affirmative action).
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If I may –
I suspect (and he can tell me if I am wrong, or unhelpful) is that part of what Hlynka is consistently gesturing towards is that HBD, as a belief, is the sort of belief that a self-anointed ruling class finds helpful because of its Explanatory Power. It is constantly being used to explain why certain government or social programs don't "work."
For the average person this framework is probably not a helpful one compared to something along the lines of the color-blind individualism that I think he is partial to. (Setting aside the fact that good common sense is probably a better predictor than HBD when it comes to keeping one out of trouble, you don't have to believe in HBD to "believe in" FBI crime stats &ct.)
So I think Hlynka's consistent suspicion of people who beat the HBD drum is rooted in the intuition that people who reach for such explanation may be the sorts of people who see themselves as would-be Lords and Masters of humanity, who cannot fail but only be failed. If someone is reaching for HBD, is it because it actually helps them interact with those around them in a charitable and mutually beneficial way or because they're sculpting society inside of their head?
As I said in another post here, HBD doesn't have any inherent policy recommendations. It being true implies that racial spoils policies of the sort that we have in the US will not substantially close the achievement gap, but that doesn't mean you can't advocate for exactly the same policies as reparations for slavery or whatever. I find it strange how much of the related discussion on this forum and other places focuses on the people who bring it up and their motives. Everyone should interested in whether HBD is true, trying to craft policy based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is bad and anyone living under those policies should want the truth to be known. Decouple what you or others think the political implications of HBD are from whether it's true. I find it so bizarre how willing people are to talk about everything except the truth of the claim itself.
You're correct, I think, that truth doesn't necessarily imply specific policy recommendations. But there are truths and there are narratives and when people are advancing a narrative I think it's fair to interrogate the truth behind it. And I think the truth of the claim itself is arguably fairly boring to talk about, in a sense, for a few reasons:
You can see this in a lot of areas – for example, squabbling about if a specific theory of physics or quantum mechanics or the Drake Equation isn't nearly as interesting for most people (and much harder to do responsibly) than speculating about the impact of the implications.
Well perhaps trying to craft policy based on this stuff is what Hlynka objects to generally. That's what I was trying to get a sense of.
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Yes, there is certainly a strong element of this in my approach.
I don't think it's a coincidence that those who seem to be most invested in the explanatory power of "Bio-determisnism" and various other structural "isms" also seem to be decidedly against what one might call "traditional western values". Describing Christianity as a "slave" or "cuck" religion/morality, and leaning heavily on the gay in "fully automated luxury gay space communism".
It does seem like (unsurprisingly, I guess) a lot of people right and left converge on "the Problem with Society is [my pet "structural" peeve], not 'merely' [poor moral choices], and to solve it we will need [new sociological insights and methods] because [traditional cultural and legal incentives] are
boringinsufficient to the crisis we face."Which I think is not dissimilar to how things were around 100 years ago, where the communists/fascists/socialists-of-the-chair all had remarkably similar ideas about what was to be done despite vehemently and violently disagreeing with one another.
And they all made the wrong choices, against individualism and merit, (and, unfortunately, there are many things in the free world with similar effect, though to a lesser extent).
I don't think it's wrong to talk about structural problems, you just have to do it with your eyes open, be aware of tradeoffs and complications behind the scenes, etc. Communism is an obvious structural problem. DEI being essentially mandated by the government is an obvious structural problem, that we can (hopefully) one day fix.
Of course, poor moral choices matter too. But the only real way to affect those at an appreciable scale are through things with far-reaching effects, which include structural things.
Any substantial reforms should of course involve cultural or legal incentives.
Does that "wrong choice" include eugenics and the Nazi "merciful death" program, in your view?
Oh, I just meant the overall collectivization, group identity things.
I'm not familiar with the programs in question, but from the name, I assume they're not good, if that's what you're asking?
I think eugenics and euthanasia are concepts worthy of consideration, and the German military defeat in 1945 does not turn them into "wrong choices".
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Can you link to this? I might have missed a subthread but this does not comport to my memory of this particular scandal.
The basic idea is that black players that had not taken the Wonderlic when joining the league had their post-career Wonderlic score compared to a lower default/baseline than white players that had not taken the Wonderlic prior to joining the league. The reason for this being that the median black Wonderlic score is lower than the median white Wonderlic score. There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race, it was applying a baseline for players that hadn't taken the test before.
Hlynka's characterization of the incident is... uncharitable to say the least.
That sounds like the facts on the ground, but maybe the argumentation was particularly bad. If this was seriously a turning point moment for @hlynka I'd be interested in seeing the actual comments.
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That's where you are wrong. A major part of the scandal was that it was revealed in discovery that the NFL had attempted to use the lower "race-normalized" scores to justify reduced payouts even in cases where the initial score for an individual player were available. Only problem being they got caught by a player who'd saved a copy of their initial scores and subsequently challenged the ruling.
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
Edited to be less antagonistic.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
You said that "There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race" but "no manipulation" because it was caught early and NFL officials were actively prevented from following through on their intentions carries vastly different implications from "no manipulation" because there was never an attempt to manipulate the scores in the first place.
The strategic equivocation between those two cases as well as between anonymized average group scores, and individual scores, is a good chunk of what I found so "illuminating".
As for the rest, my reply is basically "what @FCfromSSC said." As I've argued in previous threads, the fact that Sunni Fundamentalists and Shia Fundamentalists often come into violent conflict with each other does not invalidate "Islamic Fundamentalism" as a meaningful category or descriptor.
From where I'm sitting it seems patently obvious that the battle between the woke/intersectional left and the dissident/identitarian right is chiefly a intra-tribal conflict between different subgroups of "secular progressive-leaning academics who mostly live in coastal cities and vote Democrat" and this along with the fact that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of meaningful differences between the beliefs and policy preferences of the intersectional left and identitarian right is why I view them as being "of a kind".
Edit: Yes I'm linking that Ryan Long video again.
Does thinking that races are different on average, but not being an identitarian fall into the "dissident/identitarian right"?
I at least have been reading you as asserting that it does, to which many here disagree.
(Also, I don't think the identitarian right would vote Democrat)
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Violent disagreement does not preclude fundamental commonality. Gambino soldiers and Luciano soldiers kill each other, and yet are both members of a single well-defined set. Stalin murdered Trotsky, yet I do not think any fundamental ideological difference existed between the two.
The proper way to draw ideological borders is a non-trivial question.
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity, in the same way that Gambino and Luciano soldiers believe in "their thing", and Stalin and Trotsky believed in revolutionary socialism. That their understanding of the realities of racial identity and what it means are opposed doesn't make any more difference than it does with the mafioso or the revolutionary communists.
Stalin and Trotsky doubtless had many finely crafted ideological differences, but their ideology was largely bullshit, and none of those differences actually cashed out into differences in action: both men believed that they were the champions of an unstoppable progressive force that justified a practically-unlimited amount of murder and destruction in pursuit of "the greater good". As it happens, one beat the other in the power struggle, and the loser got exiled and then killed. The fine ideological distinctions appear to me to be meaningless trivia, because they never cashed out in actual differences in action. I am not persuaded that the details of Trotskyism as an ideology actually explain why he lost, or indicate that he would have been any better if he had won.
how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy? The progressive left demands discrimination against whites and Asians as racial groups, the white-identity right demands discrimination against blacks and hispanics as racial groups. How is this not Gambino and Luciano, Stalin and Trotsky?
I do not believe that racial identity is necessarily important or inescapable. I believe that it is at least possible in principle for people of different races to live together in peace without either top-down race-based tyranny or bottom-up racial predation. This is a distinct difference between my ideology and that of both the progressive and white-identity types.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
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I can't find anything about a specific player like you're talking about it (all the top search results are about how the NFL is racist but unsurprisingly light on specifics). Do you recall which player this was?
As I recall it was Kevin Henry (Steelers), Clarence Vaughn (Redskins), and LaDainian Tomlinson (Chargers) who were taking point, but now I wonder if I'm experiencing the Mandela effect because searching for their names and the case on google and Wikipedia is turning up nothing.
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I’m an HBD skeptic, but I will steelman to the extent that studying these sorts of things is very difficult even if there weren’t people interested in pushing the data to support their ideas. The data frankly isn’t there, and we’re using proxy data on almost every front. Nations are not always homogeneous and therefore using e.g. Sweden’s results as White peoples’s results is always going to be a bit much. Add in the confounding factors (quality of the school system, students’s health, wealth, and culture) and you have a mess even before you turn to finding a proxy (often just as difficult to measure) for IQ. Then you come to whether or not a country is reporting data honestly, whether EA can mean different things in different countries, and so on.
I don’t mind if someone tries to correct obviously bad data as long as it’s done in a way that doesn’t bias the results and that’s fairly honest. Norming EA to the standard of international math and reading tests is perfectly reasonable. Knocking off three years of attainment because it’s a majority black country isn’t.
what do you mean by this, you're writing just to inflate word count? IQ tests require from 30 minutes to hour or more, and many people do not want to waste time on it. Ticking boxes in questionaire about degree they have is less than minute, and more people cooperate.
this is a non-issue since EA here only used for getting polygenic index in reference population which is either one country or some quite similar countries. Then, polygenic index is used to predict which EA other population would had if they lived in reference country.
you're imagining what your outgroup done bad?
Educational attainment is a poor proxy because unless you have a standard curriculum across the entire cohort of the study, the end point can vary widely even if the students are reported to have completed the same grade level. Even within countries, school districts and even individual schools can vary enough that it’s not a good proxy. In my area, private Catholic schools are much more rigorous than public suburban schools, which are more rigorous than public urban schools. Taking the scores of even local students and comparing them with the polygenetic index is a bit difficult when a 12th grader at St. Simon Catholic School is expected to take calculus, while his peer in an urban school is expected to maybe master basic algebra in 12th grade. It might well be that if the urban students were put in the Catholic school, they’d be knocked back by several years based on the material covered.
I’ll agree that it’s easier to get compliance on a tick box than an IQ test, but the results are as I said above often not directly comparable between regions and certainly not between countries with different systems.
The example I gave was mostly an example of what bad faith would look like. I don’t think you’re doing it, but if someone were trying to fudge the numbers in a given direction. If you’re basing your estimated correction on curricula not being the same, or standardized test results between countries, that makes sense. But you’d have to do it on the basis of the content the students know or were taught. It can’t be based on making an assumption based on location, language or race if you want results between locations, languages, and races to mean anything.
I'm afraid you haven't read what Piffer & Kirkegaard done. p.s. edited: grammar
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I am sometimes surprised that we have been on the same forum for nearly a decade now, and some of the experiences and things you references are always new and confusing to me.
I had to look this up "Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery"
I've not had the same life experiences as you. I've been around many academics, still work around some. I think a car comparison would help here. Some academics are like drag racers. They are built to go very very fast in a straight line. Ask them to take a turn and they'll crash into a thousand pieces. The Hondas I like driving tend to last and last and last. Without much need of maintenance or for me to worry about the machine itself. They aren't exceptional in any way, but they are reliable and do what you need. I know some people that just seem to be workhorses at life, and they can wade through the shit that gets thrown at them without breaking down. They adapt and fit in where needed.
Comparing via IQ seems a bit like comparing via horsepower. Not the whole story, but still kinda accurate for what you are measuring.
I read Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture, but have not read his other stuff. I'm not familiar with this "vision of the anointed".
I'm unfamiliar with this incident. And your description doesn't totally clear up to me what was happening...
Very well said, highly agree with you. Was one of my big frustrations with Fauci during covid. Stopped trusting him after the mask switcheroo.
I'm generally against Id Pol. I feel like I am aware of HBD. I am not interested in handing off control of society or government to people who claim to know how to judge intersectionality. I like the norms of equality of opportunity and equality before the law. I'd rather live in a society that has benefits for those with genuine individual merit, but mostly contingent on them sharing those merits with society. If you are capable for being a brain surgeon, you should only get paid as a brain surgeon if you actually do brain surgery.
Jobs are tasks to be done, not rewards to be won.
I think maybe we agree, but also sometimes I feel like you are yelling at me, and I'm not sure why?
Me too, but the problem is that those terms have become political signifiers in addition to their true meaning, with both sides claiming to pursue them while pushing their own agenda.
If I said that affirmative action isn't supposed to be opposed to any of that, it's supposed to counteract known disequities of opportunity in order to end at true meritocracy, like adjusting to the left because you know the sites on your gun are off a bit to the right, would you believe me?
If someone else said that all of our laws are already equal and all our bigotry is already ended, so all you have to do to get true meritocracy is get out of the way and let the market work, the invisible hand will take care of it all, would you believe them?
Unfortunately, it's all part of the culture war now, and which one of us someone believes typically has more to do with which side they're on than a careful consideration of all the mountains of evidence.
Which gets back to the basic problem of epistemic learned helplessness, and trusting your own experts and ingroup testimonials.
HBD people are fridge and mostly disconnected from each other, how do they have a side disconnected from evidence?
Blank slatism grew stronger as people stopped living on farms, riding horses and have many children. Having multiple children provided evidence for people in form "we are trying to raise our kids equally, but are getting very different results due to genetic lottery". These changes in society decrease evidence visible to average user. Also, many anti-HBD people actively try to erase evidence from internet.
The culture war portion of the HBD debate has never been about individual variance, it's always been about population averages, and how those are used in service of the just world fallacy.
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Black applicants to universities are accepted with lower SAT relative to white/Asian applicants not because SAT is biased towards blacks but because they believe systemic racism exist (separate from SAT) in form of bad schools, lead poisoning and many other unexplored factors, which have effect of unknown size. You cannot adjust for bias if you do not know bias value, which can be tested for guns.
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Sounds like blather so far.
No. Because I am advocating to zero the sights. Level the playing field. Stop trying to pick winners. Are some people dealt different hands? Yes, Jay-Z and Beyonce's kids will grow up uber privileged. What do you propose to do about it?
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This is false analogy. Gun sights that are off can be checked, but sights in public institutions? Ah, well, is "sight" SAT somehow biased towards blacks and underpredicts their ability to learn university materials?
I think it is bad faith arguing about affirmative action Good faith could be that affirmative action creates injustice that is small and temporary and after problem solved, all society can reap much larger benefits and stop affirmative action. Just like vaccine shot creates small fever, but then disease can be eliminated.
But now we "find" that affirmative action harms nobody, and should be continued in perpetuity.
It seems like in theory that could be checked by seeing if the relationship between SAT scores and college grades is the same between races.
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Unlike the others I do not believe people sincerely believe that.
Believing you would require showing some kind of effort to ensure you haven't over-corrected, or seeing a readjustment when a known case of anti-majority discrimination is brought up. Because we have not seen these things, and in fact what we have seen when these things are brought up is dismissal, shouting down, and censorship, we can conclude that the purpose of affirmative action is supposed to be racial discrimination.
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I'd believe that people think that. But no, I certainly don't think that's the actual effect. You can tell, even without looking at the data, by seeing that people care about it more because of racial dynamics than they do because it matches to merit.
It definitionally selects those who measure up less well along the axes that can be measured; my understanding was that those discrepancies are preserved over time and you just end up with less competent people.
And why not measure, then, by actual disequities of opportunity instead of using race as a proxy? Why is Claudine Gay, who comes from a wealthy background, the one who is advantaged time after time to end up at the highest and most prestigious heights of society? Are you really saying that one's skin makes a bigger difference in causing "disequities of opportunity" than one's wealth?
I'd prefer to stick to the actual, objective tests, directly measuring ability and performance. Just use the SAT or whatever.
Do you acknowledge that there's a racial gap in ability (of whatever cause)? Do you think affirmative action programs work to take that into account?
Yes. Any discrimination will be beaten out of corporations by more efficient, more meritocratic competitors, unless there are other substantial effects going on. (E.g. if x group is generally less efficient (at least, among those in your hiring pool), but all the other employees will protest and generally just be a pain unless you have more of them, it might make sense to hire them, as doing so improves everyone else's efficiency. But if there's some other competitor which can hire a similar number of competent workers without any of those problems, they'll do better.) So yes, I'll trust markets, because I think people value their own interest more than their prejudices, and if they don't, others will rise who do.
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I do believe that people sincerely believe that. My general impression having talked with some of these people, is that they are unconcerned with the problem swinging in reverse by overdoing a correction. I also feel that a correction of such things should take a single generation, but affirmative action has been going on longer than a single generation, and there is no suggested end to it.
I think fewer people believe both parts of this at the same time. Our current set of laws is not just "letting the market work". There are some people that think we should just let the market work (I count myself among them). And there is another group of people that believe recent laws have been sufficient (though many of them actually seem to think laws in the 1990s were at the perfect spot).
Yeah, I agree its mostly explained by conflict theory and fighting over resources rather then by mistaken beliefs on the part of one group or another.
I still think I'm confused about where HlynkaCG falls on all of this. He sometimes says things that make me think he disagree with me strongly, and other times says things that makes me think we actually agree.
I think Hlynka is hard to interpret because he's actually not just backing one of the sides, he has an idiosyncratic personal position on the matter that's complex and detailed and includes many points that would piss off either side.
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You're not engaging the argument. If it's not proxy, then it should be uncorrelated?
I am questioning the framework upon which it rests.
Ok, you reject that both axes of plot are proxies for intelligence. But that is semantic distinction. Ok, call it "ability to do IQ tests". Do you agree that these plots demonstrate various populations different genetic predisposition to do well on an IQ test?
We cannot have a genetic study with N=100,000 of "Hlynka intelligence" as Hlynka is the only person who can measure it and it takes a lot of time.
Pretty much.
To the degree that IQ is measuring something real, I think that what it is measuring is something along the lines of "Academic Aptitude" or "Proclivity for symbol manipulation", and that this quality is only somewhat correlated with the ability to recognize, retain, and reason from/act upon changing information states.
You're dodging question again.
Again, I am not "dodging" anything, I am questioning the entire framework upon which the question rests.
A plot can be made to demonstrate anything. To demonstrate, if I were showed you a plot showing that the ratio of squantches to dingflarbs amongst the black population is less than one, and appended a bunch of Jewish sounding names to the end so you could tell that it had come from a serious academic source would you agree?
Entire framework? Do you question genotyping methods and usage of GWAS linear regression to study associations between phenotype and genotype?
Well, since I don't produce voluminous posts about how mainstream theories about squantches and dingflarbs inaqueduate, I don't see analogy here.
I could agree or I could say "this is good, but would be nice is these results were reproduced by another authors".
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Okay, so do you think that there are racial differences in IQ, but not in ability more broadly?
If so, would that suggest that different groups have different strengths, but the different abilities end up cancelling to come to something roughly even when you try to form some (obviously imperfect) measure of true, generic ability? (Not saying whether I think this is the case, just trying to see what your picture of the world involves, and it seems to me like something like that would have to follow?)
I've been led to believe that IQ is fairly broadly impactful, but I don't currently have data at hand to back me up.
I would say that I am skeptical.
I'm skeptical that whatever it is that IQ tests are testing for correlates directly with "intelligence".
I'm skeptical that "intelligence" correlates directly with individual virtue, honesty, conscientiousness, lack of criminality, leadership ability, etc...
I am also skeptical of the claim that any and all observed variations in the above can be explained purely through biology/genetics.
Subsequently I'm skeptical of the claim that if meaningful biological differences between groups exist, that the effect size of these differences outweigh the effect sizes of individual variance and/or other cultural and economic factors.
In short, I feel like the OP and his allies are stacking unfounded assumptions atop unfounded assumptions and there's really nothing more to say than that.
The charitable reading of this statement is that you're skeptical IQ tests perfectly measure what you consider intelligence. I don't think anyone would say that IQ tests are perfect and always a perfect reflection of someone's cognitive ability, but when you test large groups of people, which is the data that we're actually talking about when we talk about IQ in the HBD context, these individual-level objections don't apply. If you think there are factors beyond what an IQ test measures that matter for life outcomes then no one will disagree with you, but your skepticism of this point is sort of a nonsensical reason to be anti-HBD since since racial gaps exist on every standardized test that could reasonably called cognitive in existence, including job-specific tests like fire chief qualification exams. Also, IQ does correlate pretty well with positive life outcomes, so even if it's one of many factors (just like race in college admissions) it seems to be a pretty important factor.
That being the case, your position of basically denying there's a cognitive ability or "merit" gap (as in the people who would be hired meritocratically into cognitively demanding jobs) is untenable even if you think IQ is complete nonsense. Anti-HBDers who have any idea what they're talking about don't deny the achievement gap, they argue the causes are non-significantly genetic. Also, "correlates directly" is simply not a statistically literate thing to say.
I think it probably does (although again, the phrase "correlates directly" makes me grimace), but even if it didn't, I'm not sure what the relevance is. If IQ and other positive qualities were completely uncorrelated, we would still expect racial gaps in anything cognitively demanding. This is an argument against viewing higher IQ people as inherently better people, not for IQ or other measures of cognitive ability being useless metrics, even though the latter is the way you're trying to use it.
"purely genetics" is doing all the work here. If, say, 70% of the gap is genetic, HBDers are right. likewise with "any and all variation". Why are you committed to the achievement gap being 100% XOR 0% genetic? Also, could you commit to whether you think the achievement gap is real or not? By this I'm asking whether you think the ubiquitous racial gaps on standardized tests imply an actual difference in the desirable traits being measured like future job performance, achievement in school, and, admittedly more nebulous, cognitive ability.
This is a dumber version of Lewtonin's fallacy. When we talk about entire population groups, individual variance doesn't "outweigh" population-level effects, that's nonsensical. If you're saying that HBD being true doesn't preclude the existence of smart black people then yeah, obviously.
The cultural/economic factors part is closer to a sort-of defensible position (although I'd like to see you explain racial SAT scores separated by parental income and education level) but you ruin your own point by using the word "meaningful" before them. If meaningful biological differences between groups (that impact traits we care about) exist, HBD is correct!
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Unrelated to the central topic, but:
Scott just recently wrote a post about this.
While I recognize that you can construct hypothetical examples where a utilitarian is forced to agree to something unpleasant, or imagine a lazy utilitarian who makes up half-baked arguments for why whatever they want to do is utilitarian optimal and that's why they get to violate strong heuristics/taboos/norms, I think those are thought experiments a lot more than they are descriptions of reality.
In reality, followers of other moral systems (or of no coherently named moral system) seem to me to make up lazy rationalizations for why to do whatever they want to do a lot more often than utilitarians, and are a lot easier to force into distasteful hypotheticals to boot.
The fact that actions have long-term consequences like 'all trust and honor across society breaks down' is not separate from utilitarianism, it's a part of the calculation, and that's why most utilitarians I talk to think about that stuff a lot more than most other people I know, and end up sticking to broad heuristics in most real-world cases.
We have noticed the skulls, as it were, and I think other moral systems which don't require you to think carefully and make explicit calculations and use your own best judgement under uncertainty, fail to teach their adherents the same carefulness. In practice, I think utilitarians end up doing better on average - obviously not perfect, but better than average.
I think something like utilitarianism seems to do a better job of being an all-encompassing theory of moral action.
Do you think in practice, it might be easier to rationalize?
A straight-up moral prohibition of adultery leads to less adultery than "well, do whatever maximizes pleasure," I would think, even if the latter should come to the same conclusion once you consider second-order effects. It's just too easy to do motivated reasoning.
Edit: I could have sworn I came across something at some point about the skulls quote. But while looking a little, I came across these comments from @DaseindustriesLtd.
So I am honestly making the maybe-crazy prediction that no, the average utilitarian will actually commit less adultery than the average person who follows a religion that says 'though shalt not commit adultery' or the average person with some type of deontology/virtue ethics which strongly says 'cheating is bad'. I'm not insanely confident about this or anything, could easily be wrong, but I'd bet $50 on it (if I were talking to someone at a bar I mean, I'm not going to go to the hassle of setting up an anonymous online exchange for that amount).
Now, caveats.
First, what do we mean by 'adultery', I do think that utilitarians are more likely to negotiate open relationships/polyamory, which I don't consider adulterous. I really mean cheating, in the sense of violating explicit or very obviously implied agreements about the nature of the relationship. If utilitarians have an advantage of more permissive relationships, I consider that a fairly won victory.
Second, 'average person'. I'm counting everyone who would say that they are Christian (or other religions with similar prohibitions) regardless of how devout or observant they are. I'm counting everyone who would say 'yeah adultery/cheating is obviously bad/wrong/evil' but doesn't give an explicitly utilitarian accounting of why that is. I do think this means that the average person in that group will be less interested in moral quandries and less thoughtful about moral issues and less concerned with matching their morals to their actions than the average utilitarian. I again consider that a fairly won victory, because utilitarianism involves learning to make those judgements for yourself instead of relying on handed-down maxims or simplistic rules, so I think that higher level of average observance is part of its strength. But you could argue that it's popular among academic weirdos who are a better starting stock, and therefore not a fair comparison group, if you wanted to.
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It’s not a question of “agree to something unpleasant.” The problem being that because there are no lines that may not be crossed, that almost any act can become thinkable given the right set of circumstances. Me killing you to save others is thinkable provided that the others are either more valuable or there are more of them.
Ok, but again, I don't actually think that non-utilitarians are better about avoiding 'unthinkable trade-offs'.
Like, some number of christians or deontologist or virtue ethicists or whatever will in practice, in real life, trade some lives for others, either implicitly through policy or explicitly when faces with the rare real-world situations where that decision comes up.
Like, they don't actually just halt, stop, and catch fire in those situations when they encounter something their morality says is 'unthinkable', they just sort of make a decision, like everyone does, like normal.
And in those types of situations, I would expect utilitarians to mostly make better decisions and better trades, because they're allowed to think about and consider and make plans for those situations before encountering them, and just generally because of the habit of thinking about when and how to make moral tradeoffs.
I don't know if you have a more concrete real-world example you'd like to frame this under, I'm kind of at a loss for thinking of real-world instances besides things like 'risk your platoon to save one wounded soldier', which a. I don't know if that ever actually happens outside movies, b. I don't know what normal people actually do in that situation statistically, and c. I expect utilitarians to have no trouble applying hueristics like 'having faith in your comrades every day is more valuable than protecting the platoon the once every 20 years this actually comes up' or w/e.
I’m not saying it never comes up, but if I’m a deontologist, and I subscribe to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, they have inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness) then there are a lot of things that at minimum it would be very very hard to get me to do. Summary detention of a bunch of people isn’t something that should, in my view be on the table. There might be some extreme cases where you have little choice, but getting there isn’t going to be easy, and it would only happen when there’s no other options.
The problem with utilitarian thinking is that those very bright lines aren’t there as a check on behavior. I can do anything I want, with the only caveat being that in my calculations the results are better than whatever I assume would happen if I didn’t do that. And depending on what things I put more weight on, or in what parts of society I judge to be more important, or who I judge more important. There’s no reason why I couldn’t discount the welfare of the poor, or of minorities, or women, or gingers. There’s also no reason I can’t choose the welfare of the elites, the majority ethnic group, men, or bald guys as more important than everyone else.
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I think a better way to understand the fundamental conflict is to think less in terms of "unthinkable trade-offs" and more in terms of "necessary evils" More pointedly that utilitarianism as it is typically advocated for in rationalist spaces does not seem to handle such scenarios gracefully. Instead of being able to acknowledge that [action] is bad but [action] was also necessary/understandable given the circumstances it instead seems to default to a position where [action] was necessary/understandable given the circumstances ergo [action] cannot be bad and must have actually been good or at least neutral.
I see Scott's defense of Fauci in this post here and his earlier posts on Kolmogorov Complicity and the Virtue of Silence as classic examples of the problem, sure sometimes betraying the public trust is the rational choice, but by betraying the public trust you have demonstrated yourself to be untrustworthy and can no longer honestly claim to be "the sort of person who cooperates in prisoners dilemmas" because you aren't, you're a defector.
That's just a semantics question over what "bad" means. You can say "hurting someone in self-defense is always bad, but sometimes it is the best option" or you can say "hurting someone in self-defense is not bad" and you're really saying the same thing.
Yes, and at the same time it also illustrates the fundamental problem with utilitarianism, namely that it is the ethical framework that makes it easiest to excuse one's own negative behavior.
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Educational attainment as a proxy for IQ? This already stinks like 3-day-old fish. And it doesn't matter that the results seem to support my position.
what you do mean?
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Firefox gives me an 'unsafe connection, file not downloaded' type error when I click the link to the paper.
Firefox is giving that error because :
MitM attacks aren't theoretical, but for a file like this mandating HTTPS is a little overkill, and probably only popping up because themotte itself is on an HTTPS page. VirusTotal gives a clean bill -- which isn't proof, but it's waggling eyebrows.
((That's separate from endorsing the PDF's meaning or data; I don't have the time to analyze deeply, but a lot of early genomic search data, both for intelligence and otherwise, wasn't very impressive last time I checked.))
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