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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 )
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'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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