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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.
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.
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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