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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.
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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