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Your post is a potent illustration of a point I have made many times that fell upon deaf ears.
HBD is a fact.
Denying it is an erroneous rejection of reality. It's the thing that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
The implications, however, are a matter of preference, and further downstream are the policies you wish to enact.
Looking at the same disparity in group IQs, one can:
Use that as a justification for racism, in the strong sense, like disbarring them from the commons. Kicking them out of a country. Banning miscegenation.
Still discriminate, but on more utilitarian grounds, such as by demanding IQ tests of prospective immigrants so that the baseline level of IQ necessary for a wealthy, comfortable and cohesive society does not become diluted into dysfunction. Are you black but still above 100 IQ? You're welcome. It's regrettable that this disqualifies 70% of your compatriots, but it's not personal.
Argue that this justifies more redistribution. After all, we aid the sick and pay for the disabled. Why not prop up those who are cursed to be dumber because of their genes and had no say in the matter?
Or like me, argue that this is a problem to be solved, by means such as genetic engineering and polygenic screening. We know thousands of genes that all weakly contribute to intelligence. We can perform embryo selection, and with iterated embryo selection get nigh arbitrary gains limited only by our knowledge of causative genes and number of cycles we wish to churn through. This will almost certainly pay for itself. There is no fundamental biological reason that skin color should have any correlation with ones intelligence, anymore than painting an F1 car a different shade will change lap times beyond measurement error. I strongly suspect that even facial physiognomy can be conserved as long as you leave enough damn room in the skull for the brains, to head off claims that people have made before. Hooked noses do not make Jews smarter, flatter ones do not make Africans dumber. Melanin production has no reason to affect neuronal function, unless you really screw the pooch and end up with albinism.
I obviously endorse 4. Intelligence is as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. I do not think 1 is a good idea.
2? I can get behind it, at least until root-cause modification can be enacted. Most sane countries have this to a degree, if they privilege educational attainment, which is a decent proxy for intelligence. Not enough, sadly, and they ruin it by letting in "asylum seekers", keeping illegals and so on.
3? Not a fan. Eventually we'll all be economically obsolete, so I certainly would prefer UBI that does not care that I'm OOMs dumber than a hypothetical AGI. But I will tolerate no more redistribution, while humans have to pull their weight, than is absolutely necessary to ensure that people don't starve to death, have a permanent domicile, education and medical care. Not additional participation dollars for being too incompetent, beyond what anyone should receive.
But what remains obvious, for those with eyes to see, is that group differences in intelligence exist, have enormous empirical impact, that denying this inevitably leads to suspicions of systemic racism that's keeping otherwise fine folk down, and all the consequences of a gaping ideological blindspot in one's understanding of the world.
There's a lot of reason to doubt this. I've never seen cats engaged in widespread, highly destructive warfare. I've never seen ants commit infanticide. I've never seen a donkey shoot someone. I've never seen a horse rob a bank. If you're ever in any kind of situation that requires problem solving skills, having intelligence is the best thing you could rely upon, surely. But intelligence is also what produces conflict, disagreement, chaos and dysfunction.
That smelled wrong, and indeed the counterexample was only about 1.5 googles away.
More generally, imputing any sort of capability for non-cruelty to animals does not align with my understanding of the natural world at all. There are examples abound of animals routinely fighting conspecifics to the death, and I'm pretty sure approximately no animals have a notion of private property that extends beyond the reach of the "owner"'s teeth and claws. The best thing you could say is that without intelligence they can't found banks, and their capacity for appreciating their own suffering is low.
Fair enough. However I believe we call that one missing the forest for the trees.
I expanded my post a bit; really, I don't think there is a forest of edenic animal nonviolence there to miss. Since we were already talking about ants, I think I saw a BBC documentary years ago about what exactly happens when an ant colony prevails over another (I think the human terms are somewhere in the space of mass enslavement and genocide?). It's unclear that humans ever destroy more once you control for volume/complexity/economic value of what humans produce. If you actually are tempted to affirm the idea that it is really worse to create banks and then rob them than to never create banks at all, I take it you would also prefer the (education and human development level of the) 30 Years' War over the present situation because the sum total of things that were destroyed back then were fairly worthless by modern standards?
I have absolutely zero idea what in the world this has to do with my original statement.
Your statement, as I understood it, was that intelligence is not an unalloyed good because intelligence enables agents to do more damage. You sought to back this statement up by a list of claims about bad things humans do but animals (as an extreme example of something much dumber) don't.
In response to this, I claimed:
(1) animals still do bad things (that was my first response);
(2) the bad things that animals do are not actually better than the bad things humans do (this was my second response), and hence I disagree with your argument against intelligence being an unalloyed good.
Specifically, I argued (2) by saying that a calculus of badness that says that the bad things that animals do are less bad than the bad things that humans do may have implications that I certainly don't agree with, and I would be surprised if you agree with them either. Is a lion that roars at a weaker lion to chase it away and then steal its prey "better" than a human that robs a bank? If yes, why? If you say this is because the bank is worth much more than the dead antelope, is a marauding band of soldiers in the 17th century that burns down a wooden farmhouse with no plumbing or electricity (worth maybe $50k on the modern market) also better than someone who robs a bank today for $1m?
I think you're reading way too much into my statement. I was making a very simple, [what I'd have thought was a] very uncontroversial point. Intelligent people gave us climate change. Intelligent people gave us World War 2. Intelligent people gave us atomic weapons. Intelligent people gave us Planned Parenthood. Intelligence may 'not' be among the best mother nature has to offer her creatures, since animals live in relative peace of a kind that vastly outstrips the destruction humanity has wrought on itself throughout history. And your first point addresses something I never said, so that's not relevant.
Incidentally, looking back, I don't think it's a good idea to go around trying to stretch and stuff every sentence with $2 words pulled from a thesaurus, because that's what your statements read like to me, and it's very difficult to read them thinking they're meant to be seriously taken, without eye rolls.
The point is not uncontroversial, because if you're going to blame all those atrocities on intelligent people, you can't get away with being selective about it. Intelligent people gave us the semiconductor, the refrigerator, the printing press - although whether the printing press was ruinous for humanity is a matter for debate in some circles.
There's also a very good argument to be made that you can attribute the atrocities you listed to a lack of intelligence.
Animals live short, nasty, brutish lives, and I think their inability to outcompete, outproduce and exterminate everything else within reach is a matter of capability rather than need. The historical record of nature tells us that they frequently hunt, feed, and reproduce to excess, and when biomes change over time go extinct or ferociously exterminate and outcompete those occupying similar ecological niches. As far as I know, humankind is no different, we're just better at it.
Your last paragraph is typical-minding and an attempt to establish consensus. Please check your consensus at the door. There are people who take these arguments seriously, including yours, and if I took your argument seriously I'd seek the mass extermination of the human race within my own means.
Or, you know, I'd just go around trying to lower the intelligence of the human race by introducing heavy metals into the water supply.
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