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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true

This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.

It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair

Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.

The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.

That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.

"Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race...HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

I think these are the sorts of things Westerners say because they have an atypically low focus on group honor. No man is an island, we all have a tribe and that tribe and its success matters.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters. Both in that the first affects individuals and that we can easily see it being otherwise. We know how to vaccinate groups, we don't know how to raise IQ.

All of this Coleman Hughes "focus on individuals" stuff is essentially an ameliorative tactic to save individualism and group agnosticism, but that only makes sense if groups are the broadly same. As the dissident right joke goes: "individualism and freedom for all (* obviously for 130 IQ Anglos)". On this view, "equality" and not caring about groups works because they just assumed power would be limited to those capable of handling it. And then everyone forgot range restriction and became optimists.

Once we actually accept that blacks can't be "130 IQ Anglos" all sorts of group judgments can flow from this that should concern any individual. For example: I'm African (my post history goes back so I can't be accused of being a troll - and you can probably find me on reddit with minimal effort too tbh). There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds. That argument has historically worked against me (which is why Western nations mainly took white people and didn't even consider African migration) and may again, if people come to believe it again.

Am I supposed to go "well, as an individual, this is not my concern"? Are my opponents supposed to say "oh, okay then"? I cannot escape my race except under the very system HBD destroys.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters

Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".

There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds

I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Shit, that is a good point.

You absolutely raise valid points. I didn't have the time to treat the issue with the nuance it deserves, so I tried to find something brief that approximates my overall view. I do think that at some point you have to find a way to accept the things you can't change and carry on anyway. But there are still many possible attitudes that someone might take towards HBD, and I don't want to diminish the complexity of the issue.

I do understand the feeling of group honor (racial or otherwise), and I understand how it can matter even in cases where you're not "directly" impacted as an individual.

This is the sort of thing that's best worked out in an extended dialogue with the person in question, rather than me or anyone else pontificating about how you should feel.

People here have pegged me as a HBD supporter, but actually I think a lot of HBD is exaggerated or worse. A prime example is HBD supporters claiming that African countries have such low IQ that by Western standards most of them would be mentally retarded. That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea. The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea.

Why? Beyonce owns a sweatshop in Bangladesh that makes clothes and shoes. There are lots of modern industrial productions, including state of art modern electronics, in poor South East Asian countries. AFAIK there are none in sub-Saharan Africa. It's all minerals and crops. When intl megabrand grows something in Kenya, they don't really need local workforce, they need soil and climate. My common sense says that "mentally retarded" is accurate if they can't even sew shoes.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians.

The 5 IQ point advantage for East Asians is much smaller than 20 point IQ genotypic gap with most Africans. It makes entire sense to ignore 5 points gap while consideing 20 points gap. Also, East Asians countries strangely underperform in scientific output compared to their IQ. The 5 IQ gap is about Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Malaysia, Philipines and Indonesia are much lower.

The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/

When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.

It was noted by Jensen:

Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.

So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

Can I translate this as "in an anti-HBD West, people don't cite arguments specific to HBD in their immigration policy"?

I'm pretty sure that the West wouldn't give Asians preferences over whites in immigration whether the West was anti-HBD or not. Exactly who the immigration benefits is far more important than any sincere concerns about how smart the immigrants are. For that matter, you don't even need HBD to say that current immigrants should be Asian because they're higher IQ, and nobody supports that, either.

The desirability of selective immigration follows from HBD, but the desirability of race-based selective immigration does not. It does mean it's a shortcut that can be beneficial, but that's all; skimming the cream of populations has generally worked for the US.

If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...

That is the killer.

In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.

Uh, if Nigerian engineers with a 115+ IQ are intermarrying with AADOS women(I don’t think they are; I believe they get mail order brides from the same tribe, and prefer their children to intermarry with whites over AADOS) then it would boost the AADOS IQ. Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

then it would boost the AADOS IQ.

Yes. However, for some cases it will increase AADOS IQ but decrease USA IQ.

Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

All (or most) regression happens in 1st generation.

If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no?

Not really, no. Regression towards the mean says a 120 IQ person from a race with a low-mean-population IQ probably has a lower genetic contribution towards IQ than a 120 IQ person from a higher mean IQ population, but they're still going to have a higher genetic contribution towards IQ than their population mean.

Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear.

Historically, skimming the cream has worked out well for the US. Our problem populations are where there was probably selection for currently undesirable qualities (American descendants of slaves), and fairly unselected populations (overland migrants who get a LOT of help)

I don't know that regression to the mean is all that much stronger for African geniuses than non-African geniuses. It might not be stronger at all, for all I know.

Also: in three generations the human race will be either extinct or so radically changed as to make such considerations irrelevant. Or we will be ruled by hyperintelligent but benevolent marmots. (It's the first one)

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