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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.
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.
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'."
Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/
It was noted by Jensen:
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.
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