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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
I think the strong form of HBD as propounded by some - African-Americans are inferior, it's in their genes, nothing to be done about it, it's science - isn't true.
What I think we don't have yet, and buried under the genuine problems from racism and poverty and culture, is a fair assessment of the IQ of the general African-American population, and where their strengths lie.
I think it's accepted that, for instance, women are on more of a bellcurve than men for mathematical ability, so we're all clustered mostly around the middle. Men have more tails - a lot more stupid men but also a lot more brilliant men, relatively speaking.
So it could well be that the unique heritage of current African-American population is clustered around the middle of the bell curve - not so stupid, but also not so brilliant. This would explain why affirmative action of the "jobs must be awarded according to share of the general population, so if 25% in the demographics then must be 25% in academia, STEM, et." don't work out well; that does not mean there are no black geniuses, just that proportionately there are fewer than if measured against Asian and white population. So realistically, without racial bias, you would get (pulling figures out of thin air) 5 Asian guys and 4 white guys and 1 black guy in the Top Ten jobs, instead of "we must have 2.5 black guys so hire on the less able guys to make up the figures".
But since we still do have to grapple with the effects of racism and so forth, we're nowhere near a neutral measurement and data.
We have standardized tests and we've had them for almost a century. We can sift by poverty, even. At this point "racism and poverty" are pure cope and "culture" is a very thin reed. The mean is lower, it's not just lesser variability (which is somewhat controversial for sex; the PISA tests don't show it, for instance)
Okay, so even accepting that the mean is lower, I think culture does have a very large part to play. Given all the talk about polygenic selection and other interventions to increase IQ, intelligence on its own is not the thing that determines if people are more civil. Would it be better to be smart and vicious rather than dumb and vicious? For the smart vicious person, yes. For the rest of us, no. If you don't work on changing the surrounding culture to "hey, maybe we should have a sense of civic values and not accept that you can be loud, violent, and criminal in public with no consequences", then having smarter babies who grow up with "it is totally your right to swipe expensive goods off shop shelves and anyone who tries to stop you is committing assault and is a racist to boot" as their upbringing is not going to be an improvement.
It's probably that the aggressiveness also stems from genetics. Though I suspect the shoplifting is mostly culture. And yeah, that can be improved, but only if people in charge (whether black or white) insist on holding underclass blacks to the same standards anyone else is held to. Which isn't happening.
That's the tragedy. The fucking white idiots who go "Well, that's their culture" (and I see this with some white underclass in my own country, so it's not confined to black/brown people) ought to get the Lord Vetinari Mime School treatment.
Being loud and exuberant may be part of culture. Being aggressively loud, violent, and threatening in public is nobody's culture except criminals and scumbags. I know it's a meme to say "Democrats are the real racists" but the liberals and lefties who want to excuse Jamal from going to jail for fifteen counts of theft because, you know, it's society's fault and property rights are white supremacy really are being racist - they're saying you can't expect anything better from Jamal because, poor dear, he's stupid, ignorant, violent and criminal by nature, nothing can be done about it. So it's not fair to send Jamal to prison, he's not white, you can't hold him to white standards of behaviour because he doesn't have the intelligence, sense of conscience or self-control of a white person.
That's nonsense. Jamal is a thug not because of his skin colour, because there are plenty of white, Asian, and Hispanic thugs, but because a combination of never expecting anything more from him, never punishing such behaviour, and enabling it, means he learned way too early in life that he can be a thug and get away with it. Jamal may also be stupid, violent and criminal by nature, but again, plenty of white people like that too.
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The whole founding myth of our society is egalitarian. There is no world where one race is acknowledged as genetically inferior to another, where said race does not then see it justified to commit any number of terrible acts to tip the scales back in their favor. If HBD is accepted, violent crime often becomes the most logical decision since thanks to genetics you're better equipped for that than most normal work, unless you've got a knack for sports or something. You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.
There is no "changing the culture". Either we keep the equality myth, or we go back to segregation. There is no theoretical America where the "inferior" believe they are inferior and still continue to politely play along with our scheme. This entire myth from the start has been a willful concession. We need it to function.
Well yeah, if you're telling an entire people "Not one single person of you is smart enough". The Irish got this too, including our friend the infamous Mr. Lynn, about how dumb they were (90 IQ?) and then, gasp, suddenly amazingly in just one or two decades we'd jumped up to being "just as smart as the English". Wow, how could that have happened?
If HBD could be neutral on "Some of you are just as smart, but it's not in the same proportion of the general population as the Asians, who are better than the whites, who are better than you on the raw figures", then we might get somewhere. Jason is going to college, but there will be five Jasons, not fifteen as demanded by proportion of general population, because the top level means only five Jasons as against fifteen Guos as against ten Chaunceys. Not because of racism, because of the bell curve, which does not mean telling an entire people "none of you are good enough".
The expectation "everybody goes to college", because governments saw this as the easy way to raise people up out of low-paying jobs - get a degree, get a white-collar career, be successful in life - has done damage to everyone.
And as a start, we could drop terms like "inferior". 'Not as smart on an IQ test' doesn't mean 'lowly dog whose only purpose in life is to shine my shoes and carry my water'. If you're going around thinking of yourself as "superior", that's a nasty trap. You're not virtuous enough not to be corrupted by it, or understand what the luck of the genetic draw meant for you.
Equality isn't a simple fact based on evidence. It's an ideological cornerstone. Sure, HBD isn't claiming some people are inferior to others in some kind of holistic sense -- what you lose in some area, you usually gain in others. But intelligence IS the golden stat for success, more than ever before. If you're unintelligent, charisma can make up for that. If you have neither, good luck.
The way our current ideology works is that anyone who's failing can blame those in charge for holding them down, it's a consolation. There is no way we can fly directly in the face of that.
I would say not charisma, but being a decent human being. That includes a sense of civic and personal responsibility, self-esteem (not in the "I'm great just as I am" sense but in "I'm a human being and I should live like one, not a wild dog" sense), and being willing to keep the rules and work hard.
A 90 IQ person who is naked and screaming out of their mind on drugs in the public streets is much more visible, and much more of a problem, than the 90 IQ guy who gets up every morning and washes his face and goes to work sweeping the streets. Telling the 90 IQ people that "you can't help it, poor darling, so go ahead and smash car windows to steal stuff to sell for your habit, and be loud and violent and aggressive in public" is a hell of a lot worse for them, for us, for everyone.
Telling 100 IQ people the same thing is just as bad. Switching up the laws so they can steal up to $950 and it's a misdemeanour, and then you don't even bother prosecuting misdemeanours, because of the systemic racist incarceration injustice of the past and present, is even worse for everyone - it hurts the people trying to live respectable lives in that community as well as people outside it. Yes, you should have expectations for Jamal and Cletus and Jose to be respectable citizens, not pass them out of school even if they've never learned anything, then tell them if they don't get into Harvard this is discrimination and that means they can do what they want since that's 'your culture'.
The Irish long had a reputation as ignorant, drunken, violent idiots. The Catholic Church gets a lot of stick for trying to play Victorian respectability games and impose a moral agenda on the country, but it would have been ten times worse if we had been permitted, caressed, and encouraged by American and British middle class to upper class liberals that "Poor dears, you can't help yourselves, this is your culture, go ahead and live like that, don't even bother 'acting Anglo' by trying to get sober, get a job, and not fight in the streets".
Sure, I agree with all the points you make. That's how it should work. But the dynamic we've (unfortunately) evolved into is a very unhealthy, unrealistic one that works like so: Americans who are not white males or asian males are actively being held back by those in power. There is a glass ceiling put in place via systemic discrimination, and this ceiling is the only thing preventing black men, hispanic men, white women, etc. from making exactly as much money and holding exactly as much power (as a group) as white men and asian men. As the actual, genuine glass ceilings that limit these so-called marginalized groups continue to disappear, this ideology loses its ground and becomes axiomatic: The glass ceilings are disappearing, yet marginalized groups still underperform, which is proof they're being systemically oppressed because all groups are equal. It actually means the racism and sexism must be even worse than we expected, because all those barriers were removed and yet these groups are still underperforming. This is the source of all the systemic racism stuff, it's like dark matter -- it must exist somewhere or the theory falls apart.
Equality of birth is one massive concession, man. We have conceded so, so much to these people and they still aren't happy. Imagine what happens if we say screw it and affirm HBD: total chaos. No, that's never going to happen. What might happen is something suggested up-thread; something like reparations based on HBD, where we start handing out cash to "marginalized groups" on the basis of their assumed oppression, but really it functions as a "sorry you're not smart enough for the white collar world" type thing.
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What "entire" people? The most black-pilled anti-woke "IQ fits these shifted normal distributions and has unavoidable effects and measures all forms of intelligence and is entirely genetic" theory still only has about a 1SD racial difference, so it makes predictions like "there are only 6 or 7 million African-Americans smarter than the average white person" (
41e6*normcdf(-1)in Octave) and "there are only 2 or 3 million African-Americans smarter than the average tech or law worker" (41e6*normcdf(-1.6)). Admitting that those numbers aren't nearly as high as we'd like them to be, so even if we observe them we should really be open to other explanations ... would that be the end of the world? Let's imagine that the most black-pilled pro-woke "Everybody needs role models who are specifically of their own ethnicity" theory is also true, simultaneously ... and we're still generally left with millions of good candidates! Not with the full ten million we'd have liked from a population that size, but it's at least an adequate fallback, no? Even at the top of estimates for college professors an IQ-based meritocracy would give us tens of thousands of high-end African-American candidates, way lower than we'd have liked, but still enough that there'd be no need to tell smart African-American kids aspiring to quantum physics research "try Foot Locker"; you could still just tell them "oh, you mean like those guys? great!"I get what you mean. The problem is your average Joe will never see it that way. This is ideology we are talking about, its function is borderline spiritual. Only one standard deviation means nothing to the masses, this would be interpreted as an open declaration of war.
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It's worn through, and we're not getting it back. To maintain its pretense requires pretending such a level of malice on the part of whites (and Asians!), and concomitant punishing of that "malice", that it is no longer acceptable either.
OK, fine, then we shoot them. It's not a good solution but it's better than tearing the country to shreds because they can't accept reality.
When it came down to it, the Boers notably chose not to save their position by genociding the Kafirs.
America will not make a different choice, let's not be stupid here.
One group defending itself from another group trying to "flip the table", even with guns, does not necessitate genocide. You can shoot the attackers until they stop attacking, and then stop shooting.
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