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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.
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.
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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