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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
Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.
Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.
The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.
I'm not completely certain that's true. Actually I'd be shocked to learn that Olympic medalists averaged less than an IQ of 110 or thereabouts. Looking at the 2022 Winter Olympics, just to grab a quick example, some events were swept by Asians. Figure Skating, for example, was a near-total victory for Asians. The entire Men's singles podium were Asian, and the Team Event nearly so. Freestyle skiing also had a strong showing from China (three of six Golds medals), and South Korea did very well in Short Track Ski Racing. Similarly in the 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan and South Korea dominated the Archery events, China took silver in both Artistic Swimming events, every single podium in Badminton went to an Asian country, Japan took Gold in Baseball (to the embarrassment of my American chauvinism we only took Silver), and Japan and China took several medals in Boxing.
There’s a bit of a confounding factor on a lot of Olympic sports— which is that especially for those you mentioned, being able to compete requires a lot of training at very early ages. Winter sports have a second cost sink— the equipment and venues needed to train for these events is expensive. Thus for a lot of sports, your ability to even reach a level of competition where it would be worth training you to compete in the Olympics requires tens of thousands of dollars and years of very focus training. And thus if you’re not of reasonably successful stock, including intellectual ability, you won’t get the opportunity to try.
Boxing, running, basketball, soccer and other similar sports are light enough in equipment that it’s at least plausible that you could be from a working class family and be able to try.
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