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The Happy Birthday Question
in which I write about HBD
The Rogue Fishermen
Back in my early public defender days, one of the niche misdemeanors I'd be periodically appointed to was for unlawful fishing. Typically the offense took place at a beach, involving someone harvesting dozens and dozens of shellfish beyond the allowable amount while a Fish & Wildlife officer hides in the trees with binoculars meticulously counting how many individual clams went into what particular bag. Out of the dozen or so cases I've handled, every single defendant —100%— was a Cambodian man.
Since the general population is not 100% Cambodian (let alone Cambodian men), a class of criminal defendants that is exclusively Cambodian is an undeniable example of a disparate outcome. We're missing a ton of vocabulary precision on this issue, so please bear with me but when I say race, I'm using it broadly to include ethnicity and basically any related phenotype. And when I say racial discrimination, I'm using it to mean discrimination based on race itself rather than discrimination on a collateral trait that may end up with a racial correlation.
Now if you want to pull a Kendi here, the only explanation for racial disparate outcomes is racial discrimination. This is always patently facile logic because 1) it doesn't do the work[1] in ruling out alternative explanations and 2) often requires accepting some questionable premises. For unlawful fishing you have to first assume that members of every race breaking fishing laws at exactly the same rate [citation needed], but racist officers use their binoculars not just to count clams but to ascertain who to single out for arrest. Or maybe it's racist prosecutors writing up indictments who scan through the police reports and dump any with non-Cambodian names into the wastebasket. Or maybe a combination of both.
I cannot accept the "because racism" conclusion unless I see strong evidence supporting the above premises, and because I haven't seen this evidence, I have no reason to accept the conclusion. See how easy it was? But if I reject this proposed explanation, does that mean I have my own explanation for the disparity? Nope! And crucially, I don't need one. Some of the contraband shellfish quantities involved seem way too high for just personal consumption, and so we wondered if the motivation was selling their haul to some less-than-scrutinizing restaurants. Maybe word spread among the Cambodian community that this was an easy scheme with lagging enforcement. Maybe they lacked the cultural understanding that a government would ever be interested in stopping you from picking up natural bounty off the ground. Or maybe individuals within the O-M122 haplogroup carried a particular genetic mutation which made them unable to resist the siren song of free clams on the beach.
I can't imagine anyone would ever endorse that last explanation, it's deliberately absurdist. The point stands; I don't need to hitch my wagon to any particular alternative explanation to reject the "because of racism" one, all I need to reject a theory is its own lack of supporting evidence.
Genetic Destiny
Genetics are extremely consequential. Our chromosomes hold an unyielding and elaborate blueprint that govern not just an overwhelming of who we are, but also of who our lineage could be eons into the future. Humans certainly exhibit a remarkable adaptability across a dizzying spectrum of environments and circumstances, and our infinitely more malleable cultural memetic evolution deserves credit for turbocharging our advancement beyond the confines of our languorous flesh and blood. But this demonstrable flexibility can never refute the harsh unyielding control our DNA commands over certain domains. If your assembly instructions includes a third copy of chromosome 21, you will have Down syndrome and, however much we might wish otherwise, no amount of nurture will ever reverse that nature. Such is life.
Just like any other organism subject to natural selection, humans exhibit differences from each other on a multitude of heritable traits. Evolution cannot occur without variability after all, and sometimes you end up with agglomerated clusters. For example, the sickle cell gene is highly prevalent among populations from Sub-Saharan Africa because it provided a protective advantage against malaria, which just so happens to be best transmitted by mosquitos, which just so happens to favor tropical regions, which just so happens to advantage higher melanin levels for UV protection in humans. Through this complex chain of coincidental correlations, you end up with the fact that having black skin is highly predictive of sickle cell anemia risk.
That humans exhibit physical differences, across both short and long timescales (whether lactose tolerance within 10 thousand years or bipedalism across 4 million years), is tediously and trivially true. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that the same natural selection process that created such physical diversity would somehow treat mental traits as untouchable. Or as they say, evolution is not relegated to only from the neck down.
The Pretextual Charade
Acknowledging the undeniable reality that humans exhibit biological diversity is the weakest and least controversial definition of what is euphemistically called human biological diversity, or HBD for short. There's nothing ever wrong — neither in principle nor in practice — with studying the kaleidoscope that is the human genome and documenting any apparent patterns. The problem is that the HBD label attracts roughly two different camps of devotees with wildly divergent aims.
One camp is best exemplified by my old economics professor and friend Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a principled libertarian and an earnest academic who believes that IQ is highly heritable and enormously consequential, beliefs that I myself hold just as fervently. Setting aside how amorphous and arbitrary racial categories are, I also believe there's likely some relationship between certain racial groups and average [insert your favorite cognitive trait].[2] The other camp is best described by Caplan himself:
Go down deep enough the HBD rabbit hole and you'll easily encounter extended mythology about how members of the white race on average are genetically predisposed towards everything from being on time to meetings, to democracy. Start with an arbitrarily-designated geographic line that is putatively about female nuptiality, but also more-or-less fits your list of favored European stock (sorry Ireland) and there's no shortage of just-so stories that you can assemble by spotting associations through Vaseline-smeared spectacles.[3]
But let's assume the truth of the most extreme version of the above: white people on average are better on every relevant conceivable metric that is conducive to a thriving society. Now what? The fixation on group averages rather than individual merit remains baffling.
Consider how the average male is undeniably significantly stronger than the average female. But while sex is indeed highly predictive of physical strength, it isn't determinative and inevitably some females will be stronger than some males. If you were screening for a job that required the ability to lift 100lbs, screening for "men only" would for sure be better than picking candidates at random, but it also means turning down the female powerlifter and ending up with a guy with cerebral palsy.
The closest I've come to encountering a coherent proposal from "group average aficionados" is on immigration policy, generally taking the form of blanket/severe prohibitions against immigrants from countries with low average IQ (or whatever). But if IQ is of such vital importance, why not just test for it directly rather than relying on a crude circuitous heuristic? I took an IQ test myself and scored extremely high,[4] so what do you gain by overlooking that in favor of the purported average of ~37 million people? The biggest practical point in favor of testing IQ directly is that while it no doubt remains politically unpopular within certain circles, there's no universe where "let's just ban countries with low average IQ" isn't even more unpopular. Setting that aside, could the blanket prohibition option potentially be justified on cost concerns? The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most widely used IQ test and costs around $100-$400 and takes 2 hours to administer. Meanwhile, the cheapest and most straightforward legal immigration pathway to the US is the K-1 Fiancé visa, which costs $675 just to submit an application. So I've seen nothing to substantiate this cost excuse.
Anytime anyone insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits compared to a high-resolution filter, you can conclude an unspoken motivation is at play. HBD offers a convenient mantle to don for any bog standard textbook racists looking for pretextual (read: fake) justification to hide what is fundamentally an aesthetic disgust they're too timid to be honest about.
The Omnipresent Allergy
If racial group averages shouldn't ever be used as the basis for policies, can raising their salience serve any other purpose? Nathan Cofnas is another "IQ realist" who openly acknowledges HBD's tarnished association:[5]
Despite that, Cofnas argues the race & IQ chorus needs to be amplified because he thinks it's the only way to refute the Blank Slate ideology that has been the foundation of "because racism" progressive ideology. Dickie Hanania — definitely no stranger to the HBD arena — pointed out several problems with Cofnas's mission which I echo completely, but I'll add an even bigger hurdle: Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview. I'll explain.
If you accept the institutional racism framework, various downstream effects must inevitably follow. If you believe that black mothers are systematically denied adequate prenatal medical care (because of doctors' unreceptiveness to complaints from black patients, geographic disparities in healthcare facility locations, implicit bias in medical training, and general economic barriers to accessing care) then wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems? If you believe that black families are disproportionally impacted by environmental racism (because polluting industrial facilities and toxic waste dumps are predominantly located near black neighborhoods due to historical zoning and discriminatory policies) then same question, wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems?
I don't know about you guys but in my naive understanding of the world, I would fully expect pollution and poor medical care to Cause Bad Things™️, including any number of lifelong intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders. You would think that acknowledging the problems that your proposed policy would solve would be the easiest thing in the world, but progressives consistently exhibit a very bizarre combination of presenting racial minorities as both uniquely victimized and materially unaffected. Freddie deBoer observed the same dynamic on the other side with affirmative action:
If institutional racism doesn't create any material disadvantages to minorities...what does it do? If you can't get progressives to admit that the thing they hate the most causes problems, in what world would you think they'll be more receptive to messengers uncomfortably associated with reviving the Fourth Reich?
IQ is real, genetics matter, and progressives are not going to be reasoned out of an ideology they didn't reason into. The way to jettison the Blank Slate fallacy isn't to dust off the racial group averages stats that are pretextually obsessed about by bona fide racists. Theories that lack evidence should die for exactly that, lacking evidence. To the extent there is a taboo against asking the "because racism" crowd to show receipts, break it.
[1] How ironic.
[2] I even hold the rare honor of literally having been physically assaulted by a particularly deranged heckler in public, who was furious that I expressed this belief in response to a question. Those who know know.
[3] The "woke" identarian left makes identical claims but uses an oppression framework as the scaffolding rather than genetics, and is the other side of the exact same coin.
[4] Ok in fairness it was a Buzzfeed quiz and the result I got was Jasmine, but we all can read between the lines and know what it really meant.
[5] Cofnas is still a soft collectivist about racial affinity, writing in the same piece: "That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you'll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it's natural to care about the fate of your people. Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions."
Response to the conversation you've been having here in general since I couldn't decide on a single sub-reply to answer:
This seems to be your main criticism, so it's an important one. I'm going to #include all of the prior responses to your top-level as context, so I'm assuming you can relate to the concept of 'regression to the mean' as something like 'measurement error'. An IQ test can tell us that a person is smart but not that their children will be. This is true and you seem to understand it. But it's also the case that there's a substantial amount of noise in IQ testing and an IQ test can tell us someone is above a certain threshold when they actually aren't, a 'false positive', in which case their children almost certainly won't be.
So with this in mind, an analogy:
You're in charge of purchasing nails for a massive new construction project. Millions of nails are required and they need to meet certain standards or else the structure collapses. The engineers factor in some redundancy and allow that some duds are okay, but no one's sure how many, exactly, so it's important that you be very careful.
Available to you are two brands, A and B. Both nail companies, A and B, produce some good nails and some defective ones.
Brand A is a domestic producer. It's been in business for a long time and turned out a pretty consistent product. In fact, it's been such a mainstay that the assumptions the engineers are working with are based on using these nails. About 10% are defective, but this is understood and historically structures built along these lines and with these nails stand up just fine.
Brand B is a foreign producer with shoddier craftsmanship. Neither the materials nor the manufacturing process are as high-quality. 90% of their nails fail to meet your standards, but 10% do! And they're cheaper, too.
Now, on the face of it you'd be insane to even entertain the idea of buying any nails from brand B. However, due to internal politics, there's strong pressure from the executives to maintain the fiction that all brands are of identical quality. Maybe many of them 'happen' to be major shareholders in Brand B. And it turns out that there's a way to test the nails, individually, and it's so fast and cheap that there's no reason at all not to test every single one. So you turn to your co-worker and say, "Look, there's a lot of pressure to buy from Brand B, and we can test the nails, so why not just do that?"
This is actually kind of a weird thing for you to argue about on the face of it, because the execs have made it clear they won't approve any testing in the first place. (Again one can't help but wonder at their motivations). But your co-worker additionally expresses reluctance because of one more consideration: testing error. 10% of the time, for whatever reason, the nail test returns a positive (desirable) result regardless of whether the nail is good or not. 90% accuracy is still pretty good, you argue, but he's not so sure.
He points out that if you apply that test to Brand A's nails, 99% of the nails used will meet the standards. But if you apply the test to Brand B's nails, almost half of the nails used will be garbage. Can the structure withstand that? Who can say? Oh and by the way both of you and everyone you care about is going to live in it and if it collapses all is lost.
The correct thing to do here isn't to treat both brands as a priori equal and go based on test results. The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that. What non-political justification could you possibly even have to screw around with Brand B in the first place?
As such I think you should drop this criticism.
If you find someone saying "We should buy from Brand A and not bother testing", the criticism would be a bit more valid, but at least they've got historical performance on their side, which is worth something.
EDIT: P.S. the end of the story is the executives insist that you buy mainly from Brand B without any testing, the structure begins to list badly, the executives fly off to their villas elsewhere, and everything you value is destroyed. Possibly you could move to another company before that happens but it seems that somehow they're all making the exact same mistake.
Thanks for putting numbers on your analogy. How much of a quality delta between the two brands of nails would your conclusion remain true for you? I understand that a 10/99 difference is too wide for you to bother testing the other brand, so at what point would you change your mind?
Respectfully, in this analogy, given the stakes and uncertainties involved, I don't think there's ever any justification for bothering with the inferior pool in the first place.
Of course, people aren't nails. So let's abandon the analogy.
At times it can make sense to import specific individuals - not classes of them - who have demonstrated utility, distinguished themselves, and so on. The bet being made here is that even if his kids are all rotten the good this specific person will do in this generation probably outweighs the future harm of his progeny. And instead you might get lucky and get a lot out of his kids, too!
The risk is greatly increased by a welfare state, of course. If his offspring are so economically unsuccessful that they can't afford to reproduce much or at all, the problem solves itself, which is how so many historical states managed nearly-unrestricted immigration. Come, contribute, succeed -- or read the writing on the wall and try elsewhere!
But the question I wonder about, and which I would very much like to be able to put a number on, is what percentage of a population can be non-conforming immigrants before institutions break down. I don't have an answer there and don't even feel really comfortable guessing. Different institutions have different capacities for this sort of thing, the collapse of one can snowball into others, and so on. The matter is playing with fire by its very nature.
By the way I'm the person you've been discussing this with on discord -- no intent to mislead you about that, in case you hadn't noticed. This seemed the better forum for this format of discussion.
So the instructive lesson of your analogy is that when you're buying nails, you should pick the brand with the higher quality reputation instead of testing each individual nail. Sure, that makes sense. Now what? What was the point of building up an elaborately granular analogy spanning several paragraphs only to abandon the gratuitous detail as irrelevant? I don't get it.
Truly in awe at how you got there from "The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that."
No it doesn't.
Not only did I explicitly say something contrary to your apparent conclusion after laying out the reasoning for you, but your interpretation doesn't make any internal sense to begin with. At this point I have to think that you're not capable of understanding or you do not wish to understand[1]. Either way we're done.
[1] Inclusive or.
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