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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."
If you wanted to prevent overfishing of shellfish, what would be the test that costs a couple hundred, takes a couple hours to administer, and screens out people who are likely to harvest shellfish beyond the legal limit? Apparently simply not letting Cambodians in the country takes care of 99% of the problem. Maybe it's genetics, or more likely some cultural thing, or perhaps a combination of both, but my guess is that few people know for sure why the Cambodians are like that. And there could be a lot of other things the Cambodians are doing that have an effect on society, but few people know about it, because when they are not picking shellfish there are no officers watching with binoculars.
Perhaps the reason why many people who express opinions about IQ being heritable also have other questionable opinions is that expressing opinions against progressive viewpoints tends to provoke in some people a hostile and aggressive response, and so only people with a certain fearlessness are ready to express such opinions, and this fearlessness allows them to disregard other people's disapproval in other matters also.
And perhaps the reason why some people holding progressive viewpoints respond in a hostile and aggressive manner when these viewpoints are contested is because they see themselves as being on the "right side", and the idea of them "being the baddies" is unbearable to even think about, and so an aggressive lashing out is the way to distract from these uncomfortable thoughts. This could mean that just asking for evidence will also put you in their eyes in the category of "punchable nazi", even if you don't bring up differences between racial groups.
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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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It's absurd because you said a single gene, but many genes differing in frequency between races, each with small average effects, leading to things like lower IQs, higher time preferences, and less disposition for empathy across different races, is not absurd.
Everyone in town would know this, so it wouldn't produce a race difference.
This can be due to racial differences in frequencies of genes that have effects on cognition. If they speak English, it's unlikely it's due to non-genetic factors; they would have the same knowledge environment, independent from genes, as other English speakers in the area.
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Do people not go harvesting shellfish as a commercial operation on Canadian beaches? It's fallen out of favour here now, but in my own town there used to be people going out on the harbour or out to the beaches when the tide went out so they could gather mussels etc. for sale.
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
Nobody round here is Cambodian (yet) so yeah, I think you can take it they're selling the shellfish on, well unless they're planning a multi-generational get-together of an enormous clam bake 😁
I'm going to go out on the opposite limb here and claim that Western (which is what we are really talking about re: whiteness) success is down to Christianity. A set of moral, ethical and cultural values that were imposed society-wide across a particular region for centuries shaped the mindsets and expectations of the inhabitants around things like the common good (keep the rules about over-fishing, and don't over fish because everyone should get their fair share, and a fair share is due because 'who is my neighbour/love your enemy/we are all children of God' etc.)
Asians and illegal fishing seems to be a predictable pattern anywhere there’s a large Asian diaspora population- commercial fish poaching on the gulf coast is a mostly Vietnamese crime and buying carp fished out of the trinity river(fish from this river is banned for human consumption due to water contamination) is, according to local legend, how Chinese buffets in Dallas get their fish.
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It wasn't always clear. The personal limit was something like 20 clams, and the guy who collected 789 clams was definitely selling them somewhere, but the guy who collected 64 above the limit? He told the officer it was indeed for a family feast but who knows.
64 does sound realistically like "we're having a big family get-together". My childhood to early teens was spent living in the country beside the sea, in an area where both my parents had grown up, and if some official popped up while we were walking on the strand and said "Oi! You can't pick those barnacles, there's a law about that!", we'd have felt "what the hell are you on about, my dad's family did this when he was a kid, when was there a law, besides it's the strand, it's open for everyone, nobody owns it".
I can get why your Cambodian clients would think "well this is some weird-ass Western nonsense" about that. We, ahem, may or may not have been in receipt of some mysteriously acquired salmon that was definitely not poached out of the duke's river from a friend of a friend in my youth 😉
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There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
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Molly Malone?
Not that part of the country, but yeah - certainly in my father's time people went picking shellfish on the beaches and shores, and up to my teen years I used to see them doing so even in the town harbour. It was always sort of "poor people food source" and not highly regarded, and with fears about pollution and big producers selling those kinds of items in supermarkets etc. it went out of style.
But your Cambodian friends doing it are not acting weird, they probably think the Canadians are the weird ones for "what do you mean you can't dig for clams?"
That's my best guess. I had a similar experience with dumbfounded Mexicans arrested for DUIs who seemed genuine in their bafflement "what do you mean you can't drink and drive?"
A huge problem with the new "refugee" populations as well.
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Re: drinking and driving, while that has finally become socially unacceptable here in Ireland - though people continue to do it, and now have added 'driving while high/stoned/under the influence of drugs' to the repertoire since now we're a modern, urbanised country - we'd have some local politicians defending it on the basis that (1) rural people don't have access to buses and taxis like town people and (2) it's often the only means for social outing for those guys to go to the pub once a week. Also, claims that such crackdowns would mean small pubs in rural areas would have to shut down.
Some of those chancer politicians' efforts from 2013 and 2019.
Drink driving impacts rural areas, drug driving impacts town/city areas.
Amazing
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I don't see why you present this part as a big gotcha. My first instinct is to say "that sounds great, let's do exactly that!" Bit of a problem with further thought though is that IQ tests mostly work because they're currently low stakes and there isn't much incentive to try to get good at gaming them. If you suddenly made them a pivotal load-bearing component on a very important and desirable thing, you'd get an overnight IQ test prep industry popping up, with all the existing tests immediately leaked to serve as practice material. You'd still get some signal, but I'm pretty sure months of practice are going to skew IQ test results. I'm probably still on the side of trying this, do it for a while and see how much of a problem the test prep ends up being.
This last part feels like it takes a bit of a swerve with the argument and I'm not sure I see how it fits in any total thesis for the post. It feels like it maybe should've been a whole second post. Looks like you're gesturing towards a wider pattern, I guess seen in The Cult of Smart too, that depressed IQ is gonna depressed IQ, even if it's environmentally caused, with all the expected bad effects for life outcomes, but progressives are basically just equivocating accepting this into full acceptance of immutable hereditary IQ differences and denying both with equal vehemence. It's certainly a possible angle of attack, but it seems that if you want to keep talk of the possible genetic group differences off the table, we'd still be mostly in the status quo where people will just aggressively go for the "genetic group differences are impossible, actually" angle, since arguing back against this is not allowed. They can then just go back to playing the endless game of claiming structural racism and use the noise from this to draw attention away from practical problems like what you pointed out.
If that's a big gotcha, it would only apply to someone who is using average country IQ as a pretext for pursuing the ulterior goal of limiting immigration for plainly racist reasons. I'm not claiming everyone who acknowledges the reality of IQ is hiding behind a pretext. Your point about gameable IQ tests is admittedly outside my wheelhouse, but the evidence I'm aware of regarding the SAT (itself just a proxy IQ test) tutoring according to Freddie deBoer indicates it has little to no impact (see bullet point 4).
It's not that I don't think people should research or mention group differences, I just don't think emphasizing their salience is going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. If you want a bothsideism from me, it would be that I believe the "because racism" camp on the left and "because genetics" camp on the right are too often used reflexively and with lacking evidence. The other problem is that even if the "because genetics" explanation brings compelling evidence (which definitely happens) it isn't actionable except to refute a "because racism" explanation that was already lacking supporting evidence. The one point I'd give to the "because racism" camp assuming it actually proves its claim is that at least it it's more likely to give you an actionable solution.
It suggests an actionable solution of researching gene therapies that increase intelligence.
Also, setting up some sort of baseline welfare state and somewhat paternalistic social institutions instead of engineering society with the assumption that everybody could train themselves to perform a well-paid knowledge work job and consistently make rational personal decisions if it weren't for moral failings like laziness, and that the people who don't manage that deserve what's coming to them.
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I believe that regression to the mean is highly supported by observations and data when it comes to the children of recent immigrants. There are also other measures of HBD besides raw IQ, most obviously in the tendency towards aggression and violence.
Of course HBDers would probably still agree to this plan if it was an option on the table, but this discussion is heavily suppressed by the enemy. Real racists aren't HBDers and they believe that group differences are a downstream affect of their superiority, and not the central aspect. You'll hear about this narrative because the enemy needs to exaggerate the evil racist boogeyman.
HBD is a counter-ideology to the enemy's ideology that blames racism. Raising the salience of group differences is both a necessary precursor and the result of the spread of HBD ideology. Bringing in the facts to crush the enemy with facts and logic (/s) is a way to survive and immunize. Otherwise what other options are there to refute the enemy?
Trace suggested I preemptively address this but I couldn't take this argument seriously. The first problem is that it's explicitly moving the goalposts by conceding that a high IQ immigrant might be ok, but concern might still be warranted due to a hypothetical risk regarding their kids. The second problem is that the only method of properly estimating someone's "mean regression potential" (there might be a better word for this equilibrium) would be measuring a sufficient sample of their ancestors, which at just 3 generations (completely made up threshold) would mean data from 14 ancestors (2 parents + 4 grandparents + 8 great-grandparents) across 75-100 years. This is obviously impractical, but the further you stray from this the more you're on speculative ground. Simply assuming that "country of origin average" as a sufficient proxy for "mean regression potential" is definitely the most practical option, but it's still highly speculative and also flattens whatever variability may exist within a country's subpopulations or ethnic groups. The final problem is the number of hypotheticals this concern is predicated upon. "We should pre-emptively prohibit individuals who might have a low regression to the mean potential from immigrating because they might have kids who might have lower IQ which might also be lower than native average IQ" isn't very compelling.
@SwordOfOccam I admit I was caught off-guard by Walt's answer in the moment, but this was my genuine understanding of regression to the mean. I welcome your critique.
I've already addressed this in the post. It just doesn't make sense to say "gee I wish we could test for IQ directly but leftists are whining too much so I guess my only choice is to ban all immigration based on country averages oh darn". If the first option isn't available because of [reasons], neither would the second option!
It's not a hypothetical, but a real and proven phenomenon.
Why should we take anyone? You might say that the racist option is off the table, but you still haven't articulated any coherent argument why your proposal is a good thing, rather than a lesser evil. In the meantime it's an uneasy alliance between real racists and HBDers. Everyone in favor of restricting immigration at all for any reason is an ally against the enemy that promotes total unrestricted immigration.
To put it another way, if real racists got what they want in regards to immigration, HBDers should prefer it over the current situation. If HBDers get what they want, then real racists would prefer it over the current situation. At this point I'll take anything. Between gasolineing all of the illegals to instituting IQ tests, I'm on board with whatever option is available.
Nobody* is insisting on only a single approach. This is an obvious strawman.
Regression to the mean is undeniably real and conclusively proven, I'm not disputing that. It can happen as fast as within one generation but it's more reliably observed the more generations you sample. What I described as hypothetical was limited to 1) whether this immigrant was going to have any kids at all and 2) assuming they did, in which direction and at what magnitude would any regression take place in their kids. It's possible for children to have an IQ higher than their parents', lower but still higher than the national average, or lower than both their parent's and the average.
You don't have to take anyone. My proposal is only relevant for people who are against immigration because of low-IQ concerns. If you have other reasons to oppose immigration, then clearly my proposal is of no relevance.
It's only a strawman if I'm mischaracterizing someone's position. My criticism only applies to those whose position matches my description of "insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits". If their position is different from what I have described, then clearly my criticism would not apply to them.
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I’m not sure myself whether the genetics of regression to the mean would matter if one was specifically selecting on high-potential individuals of any given race.
For instance, I’d rather select a 115 IQ/otherwise upstanding non-white citizen than some 100 IQ ne’er-do-well from say Norway. After all, you can have “good stock” and “bad breeding” within families of the same race and society. The white underclass is pretty shitty and I wouldn’t want to try enlarging it.
But that’s contingent on being selective.
Mostly, I got the feeling you didn’t know what regression to the mean could mean in the podcast, though I figured you had to know the concept and I would expect you had heard it used in this context before. I got a flash of the “per capita” insanity, but since I’m pretty familiar with your writing and we generally agree on things (not open borders, not sure what else) I was just surprised by it.
I think you have very good points against white nationalism, but in a “punching down” sort of way. There are smarter ones out there, like say Steve Sailer. To your credit, you are straightforward that you can’t pass an ITT, but you did kinda go full lawyer mode instead of letting Walter narrate sufficiently to explain the worldview he used to hold.
It strikes me as strange you can’t pass an IIT in that affinity for one’s kin and preference for similarity in appearance and belief is highly traditional. White nationalists tend to point out examples like Japan and Israel (the latter being more complicated) as their preferred type of country. This is extremely common in Europe too. Obviously, “whiteness” is hard to define in any robust way, but these types have a pretty strong “I know it when I see it” vibe, not strict logical definitions.
That’s my biggest complaint about the episode actually. The podcast would have been better with more structure, with the two-on-one dynamic especially. Honestly I’m impressed you all stayed really chill with how freewheeling it was.
Can you elaborate what you meant by "per capita" insanity? Given what I wrote above about regression to the mean, do you identify any deficiencies in my understanding of it? I'm more than happy to being corrected here. I've never heard of the regression argument before in response to the immigration topic so I was just surprised in the moment, but I'm also very much not immersed within the race & IQ rabbit hole.
I'll try to give a very brief synopsis on my approach here, but a full dissection will need a much longer effortpost. The reason why (if I had 6 hours to record) I would start with the question "how do you know who is white?" would be for exactly the same reasons I would ask, for example, a diehard believer that hot dogs are sandwiches "how do you know what is a sandwich?" So many common categories we regularly use are unconsciously accepted, and generally there's no reason to crisply demarcate their specific boundary lines because...who cares? Things change when the category itself is elevated as the central organizing focus. An answer from the hot dog guy would probably be "well I look at the food in question and I check to see if it has a central savory ingredient that is surrounded by two layers of bread" or whatever. Once the hot dog guy establishes his own boundaries for what food should be included in the venerated sandwich category, my next question would be "why is inclusion in the category important to you?"
Going one level up in complexity from sandwiches, I've observed an insanely high overlap regarding how white nationalists describe being white, and how transwomen describe being a woman. I would go through the same process, I'd want my interlocutors to explain in their own words how they determine how someone fits into a category that is clearly very important to them. Once they establish these boundaries themselves, the next phase of questioning would be to discern whether they care about the underlying traits or about achieving membership in a specific category. My overall thesis is that membership is sought out because of the background associations attached to the category. This is why for many transwomen it doesn't matter how much you compliment their outward expression or whatever, they'll still deem it a failure if they are not slotted into the 'woman' category.
I haven't figured out the best vocabulary to satisfyingly describe what I think is going, so bear with me. First, imagine a generic list of generally positive traits broadly associated with "woman" (caring, graceful, nurturing, beautiful, etc). Some of the dynamic I suspect is happening with the trans discourse is a sort of delusion that if someone succeeds in checking off enough superficial traits associated with "woman" (long hair, make-up, dress, high-pitched voice, etc) then that person also be successfully associated with the broader constellation. Something like "if I have long hair then people will slot me into the 'woman' category, and if I'm in that category then I'll also be beautiful by definition".
I suspect something similar is playing out with people's attachment to race. There are an infinite number of ways to slice "preference for similarity in appearance". It could include anything from hair style, hair color, cheekbone shape, neck length, gut size, toe nail shape, overall height, overall weight, beard length, etc etc. Picking one dimension and reifying it as the central organizational filter strikes me as arbitrary, but it makes sense if what people are after isn't the trait itself, but rather the formidable constellation of associations linked with the trait.
That's all terse given the subject matter, and not communicated in the most elegant manner. But let me know if any of the above makes any sense.
Per capita https://twitter.com/UsingLyft/status/1773872358421332266
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Simultaneously, I completely agree with your breakdown of “white” being difficult/impossible, but also I can totally understand what the white nationalists aspire to.
Oh man, I just assumed you knew about Twitter “per capita discourse.” I don’t even know where to start. How about fire alarms chirping?
At any rate, what you wrote here seems fine. It was just in the podcast where I was perplexed about your reaction.
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Per the recent podcast episode, I’m not sure he understands “regression to the mean.”
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That, I agree, is the important thing, and the emphasis on IQ is not helping the real problem we need to tackle: why are some groups apparently predisposed to being aggressive and violent? Stupid but law-abiding is better for the whole society than smart but criminal.
That is obviously the Latino versus black debate. It appears the IQ gaps are relative small but the criminality eventually seems to disappear in Hispanic populations but not black populations.
Not to blame it all on culture, but it honestly does have an effect if you're a population that has been seen as less capable to the dominant one. There's an awful strain persisting in Irish society of (1) lack of appreciation for built heritage, now ironically the chickens are coming home to roost because our tourism industry wants to find selling points but we've mostly trashed the Georgian and other heritage due to the 70s-90s building booms (2) what is called cute hoorism, where you look out for Number One, do down others, and generally don't give a damn about the common good.
A lot of that is due to the colonial past, where the best way to succeed was to play up to the Handy Andy stereotype of the broth of a boy, a bit dim, but brave and hardy, even if boastful and foolish. Of course, such people weren't fit to govern themselves, being in the same position as children, but that is why the superior Anglo-Saxon/British stock was placed by God over them as natural rulers.
While that flatters the vanity of the rulers, what it engenders in the ruled is a culture of being two-faced, of putting on a performance, of pretending to be (and maybe really being) dependent, incapable, and harmless. If you can't be held responsible, then you can't be blamed either, for drinking, fighting and stealing. It's corrosive to the national character to be liars, hypocrites, and thieves.
And I think a lot of that happened in African-American culture (the Stepin Fetchit caricature) and is made worse by being exploited, by white liberal guilt and black grifters; why not steal and rob, you're owed reparations? Why teach kids to 'act white' where that means 'don't be lazy and criminal'? The worst of "they can't help it, the poor things, it's their nature" and "we are owed for the wrongs done to our people" combining to make future generations worse than they need to be.
In that case, I don't much give a damn about relative IQ or is the average population score lower, I do care about "is misbehaviour being punished or is it being reinforced as 'our culture'?" If your height of ambition is to be a rapper or drug dealer, does it matter if you're a smart drug dealer or a stupid one? It's still bad all round for you, your community, and the future.
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I don't really understand this: don't progressives loudly complain about a number of downstream effects? Poverty, crime, incarceration, lower educational attainment, drug usage - the same sorts of things that their opponents blame on their genetic character? I don't understand how "the racism has consequences" is defeating to the blank-slatists.
I should've maybe been more explicit that progressives only complain about mutable negative effects, like poverty. I've never encountered a progressive who has been willing to assert anything similar to "[race] has lower IQ and higher impulsivity, because of [environmental factor]". The filter tends to be on that first clause. I'm aware of only one major progressive scientist who acknowledges the heritability of IQ and other traits but her name escapes me at the moment.
But is it really "self defeating" for progressives to not acknowledge (or not believe in) immutable negative effects? The mutable ones are plenty bad, and they think those effects can be addressed with their preferred policies. I'm not sure this is a sufficient argument against that.
My point is that progressives who are spooked by their shadow accidently spelling out the n-word have such an insanely high aversion to acknowledging the immutable negative effects that their own framework would logically predict, that it's even more hopeless to expect them to ever acknowledge the immutable negative effects if it comes from a field of study that they've already rejected and tarnished by association.
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Sounds like Paige Harden.
WOULD, btdubs.
Yes and yes
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If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
That seems tangential to what I'm saying - one can claim that the poverty, crime, etc. etc. are independent of intelligence. I agree that most progressives deny that disadvantaged groups have lower intelligence - but they do agree that they suffer from the above effects, and attribute that to social factors like racism and other biases.
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This is not my observation. My observation is that progressives deny that the decrease in intelligence is intractable, and claim that it can be fixed for the next generation, if not the current, by removing the environmental racism.
In general, most of the people in the progressive bubbles I'm at do not act as if they get regular """NPC updates""", as people love to paint it here.
There was a researcher who got fired for citing research on the existence of the achievement gap.
There was a law professor who remarked that her minority students struggled. It did not go well for her.
The “fact of” is routinely denied and a firing offense in many jobs.
There is magical thinking here that is inconsistent on multiple levels. Progressives want to have their cake and to eat it too, in that obviously systemic racism and various inequities negatively affect minorities, but also acknowledging the effects themselves is racism.
“The next generation” idea has fallen out of favor now that we are multiple generations past the Civil Rights Movement. That’s a major reason “systemic racism” is such a popular concept.
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