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The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
This is probably the crux of our differing views on the history-teacher thought experiment. The way I see it, for better or for worse, "HBD is noxious pseudoscience on par with flat-Earth and ancient aliens" has been successfully taught to a vast majority of the population. That is, in fact, what HBD advocates complain about. So long as it's the case, it's not a random humanities teacher's responsibility to buck against that. We can't expect him to know that all mainstream geneticists in the country are participating in a vast conspiracy to suppress a genuine controversy, any more than it's his job to guess whether NASA is faking space imagery of the round Earth. If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
I'd want the serious history teacher to mark down the paper only if the argument that the Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta built it was truly bad. Which should almost definitely be the case, if we're in reality. If it is the case that, somehow, the student was able to form an argument based on the best available empirical evidence and best available analysis using the best available methods that was exactly as rigorous and fact-based as another student's argument that it was built by Egyptian slaves or whatever, then I'd want the history teacher to give that student the same grade. I don't know why you write "eloquent" in this example, when eloquence has almost nothing to do with the quality of an argument.
Perhaps my assignment of blame to the history teacher was more severe than is warranted. If it is indeed the case that the entire field of history (or humanities in general) is so biased that any typical history teacher can't be reasonably held to account for believing the bias, this speaks to even more horrific levels of incompetence in the entire field. What you're describing is a situation that's similar to what I described, but severely worse. As in, to refer back to my earliest comment in this thread, the situation in academia is even worse than the worst things that people here were criticizing with respect to ideological bias in academia and similar institutions.
What's unfortunate is, I think you're probably right on this.
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