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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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HBD is important because it's a refutation of the myth that low black and indigenous achievement is due to racism. It's also a refutation of antisemitic conspiracy theories about high Jewish achievement.

You point out the effects of genetics denialism on education, but it goes far beyond that. It also results in nonsensical ideas about and policies to address underrepresentation in cognitively demanding occupations, earnings and wealth gaps, incarceration rates, and even a literal blood libel about the causes of racial disparities in police shootings.

Note that although race gets all the attention, there's also class HBD, i.e. differences in average genetic potential for academic and professional achievement that break down along class lines, which is the main reason why even within races we see that children of successful parents tend to do better in school and earn more than children of poor parents. Because of genetics denialism, we get pants-on-head stupid discourse about "mobility" premised on the ridiculous idea that intergenerational income elasticity can be entirely attributed to rich parents buying advantages for their children and poor children having no chance to get ahead.

A lot of people, mistakenly believing that HBD is racist, nevertheless don't buy into the idea that racism causes racial achievement gaps, instead attributing the gaps to culture. There's probably a grain of truth here, but the very small effect of shared environment on adult IQ in twin studies is hard to reconcile with SES or culture explaining more than a small portion of the gap.

Aside from the fact that it appears to be wrong, I don't like the fact that this hypothesis adds insult to injury. Why blame people for something they can't help.

As for the dysgenic effects of welfare combined with low fertility among the cognitive elite, I do worry about this and would certainly be in favor of, e.g. sterilization of convicted violent criminals or making welfare eligibility contingent on use of long-term birth control, but I'm counting on genetic engineering to save us from the long-term consequences of the dysgenics program the government has been running.