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HBD is very broad or like a spectrum. It can mean definite racial cognitive stratification, or that individual differences are inherently innate, but with race playing a smaller role. Even if some groups score higher on average, there is considerable overlap of the distribution of scores, so we cannot generalize at the individual level as easily, which is what Charles Murray himself said. Even if HBD does have flaws, it still seems to be better than the alternatives at explaining society.
Given how high stakes the LSATs and SATs are, who doesn't put maximal effort? Yet some people get way higher LSAT scores than others even though everyone is trying hard, suggesting innate differences still matter even if incentives also matter. Probably 100k+ people annually apply to top law & med schools, top colleges; I am sure most of them are putting in maximum effort on high-stakes tests such as the LSAT, GRE, ACT, SAT, MCAT, etc.
Part of the problem with a lot of HBD-dunking, such as by Taleb, is they fail to control for individual preferences. So in aggregate, correlations between innate qualities and outcomes are low, but you are not accounting for individual preferences, not that genes do not matter. Most >120 IQ people do not work at a high-paying tech companies, but having a high IQ is highly predictive of who gets those jobs.
Neither I nor the person who did the study were making a claim about the SAT, we were considering a setting where people fill out surveys for pay on the internet.
I didn't say effort was the determining factor, I said that it mattered, with natural variation in effort covering maybe slightly less than 10% of the variance (so if you go from slacking to max effort, maybe that gets you a bit more than a standard deviation of score).
Much of individual preferences are heritable too, but yes I agree that group-level differences are much less "noisy" than individual-level differences.
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