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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5953 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've been researching HBD for the first time lately.

Question: Could acknowledging HBD have any underappreciated benefits?

Although there is valid concern that it may be exploited by bad actors (such as white nationalists), the idea that intelligence being genetic (and therefore outside our control) could potentially reduce stress for Black Americans.

No more nagging from conservatives about pulling your bootstraps.

Not nearly enough effort, nor sufficient evidence or argumentation for the topic. Don't post like this. No, not even when you roll new accounts.

Maybe I just don't understand HBD but does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture? If not then there's still plenty of room for nagging.

does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture?

Not necessarily, but if you were looking for an excuse to give up, it's a fantastic and instant argument-terminating justification to do that.

Of course, it's worth noting that literally everyone accepts HBD on a who-whom basis; group-level biological differences are the current go-to justification to discriminate against men and anyone under 25 in the same way they were used to excuse racial discrimination 50+ years ago.

I believe the easiest counter-argument is that using scientific racism/sexism/ageism HBD to do discriminatory things has a dysgenic effect on that population; if you treat all a group's members to slightly below their average, it means that any individual with an objectively positive deviation from that average is not rewarded for that as strongly as they would be if the background assumption was that they were that capable in the first place, so the stupider members have less competition for resources (this same argument can be easily made for redistributionist policies in general, by the way).

Sure, this is complicated by the fact that financial/material success and odds of reproduction are inversely correlated- and the dysgenic effect of that might very well cancel out the eugenic effect the above should create- but I've never seen anyone seriously try to link the two, much less argue that's a global maximum for everyone involved. (The fact that "just tolerate the bad behavior so that the good ones get ahead enough to spur change" isn't costless, and the fact that yesterday's and today's death cults inherently cannot bring themselves to reward any reproduction, complicate things even further when it comes to whether one should over or under-subscribe to HBD.)

if you treat all a group's members to slightly below their average, it means that any individual with an objectively positive deviation from that average is not rewarded for that as strongly as they would be

this is complicated by the fact that financial/material success and odds of reproduction are inversely correlated- and the dysgenic effect of that might very well cancel out the eugenic effect the above should create

The actual problem with your line of thinking is that the post-Civil Rights level of preferential treatment (disclaimer: I hold that blacks in the US are, ceteris paribus, treated preferentially) did nothing to alleviate black dysgenics which surpassed white rate half a century back already, compounding the ability gap.

Does discrimination exacerbate dysgenics? I could just as well spin the opposite narrative, both in the manner you've suggested and by pointing to generic social-darwinist logic some Philosemitic people use to explain the excellence of Ashkenazim. In any case, the US is roughly a century removed from even beginning to craft policies with natural selection dynamics in mind.

HBD in its modern form can be traced to much-demonized Jensen's 1969 article "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?", which explicitly addressed cultural interventions that are informed by the reality of innate differences, instead of progressive nostrum that is throwing ever more money and white guilt at the problem and political power to their feet.

I have suggested one additional hy­ pothesis concerning the developmental rates of Level I and Level II abilities in lower and middle SES groups, as depicted in Figure 20. Level I abilities are seen as developing rapidly and as having about the same course of development and final level in both lower and middle SES groups. Level II abilities, by contrast, develop slowly at first, attain prominence between four and six years of age, and show an increasing difference between the SES groups with increasing age. This formulation is consistent with the increasing SES differences in mental age on standard IQ tests, which tap mostly Level II ability.

Thus, ordinary IQ tests are not seen as being "unfair” in the sense of yielding inaccurate or invalid measures for the many disadvantaged children who obtain low scores. If they are unfair, it is because they tap only one part of the total spectrum of mental abilities and do not reveal that aspect of mental ability which may be the disadvantaged child’s strongest point— the ability for associative learning.

Since traditional methods of classroom instruction were evolved in populations having a predominantly middle-class pattern of abilities, they put great emphasis on cognitive learning rather than associative learning. And in the post-Sputnik era, education has seen an increased emphasis on cognitive and conceptual learning, much to the disadvantage of many children whose mode of learning is predominantly associative. Many of the basic skills can be learned by various means, and an educational system that puts inordinate emphasis on only one mode or style of learning will obtain meager results from the children who do not fit this pattern. At present, I believe that the educational system— even as it fal­ teringly attempts to help the disadvantaged— operates in such a way as to maxi­ mize the importance of Level II (i.e., intelligence or g) as a source of variance in scholastic performance. Too often, if a child does not learn the school subject matter when taught in a way that depends largely on being average or above average on g, he does not learn at all, so that we find high school students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could easily have learned many years earlier by means that do not depend much on g. It may well be true that many chi­ldren today are confronted in our schools with an educational philosophy and methodology which were mainly shaped in the past, entirely without any roots in these children’s genetic and cultural heritage. The educational system was never allowed to evolve in such a way as to maximize the actual potential for learning that is latent in these children’s patterns of abilities. If a child cannot show that he “understands” the meaning of 1 + 1 = 2 in some abstract, verbal, cognitive sense, he is, in effect, not allowed to go on to learn 2 + 2 = 4. I am reasonably convinced that all the basic scholastic skills can be learned by children with normal Level I learning ability, provided the instructional techniques do not make g (i.e., Level II) the sine qua non of being able to leam. Educational researchers must discover and devise teaching methods that capitalize on existing abilities for the acquisition of those basic skills which students will need in order to get good jobs when they leave school. I believe there will be greater rewards for all concerned if we further explore different types of abilities and modes of learning, and seek to discover how these various abilities can serve the aims of education. This seems more promising than acting as though only one pattern of abilities, emphasizing g, can succeed educationally, and therefore trying to inculcate this one ability pattern in all children.

Part of the problem is that was integrated into the curriculum, as far as I'm aware, just without attribution. Education increases in rote learning and falls in g-loading (and simple IQ requirements), which narrows achievement gaps, technically – at the expense of people with «Level II abilities».

I'm not sure if this happens on the primary school level, though.

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HBD in its modern form can be traced to much-demonized Jensen's 1969 article "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Achievement?"

I'll have to give this a read sometime, thanks.

Part of the problem is that was integrated into the curriculum, as far as I'm aware, just without attribution. Education increases in rote learning and falls in g-loading (and simple IQ requirements), which narrows achievement gaps, technically – at the expense of people with «Level II abilities».

So would the ideal be a two track system which allows for the level I path without removing the option of level II style learning for those who are able for it? I wonder if this is how it works in Italy, I know they divide their highschools into academic, technical and vocational paths.

I think this is what naturally happens in practice with tracking – and in fact Jensen's two-tier conceptualization is too rough.

We just need to extend tracking downward and make it universal.

I mean you could at least get a reasonable cutoff where you can say "we gave this our best shot, no more improvements by throwing acculturation at the problem". Whereas blankslatism demands infinite sacrifices.

Maybe I just don't understand HBD but does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture?

I would hope so. It is often overlooked that conservatives also adhere to the blank slate theory, but they attribute societal issues to factors such as education, families, and perceived laziness, rather than systematic racism allegations as is commonly associated with the Left.

Maybe it would get both sides to shut up, lol.

That's what I was thinking Thomas Sowell's Culture series of books (Race and Culture, Migration and Culture, Conquests and Culture) is a good example of this.

My understanding is that the big thing HBD proponents hope for is that it wouldn't end cultural solutions to inequality, but to change the moral valence of such solutions. It's the difference between "we should implement a societal solution because the playing field is naturally uneven" and "we should implement a societal solution because people are tilting the playing field".

Well, the obvious one is that if you acknowledge your weaknesses, you can better address them. For example, we all agree that boys are generally more aggressive than girls, and therefore benefit more from special instruction to control their anger.

As a hypothetical example, lets say you had a race of green people who were biologically adapted to utilization of violence, corporal punishment, and emphasis on the spoken word. If you wanted green people to have better quality-of-life outcomes in a technologically advanced liberal society, you would want to place special emphasis on teaching green children to suppress their emotional intuitions in favor of liberal platitudes. (I.E. Sticks and Stones...)

That is not, in practice, how it works out- New Orleans(but not local) blacks(but not Louisiana whites broadly) are widely viewed as a lost cause even by relative liberals involved in the administration of Houston because of the stereotype of them as green people.

American society has a hard time accepting innate inequalities in the first place. Take race out of it. Everyone understands that some people are stronger, smarter, healthier, etc than others. The "best" idea we came up with to deal with it is some variation of, "from each according to ability, to each according to need." Which isn't even that great an idea because it removes motivation from the equation and it means that if someone isn't getting what they need, it's considered the fault of someone who has ability but isn't chipping in out of greed.

Our second best idea is just to ignore it and pretend that success is a matter of virtue. A lot of our fables expound on the virtue of being smart, crafty, etc. But if intelligence is also just a matter of luck, where does that leave us? What virtues can we improve through culture/external forces and to what extent? What ideals do we want children to strive for which they can realistically improve on?

The thing that I would like to see as a society is intelligence being decoupled from morality. We seem to treat intelligence as something achieved through hard work and stupidity as a moral failing. While intelligent people often also work hard for success, many intelligent people are able to get by with less effort than someone with moderate intelligence. We need to decouple the idea that intelligence is equivalent to diligence or that stupid people "deserve" to be stupid.

This does not mean that we should expect or wish for equality of outcome between stupid people or smart people. I cannot imagine a society where that would work or even be desirable. There will always be high-consequence roles where you want the smartest person in charge, intelligence will always have an advantage in competition, and tying compensation with outcomes appears to lead to the best outcomes.

That said, I think our society has removed a lot of guardrails for stupid people while also adding a bunch of extra unnecessary pitfalls. Things like going from an extended family model to a nuclear family model to a single parent model has removed a lot of support that stupid people would have benefited from, while also leading to worse educational outcomes for children. Making cheap dopamine devices available to everyone over the age of three creates a time and opportunity sink.

HBD will only become NBD if we can figure this one out first.

Black Americans are not particularly stressed in the first place; and their problems are not explicable by being stressed out, and accordingly worries of liberals about their potential mental anguish as a result of some scientific paradigm change are on weak footing, and might just be projection born out of inability to conceive of other minds generally and engage with black people specifically.

On top of that, Science has shown that

Blacks and Whites tend to base their self-esteem on different domains and that the tendency of Whites to base their self-esteem on the approval of others provides a partial explanation for the Black self-esteem advantage.

In other words, white=cringe, black=based, in a pretty rigorous technical sense.

Accepting HBD as a valid explanation would have the benefit that, at least, such misconceptions would stop being instilled in the consciousness of Americans, generating unproductive guilt and mental disfunction among liberal white women, likely suppressing fertility and driving up antidepressant prescriptions. It would be an interesting focus area for Effective Altruists to explore, should their therapists allow it.

I do wonder if effective altruists are missing cognitive enhancement as a neglected area considering they're concerned with economic growth.

They might be, but the optics for the quick option are bad- amphetamines are generally illegal unless you convince a doctor you require them to function, and unlike weed, it's not something half the population is already using under the table.

It's understood that they're a treatment for mental illness and that doesn't have the same connotations as "now I can focus for 8 hours", and encouraging widespread use honestly might be a bad idea because if that happens you've created (a limited form of the) Deus Ex problem and it's something you might eventually have to take advantage of or else be left behind in work or school... so even if it's found to fuck with you in other ways you functionally won't be able to stop.

Technically speaking, tobacco does this too, but as far as I can tell widespread nicotine use is more anti-anxiety than anything. Still, the greatest human technological achievements were made when smoking among the US population was at an all-time high, so...

The underappreciated benefits is that: if HBD is true, then "invisible racism that everyone holds" stops being a reasonable explanation for why certain demographics are under-performing. Acknowledging HBD is (in my opinion) critical to reducing racial bitterness that the mainstream media has been trying really hard for the past decade to inflame

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