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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I'm not interested in banning or demonizing anything.

What's the proper way to refer to race-essentialist people who explicitly use HBD as a fully-general explanation for all behavior and outcomes? As an example, this post from a bit ago:

We know what the root cause is for classroom indiscipline, poor nutrition, bad (cultural?) traditions, bad (parental?) literacy, unstable home life and one-parent households.

If people are smart and capable, they won't find themselves in situations where they're having more children they can support with unhelpful partners, won't have a culture glorifying crime, won't be illiterate, won't disrupt classrooms, won't create or maintain food desserts or fail to provide nutritious food.

...So that's a claim of straight bio-determinism, isn't it? It seems to me that these sorts of posts are most of the HBD posts I see, mainly because the more rigorous conversations got mined out years ago. Now, maybe my impression is wrong, and I think that sort of post is more common than it actually is because it stands out to me in a way more rigorous HBD posts don't. But this low-quality and wrong posting is what I'm actually objecting to, and not the rigorous version that confines itself to the evidence.

How about "your average far right mottizen with more concepts than sense"?

Although I may be unfair to them. Given the disconnect between how suppressed HBD is, and how scientifically well-supported it is, it’s no wonder that people try to “put HBD on everything”, just for the novelty. What other puzzling questions can be easily answered with something like HBD when the lies are exposed and the censorship lifted?

How about "your average far right mottizen with more concepts than sense"?

That's a possible option.

What other puzzling questions can be easily answered with something like HBD when the lies are exposed and the censorship lifted?

...This is the problem, though. The comment I linked is a person saying "it's all genetics", in response to a situation that we know for a certainty is environmental. Teachers used technique A, got good, verified results, but switched to technique B that gives very bad results instead, because the teachers find technique B more personally fulfilling. HBD has no plausible role in this conversation, but here it is anyway, because people find it easy and fun to apply.

Then when our grumpy friend drops the hammer on this obviously bullshit argument, which he predicted would be made in advance, more reasonable HBD people appear to interpret it as an attack on reasonable, evidence-based science.

If HBD leads to the proliferation of irrational, obviously bullshit racial hot takes, I think that's a problem. I think the best solution is to push back against those hot-takes, and the core logic behind them, and "put HBD into everything" is definately part of that core logic.

Sure, push back against those specific takes all you want. I have a problem with you saying things like ‘nothing good can come from [discussing HBD]’, not you taking apart flawed arguments. You'd immediately recognize your statements as indicating a wish to hide the truth if a progressive said it about one of your hobby horses.

I’m not going to condemn all hypergamy, cathedral, or anti-enlightenment talk (for example) because some take it too far (despite those concepts being a lot more dubious than HBD). We don’t even draw the line at things that are clearly false, so why here?

I have a problem with you saying things like ‘nothing good can come from [discussing HBD]’, not you taking apart flawed arguments.

...and part of the problem is that there's two different arguments getting conflated.

"Put HBD in everything" arguments are generally poorly argued, and often motivated reasoning. I don't like seeing arguments of this sort, because they're low-effort, unsupported and inflammatory, without actually providing anything of value.

"HBD is useful" is coming from the common assumption that HBD in the narrow sense is pretty clearly true, and then asking what we do about it. This seems like an entirely legitimate argument to me, but I hold that, practically speaking, there is nothing particularly useful you can do with HBD. Spreading it isn't going to resolve our racial problems, because they're already too far gone. I could be wrong about this, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to debate. Part of the problem, though, is that spreading "HBD is useful" seems to also spread "Put HBD in everything", both here and in the general population.

You'd immediately recognize your statements as indicating a wish to hide the truth if a progressive said it about one of your hobby horses.

I have a hard time imagining a symmetrical argument on my side that would fit the particulars, so this is hard to assess. I don't think it's true, though, because I don't see how anything I'm saying is properly understood as an argument to hide the truth.

This seems like an entirely legitimate argument to me, but I hold that, practically speaking, there is nothing particularly useful you can do with HBD

Why is HBD held to this impossibly high standard? A large majority, at least, of all political theories are false, what's useful about those?

Spreading it isn't going to resolve our racial problems, because they're already too far gone.

No offense, but this is your usual excessive pessimism. If nothing can be done, your way is just as pointless. From the POV of a guy who hasn't abandoned all hope, there's a good chance that publicizing HBD lowers the 'it's racist discrimination' pressure considerably. The truth is usually helpful in navigating the world.

'put HBD on everything' is to HBD as 100% environmental explanations are to well-supported environmental explanations. You're saying environmental explanations generally 'lack all usefulness' because you are annoyed by the blank state types, and legitimate environmental explanations 'help spread' crazy blank statism.