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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.

This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.

Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.

Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.

Erm, I think your links present a very clear alternative hypotheses. To quote the Vince Buffalo tweet thread you yourself linked:

On the Clark paper: correlation functions often decay over various distances (genetic, environmental, spatial, etc). Observing a correlation that varies over genetic relatedness is not evidence that the cause is genetic, since many other processes create correlations that decay.

Fitting a parametric model for the rate of decay, as he does, is one way to check the plausibility of a model. However, many correlation functions have very similar forms. A good fit is not evidence of the right causal model.

His model has 2 degrees of freedom: heritability (h²) and corr. due to assortative mating (m). The genetic trait correlation function ρ(k) = h²((1+m)/2)ᵏ will fit data from many different non-genetic processes very well, which we know would also be decreasing over distances.

So, my take is the dataset is interesting, and yes the "genetic" model fits. But so would many, many alternative models that aren't in the paper. That the genetic model fits is not evidence genetics is the cause of the good fit. Many models with 2 df fit decay in correlations.

To put it bit more bluntly: If I measure how many Christmas postcards people send to each other (during 90s when people sent Christmas postcards), I would be surprised if I did not observe excellent fit for a genetic model with two free parameters for correlations of much postcards people send to each other: parents and children send more frequently postcards to each other, siblings quite and grandchildren and grandparents quite often , uncles and aunts less, cousins and other more distant relations less, decaying more and more as relations become more distant. It is not due to genetics causing postcard-activity (in a Platonian state, where children won't know their parents, sending postcards to them would quite difficult indeed!). It is because we intentionally organize ourselves socially in a way that closely mirrors our genetic relationship (for various good reasons), barring some random accidents.

Or here is what Turkheim says:

"Except for wealth"? Isn't wealth the alternative hypothesis? And that is what the modeling does: observes surprising persistence of family effects out to fourth cousins, for which there are at least two hypotheses: environmental family effects (C) and assortative mating (AM). /1

The models don't include C, by fiat. They just show that if you are willing to push AM up high enough, you can get a genetic model that fits the data. Kind of like doing a twin study, observing rDZ=rMZ, and concluding that it fits an additive genetic model with enough AM. /2

Assortative mating covers a huge amount of territory here, basically lumping all stratification processes-- genetic, environmental or phenotypic-- under a single rubric with an implausibly high value. Ignoring family environment is justified post hoc. /3

If you had told me a year ago that 2023 was going to bring a wave of maximalist genetic explanations of social structure, I would have said you were alarmist. Now? In a progressive era of surprisingly thin GWAS findings? But here we are. More soon. /end

To be scientifically more convincing, the study would need is a setup that could falsify a genetically determined environmental explanation. Lack of it is quite surprising because the object of the study is social status in the UK. Social status of king Charles is hereditary, yet not caused by any action attributable his genes themselves. I am surprised hereditarians would put so much stock on this study -- there are much better other evidence for a hereditarian positions, such as GWAS studies which usually attempt to control for this sort of thing (usually including principal components of genotype as covariates in regression models, which doesn't necessarily always work convincingly but probably results in directionally better estimates than no control at all). The Clark study, despite the impressive N, is quite weak evidence: if there is other more convincing evidence (that can rule out genetically-correlated social environment), then it is only confirmatory observation. If there is no such evidence, it won't convince a critic on its own merits.

When I claimed that there had been no substantial disputes, I was referring to the fact that every criticism I had seen to that point had presented alternative mechanisms that could be at play without testing any of them or seeing if they were addressed in the paper. There’s a big difference between hypothesizing various different factors that could affect the data as opposed to seeing if one of them is actually a valid alternative cause.

Today, a rebuttal that met those criteria was posted. I can’t speak for how damning it is of the Clark paper, but wanted to acknowledge its existence and share.

Update: Cremieux has replied to this rebuttal and found it wanting.

Yeah I was a little taken aback by the lack of attention paid to wealth in this. He says wealth has a stronger implied generation to generation persistence then his other metrics of social status but he doesn't show whether or not wealth correlations changes as a function of genetic distance like he does for the other metrics.

He does show that wealth is asymmetrically hereditary in that the paternal grandfather predicts wealth but the maternal grandmother does not. If social status is produced by wealth, and wealth is inherited by sons then wouldn't we expect other status measures to be less correlated with the female line than the male line?

I read this paper a while ago but I think the comparison group for a lot of their metrics isn't the average person but people who were similarly wealthy in 1850 or 1860 but who owned fewer slaves. I remember reading it and being confused as to why the descendants of people who experienced a large negative wealth shock ended up better off then people who were similarly wealthy but didn't lose as much wealth.

For what it's worth the authors of that paper reject genetics as an explanation and think it has to do with sons of families that lost slaves ended up leveraging their families accumulated social status to marry much richer than average.

I skimmed the paper and there's something I don't understand, I'm not an expert on this so hopefully someone can explain it to me.

Fisher has equations that describe how for a given intensity of a assortative mating and a given degree of relatedness how much phenotype correlation we should expect. Clark compares how different measures of social status correlate for each degree of relatedness (sibling, cousin, grandkids, second cousin etc) and finds that the correlation declines for each generational step in the way Fisher's equations describe. That genetic distance predicts the change in correlation in status metrics is strong evidence that there is a genetic component to status.

Clark says that because the rate at which status outcome correlation declines with genetic distance is constant over time there has been no change in social mobility, but doesn't the initial correlation matter? If I look at Table 2 Parent Child Higher Education status correlates at 0.53 from 1780-1860 and at 0.37 from 1860-1919. That looks like it could be a decline in the heritability of educational attainment but Clark says that the important thing is that the change between parent-child and cousin-cousin educational status correlation fits Fisher's equations in both data sets. He says that because social status measures decline with genetic distance at the same rate rate in all these different time periods there's been no change in social mobility. But wouldn't a society with a 0.8 correlation between say, siblings home values, have less social mobility than one with a 0.2 correlation even if they both declined at the same rate with genetic distance?

Not necessarily, because house value is a proxy for social status that depends on its contextual weight. If London is burnt to the ground, or becomes much more expensive, the relationship between social status and house value changes, but the underlying heritability of social status remains the same. If everyone had cheap houses, it doesn’t mean that the society has more social mobility, just that that variable doesn’t capture status any more. Note figure 3, where wealth has much weaker maternal heritability compared to occupational status and education.

Yes, the relationship between social status and a particular metric of status can change over time, literacy is a better indicator of social status in 1600 than in 1990. But I don't think we can assume everytime a particular metric of status becomes less heritable it is because it reflects status less, though I'm also not sure how you'd test whether a metric is genuinely measuring status.

It’s a pretty good prior tho, no? With an N= all British people 1600-2020 you could rank order each person per generation by Clarks’ variables, derive a temporal weight for each, then see who is at the top and bottom, and the rank of their relatives. As is, Clark has to do a lot of estimations, tho he does try to justify them. The alternative hypothesis would have to find a reservoir for status outside of money, occupation, or education, which seems plausible but I’m personally drawing a blank for possibilities.

It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.

Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.

Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.

The analogy falls short of conveying the rich irony of reality because, as Faulkner said, «The past is never dead. It's not even past» Or Panasenkov: «It's the same slogans; moreover, it's even the same people». Nothing has changed since the 1950s; piling new deboonks on a doctrine unshaken by the fall of Lysenkoism is an exercise in futility.

Obligatory Maynard Smith:

Why is it that Hamilton, having had the sort of essential notion, really ran with it, really made it an important part of our biological understanding, whereas Haldane had the notion and did nothing with it, I understood the notion and did nothing with it?

And I do think I have to put it down to some extent to political and ideological commitment. Hamilton had the advantage over us in a sense, a) that he was passionately interested in social insects and knew something about them and wanted to explain them. He saw them as a problem to be explained. And he had clearly no reluctance in his mind about the idea that notions about the evolution of altruism in social insects might possibly have a relevance to humans. Neither Haldane, nor I, knew anything much about social insects at that time, though Haldane did become interested in them later.

But more importantly, we at that time – and we're now talking about '56, '57 I suppose when we were discussing this idea – if you look at it in the context of where Haldane publishes it in an article in New Biology, it's very much in the context of trying to understand human behaviour and human altruism and people going out and winning the VC or joining monasteries or what you will.

And neither he nor I at that stage were at all willing to entertain the notion that such behaviour would be anything other than culturally determined and influenced. We were, I think, very reluctant, as Marxists would be, to admit that anything genetic might influence human behaviour. And I think that it wasn't– we didn't say consciously to ourselves «this would be un-Marxist so we won't do it». I mean, that's not the way that the mind works. But I think it was a path that our minds were not, so to speak, prepared to go down in a quite almost unconscious sense, whereas Bill was very prepared to go down it. And he also had the natural history background and knowledge to enable him to go down it, which we both lacked.

And so what I'm really trying to say is that to make big breaks in science, which Hamilton did, it's not enough to have the technical understanding of some technical point. You've got to have the… it's got to fit in with your world view that you should pursue this road. And I don't think it did for Haldane and myself at that time. It would have done later.

Maynard Smith, of course, was the archetypal Anglo communist professor; but also a genuine intellectual, capable at least in principle of deep self-reflexion and contemplation of ideas (this is clear enough in how he speaks). Most scholars continuing the good fight against bigoted facts today are social – indeed, oversocialized – insects in comparison. Like this. «If U get eugenic, i'll fight U.»

Could it be because Twitter is a shithole with next to no incentives for reasonable debate?

I don’t even disagree with your hypothesis. The HBD battle lines have been drawn for vibes-based and sometimes historical reasons. But goodness, number of retweets is an abysmal proxy for valuing academics! Making numbers is not well correlated with making sense. The fact that this guy isn’t getting retweeted says that his commentary isn’t useful as a bludgeon.

Compare COVID discourse, which was dominated by tweets hamming it up for the audience.

With dogma like this, the cultural victory condition is not to win the debate it's to have no debate- to debate is to lose even if you win the debate because you make something an issue that is supposed to be a non-issue for the dogma to work. There was the same dynamic of the Christian x Internet Atheist debates of the 2000s. It didn't matter who won the debate, it mattered the debate was happening, and that portended something significant.

The smart move for someone who wants the dogma to persist is to not signal-boost Turkheimer, it's to ignore him because there is no debate, it's a non-issue is the only stable state for such dogma.

HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.

By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?

Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.

The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.

By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?

The world’s second most powerful country is run by avowed Marxist-Leninists as a one-party state by a Leninist vanguard party; Marx and Lenin’s writings are taught as fact in its schools, its political elite are often true believers, many of the aesthetics (eg. socialist realism in public art) of Marxism-Leninism remain the default there and so on. That they embrace a limited form of capitalism (so did Lenin with the NEP, by the way) doesn’t change that.

As said by others, China is not a Marxist-Leninist state in anything but name.

Key among the tenants of Marxism is a theory of history, where capitalism is but a step on a path that goes like this:

  1. feudalism

  2. capitalism

  3. socialism / dictatorship of the proletariat

  4. communism.

Communism being the end state where property and money are no longer necessary.

Yes, the USSR backtracked slightly from socialism->capitalism during the NEP years. This lasted for what, like 5 years? A temporarily pause until Stalin asserted control, and it was after the NEP, during the 1930s that Communist beliefs were strongest in Russia and worldwide. Useful idiots in the U.S. even moved to the Soviet Union to join the wonderful utopia. The vice president of the U.S. was a fellow traveler. Many westerners thought that centrally planned economies were inevitable, even desirable. That is what belief looks like.

China, on the other hand, has been capitalist for 45 years now. Where is the path towards communism? Does anyone in China actually think things are headed in that direction? Of course not. To quote Deng, "to get rich is glorious".

China is not run as Marxism-Leninism in any meaningful way.

England is closer to theocratic dictatorship than China is to Marxism-Leninism.

Wealth inequality existing doesn’t mean that China isn’t run along Marxist-Leninist lines. There was always inequality in the USSR, between jobs, regions and people.

Wealth inequality is hardly the only mismatch from claimed Marxist-Leninist.

You can avow, believe, and teach something all day long. That doesn’t mean you are that thing.

China is about as Marxist-Leninist as the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. If you want to “no true Marxism-Leninism has ever been tried” me, then go ahead, but in a real sense yes the CCP is a successful Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and minor alterations in economic doctrine over the last forty years do not change that fact.

no true Marxism-Leninism has ever been tried

Well, that is true, but only in the trivial sense that the ideology is incoherent, and therefore it can't actually be tried. If China was truly MLM, then they would at least be on the path towards the withering away of the state and the transition to a classless, moneyless society - they would at least have it as a goal. But plainly the leadership of China does not view this as a desirable goal in any sense. And I don't blame them - it's not a coherent goal, it's not something that can actually be achieved.

I don't know what level of centralized state planning it would take for me to say that China has a different "economic system" than the US. I haven't thought much about it. I'm skeptical of the idea that we can meaningfully speak of different types of economic systems in the first place - I'm skeptical of the idea that there was a distinct "feudalist mode of production" for example. The US, like China, also has government management of the economy and public-private cooperation. It strikes me as a difference of degree rather than kind.

If "Marxism-Leninism was a spent force by the 1980s" means anything, then I think it would mean something like "by the 1980s, even the true believers recognized that the global socialist utopia was not going to materialize". And I don't think there are any true true believers among China's leadership or intelligentsia today. True believers in central state planning, sure - but Marxism never took central state planning to be its ultimate goal.

The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.

I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.

The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.

It always has been. I realize you are mostly referring to racial HBD theories, but an HBD regime would equally be earthshaking for the poor, the working class, the failures more broadly. The majority of people in America who have reason to dread an HBD regime are white, because the majority of Americans are white.

If genetic talent will out, as the study purports to show, then if your family is still in the mud they probably deserve it, right? Affirmative action might in a few cases explain why someone is an engineer instead of a doctor, it never explains why someone is working retail instead of getting a real degree.

If genetic talent will out, as the study purports to show, then if your family is still in the mud they probably deserve it, right?

Alternatively, your riches are not because of hard work or dedication but simply because you won a random genetic lottery... so why do you deserve all these good things in life due to blind luck? It's a case that socialists can make just as well.

Wealth sure, status no. Beyond a bare minimus of comfortable survival, redistribution rhetoric has never taken the form of "Yes the ruling class is smarter, stronger, harder working, better looking, but still!"

Humans intuitively think smarter better humans deserve more reward.

I’d argue there are a massive amount of people in the west who would benefit if hbd became widely accepted.

It’s actually one of my main arguments for supporting affirmative action at elite schools. It provides a rational for Harvard to let in black students with lower scores. Since the college trains a large part of the elites it’s necessary for a percentage of the school to be black so that the John Kerry’s, Bush’s, et al who will govern the community have exposure to black voices. Even if due to hbd blacks won’t be presidents often the president still needs to understand the community and govern them. This argument escapes the logic of using affirmative action to undue “structural racism” but instead shows the needs of elite education. Perhaps, Harvard doesn’t need to be 14% black but it certainly needs a significant black community. I doubt Bush interacts with many blacks especially as equals on his ranch.

Furthermore, right now we spend a ton of money trying to educate the black community so they can go into successful careers and undo past “racism”. If people accept that inequality won’t be solved with more education or better “programs” suddenly a lot of money would be freed up to just give lower ability people direct cash.

If I’m a lower IQ person I think I’d prefer $4k a year to buy some consumer goods and have no one just me for it because well I’m low IQ and untrainable for the upper class than have the government spend $30k a year trying to make me an accountant. I’m bored at school anyway. And a cheaper $10k a year education that makes me semi functional and checks every year sounds great.

Even if due to hbd blacks won’t be presidents often

I'm not sure this is true. Democracy is weird. Being president doesn't require exceptional intelligence. Looking at our last 5 presidents (Clinton, bush, Obama, trump, Biden) none of them had stellar test scores. I think Obama was the host of the 5 but even then his LSAT was below average for Harvard law

I'm not sure how elites having exposure to rich Nigerians during their college years is going to help them govern African-Americans later on.

Slave-descended Americans are vanishingly rare at Harvard.

"If we were to count the number of [Generational African American] students at Harvard who were descended from enslaved people, came from low-income backgrounds, first-generation, four grandparents descended from enslaved people, I feel like that number would be so low — like, maybe one person."

And of course, actual African-Americans are just one group that is basically non-existent at elite universities.

What percentage of Harvard is white, working-class, non-legacy, non-athlete? I'm sure there are examples. But it's extremely rare. Along with slave-descended blacks, this group is incredibly underrepresented at Harvard.

Is Barack Obama not African American? I’m not saying you need to go pull anything you can out of Baltimore or the southside of Chicago. I had a wealthy black neighbor who ran a mutual fund his kid went to Stanford. Tilting the scales a bit to get the upper middle class or current elites seems fine.

I know it’s a meme that they just pull upper class internationals to meet their quota. They should bring in internationals at elite schools but I’m not sure how far this goes from meme to literally 13% of Harvards 14% black population is an African prince. They shouldn’t do that. But those types should exists at elite schools too. Something like 5% American black mostly upper class with 1% the best you find lower class and 2% international would seem fine for making a place like Harvard a broad community.

The whole Nigerian thing doesn’t make sense to me. It’s population is only 5x the size of Americans African population, not biracial, and I doubt there schools are as good as ours so I have trouble seeing how so many of them could be qualified above the domestic population.

No, Barack Obama is not a central example of an African American.

As you probably know, Barack Obama is biracial, with a black father and a white mother. His father was not descended from slaves, nor was he present in Barack's life. Barack Obama was raised in white culture. As are many of the black people at Harvard.

Harvard practices a racial essentialism that would make a KKK member proud. The 1/8th black adopted son of two white hedge fund managers is black in their eyes. Eminem, on the other hand, would be considered white.

That said, I'm perhaps a little out of my depth here. I read a couple articles about Harvard's black students. The quote about nearly ZERO students at Harvard having 4 slave-descended grandparents really struck me as crazy, considering that almost all African-Americans would be in that category. The black student at Harvard is not a central example of an African-American, even an extremely successful one.

But I would welcome actual data about what percentage of Harvard's "black" students have at least one grandparent descended from slaves.

What does "HBD" actually entail? It's a term you never see used outside of this forum, afaik. All I know is that it stands for human bio diversity and means that you take seriously the findings that all sorts of tests like the SAT etc show in terms of group differences? What else?

It's not just IQ but that is certainly the lightning rod of the idea. The kernel of the idea is just that there is no mystical force that means all the obvious variation we see in individuals should cancel out at any given population level. This variation has a pretty obvious genetic component, it is not surprising or controversial that the children of tall people are usually taller than the children of short people. That the children of smart people are smarter tend to be smarter than the children of dim people.

Now there is as much variation in what HBD believers think we should do with this observation as there is variation among those who recognize tidal forces and one doesn't even need to accept it as anything more than a reasonable hypothesis to bring certain political practices into question so most of what you're observing when you see HBD discussed are a degree of two of separation from the immediate point because there really isn't all that much to say about the observation until someone comes in to call everyone who believes it despicable racists.

My guess is hereditary biological determinism...

I admidettly only scan over this material but the best examples are Askhenazi Jews are inherently smart, in it's worst guise Black people are inherently stupid.

As far as I can tell, the low-IQ version of this argument starts with a racist mindset that then uses a naive attribution of IQ to genetics, and constructs an elaborate just-so story to justify any inequality of black people as a natural consequence of the world.

My guess is that the high-iq version has better arguments and data but is just another elaborate just-so story like evolutionary psychology or blank-slate cultural constructionism or marxism or whatever other thought system that lacks sufficient epistemic humility and likes to draw long-bows.

The inquiry is fine and there may be the beginnings of a genuine science taking shape but easy answers are a lot more fun to post than the complexity of the real world.

  • -14

My guess is hereditary biological determinism...

I admidettly only scan over this material but

This is the definition of a low effort post.

I think your take is terrible and that if you don't understand a topic you shouldn't opine authoritatively upon it, but something you said piqued my interest.

I admidettly only scan over this material but the best examples are Askhenazi Jews are inherently smart, in it's worst guise Black people are inherently stupid.

I'm really, REALLY curious to hear a bit of elaboration on your thought process here. Why is "Ashkenazi jews are inherently smart" the best example, and "black people are inherently stupid" the bad example? What is the precise differentiating point between those two positions that makes one the best and one the worst?

It's a potentially narrow, fairly homogeneous grouping at least for some of history. It's more tractable for study. 'Black people', which at that level, not so much-it would include a plethora of overlapping lineages.

This is not a useful objection, as "black people" can be usefully narrowed to "black American descendants of slaves" (ADOS) -- which informally is often what is being talked about anyway. It is an interesting question about whether sub-Saharan Africans (who do form a useful if large cluster) or e.g. Nigerians (or Igbo or Yoruba) or Congolese are also different, but in the US it's ADOS which are normally most relevant.

Certainly it's an ugly idea that an identifiable group might be on the average significantly less intelligent than the whole population average, but just because it is ugly does not mean it is not true.

Out of curiosity.

What is «elaborate» or «just-so» about smarts being heritable?

Smarts can be hereditable for sure, but in daily life there's lots of types of smarts in terms of success for environment, and there's not just genetics, there's epigenetics - culture can affect genetic expression.

Epigenetics has fuck all to do with cultural effects on gene expression actually, or with almost anything else. But okay.

More comments

Spent a minute trying to find a charitable basis on which to respond to this, but —

Can't remember the last time I saw someone so casually dismiss an entire concept while openly admitting that he doesn't even know what is being discussed and can't be bothered to spend five seconds at least googling the acronym.

It took you so much longer to write that! And you're so comfortable assuming that HBD-proponents only hold their views because of tawdry character flaws. When you do make it to google maybe look into "projection (psychology)" as well.

I'd thought you were a troll but it looks like you've been around a while?

One of life's mysteries, I guess. Like what 'HBD' means.

It was provocative I admit and I welcome harsh criticism of such a lazy post. But I have read some of the posts here and I stand by my gut feeling of a lack of sufficient nuance for the topic.

As far as I can tell it traverses the full complexity of human complexity - genetics, epigenetics, phenotypics, brain science, interaction of culture with genetics, study design, statistics, intelligence measurement, long history, short history, local history, global history, evolutionary biology, education, development...

Ie, partitioning off causal effects based on aggregate numbers on IQ across partly socially constructed population categories feels 'fraught'. I'd engage with it more (currently reading Charles Murray) if it wasn't for the fact that most posts don't seem to show the slightest glimpse of epistemic humility or acknowledgement of the gaps, difficulties in causal analysis.

But it's an intuition - I could be way off, can you point me to something enlightening and I'll make a start on the topic. I'm picking this would need about 1000 hours of research /thinking as a starter given it's complexity.

Yeah, no, the presumption of good faith is gone here. You do not have the attitude of someone interested in learning and I won't be snookered into wasting more time on you.

Perfect example of using "nuance" and "complexity" to cloud up an issue.

When you are dead, you don't know about it, it's just hard for others.

Same issue when you're dumb.

– deep Russian wisdom a meme stolen from Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais wisdom

A major implication of this is that, even if you are able to provide perfect equality of opportunity, groups will still have different outcomes because of their differing inherent ability. As a result, for example, cognitively-demanding (and high-status, high-compensation) professions will never reflect the distribution of groups in society; instead they would be occupied mostly by members of groups with higher ability. The alternative to this is to weigh the scales: to hire based on some attribute other than merit alone, which many find to be unfair.

And these "good" professions are just one example - you would expect to see this phenomenon in every area of human endeavor where ability comes into play.

There are issues associated with what you mention that bother me about the complete anti-HBD stance in the general public. Let's say that groups do not have the same attributes or inclinations on average for higher education and highly cognitively demanding work. Yet most people want "equity". No one wants to hear anything different than "everyone is the same" or a complete non-debate. And let's say that equal opportunities are given. The results are inevitably going to end up skewed due to hereditary (and cultural) reasons. And, given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly. Racism must be the culprit. Professors who were simply doing their job well will be accused. Some will speak up and get cancelled. Others will tip the scales so that their results don't appear "racist". Dumping more qualified students out and including less qualified ones. So there will be false accusations, and dishonesty will reign for others. The grifters who make their living off the existence of systemic racism get to justify their positions. Not to mention the fact that some people who don't have the abilities for doing a demanding job well will get those jobs. Might be dangerous in some cases. And it might be hard to get rid of them, due to the fear of accusations. I wouldn't want my neurosurgeon being an ass-covering, entitled, 100 IQ person.

Right, what you're describing here are major elements of the pro-HBD position. Most people on this forum, including myself, agree with you about this.

Be sure to consider as well the nature of the opposing viewpoint. Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness. The idea that some people are disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own but only through an accident of their birth, strikes them as being unfair. I agree that it is unfair, though it's unfair on a sort of cosmic level, not in a way that should affect who becomes a neurosurgeon for instance.

But there is a worthwhile question to consider in it, one which I think Freddie DeBoer touches on at times: if there is a group of people who are natively less intelligent, does that mean they are destined to have worse lives? Is it right that they should have worse lives? It is important to bear in mind that intelligence is not equal to humanity. I can understand why, when you see one group of people having lives which appear to be worse in many areas, one would feel called upon to try and help that situation and correct it. But as you can see in the real world, when this desire is also motivated by false premises, it can lead to injustice too.

If there is a group of people who are natively less intelligent, does that mean they are destined to have worse lives? Is it right that they should have worse lives?

We accept this for other groups. For example, we accept that people from the Congo are probably going to have a rough go of things compared to Swedes. People born with deformities are going to struggle. And what of the extremely ugly? Why are we not guaranteeing them sex and partnership? Do they deserve it less than the beautiful?

How does one who wants equality deal with these questions? There are two ways.

  1. Yeschad.jpg. We need to institute a totalitarian society to remove all inequalities, whether wealth, national, or genetic. Rich people will be taxed and money given to the poor. No borders. Fat chicks on the cover of every magazine, and beautiful people deformed. Communism but for everything.

  2. People can be unequal, but groups can't. It's okay that some people are stupid, fat, and ugly. But it's not okay for a group to be these things. It's very important that all races are equal, because race is the most important thing in the world.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg

Equality is impossible. Doubly so because HBD is true. But to fix the problem involves resorting to the extreme ideology of leveling or race-based nationalism. Better to just deny HBD.

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Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness.

Leftists are very, uh, fair in mainstreaming the adoption of this new concept of «equity». Because fairness is, of course, more about equality of opportunity, about being able to win «fair and square» – or to lose by the same ruleset and accept the loss. Unless we assume that biological heredity is part of the opportunity endowment that's supposed to be equal, this all works.

Of course, there's a big problem here. One can easily see such an assumption «we hold those truths to be self-evident…»

Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness. The idea that some people are disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own but only through an accident of their birth, strikes them as being unfair.

I think this is not a true general principle. They do not care about the ugly, or the short, or the introverted. Only certain disadvantages count. If they truly believed that principle they'd go full Harrison Bergeron.

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I think all this stuff about fairness is beating around the bush- the African American community is a little over 10% of the population with low and decreasing HBD potential and a broken culture which prevents them from making the best of it. Their TFR is actually above the American average.

You cannot have a 10%ish percentage of the population be a community that’s just destined to mostly live shitty lives without getting a whole lot more mask off authoritarian than the USA is likely to be anytime soon. It’s very important to maintain the illusion that Jayquan and Lashondra have access to meaningful and aboveboard upwards mobility to prevent the entire community from making things a whole lot worse for the country’s social structure. If that entails a playing field that is not perfectly level, then so be it.

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At the same time, we can see how 'tax people with good traits to subsidize the reproduction of people with bad traits' might get us into real trouble. It's the humane thing to do right up until the whole system collapses under its weight and we're back to third-world levels of wealth without the social cohesion which allowed us to climb out of that in the first place.

I like the metaphor of an oared galley. At first all the rowers are strong men. But over time, as the rowers tire out, they begin to be replaced by statues of rowers. This can go on for a while, even as it increases the load on the extant rowers. There comes a tipping point, though, where the boat is dead in the water.

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I would define it as:

The belief that individuals and groups meaningfully differ in nearly all measured attributes for biological and genetic reasons.

That’s really the extent of the belief. The point of contention is what is off limits to scrutiny through that lens. No one would object to the idea that skin color, eye color, or hair texture differ between individuals and populations for genetic reasons.

HBDers (alternately “race realists,” “hereditarians,” “scientific racists,” etc.) are those willing to apply that lens to all human traits.

To borrow your word： apply how? Apply simply in acknowledging the idea as worth further research? Or apply by accepting the hypothesis as axiomatic and then set public policies (re immigration, hiring, voting laws, whatever) in some seemingly reasonable way so that presumably the smarts make the decisions while any member of the dumbs must first pass intellectual muster to be taken half-seriously? Or something else? I ask this question genuinely, and I would be interested to read various answers.

Or apply by accepting the hypothesis as axiomatic

Certainly not. It's not even empirically proven (in the "group differences are genetic" sense; "group differences exist" is easier to measure); it's certainly not axiomatic. I would like to see further research, since it's not empirically disproven either, but so long as the NIH is taking an Index Librorum Prohibitorum attitude to the question perhaps we shouldn't expect progress either way on that front.

So instead, could we just stop accepting the hypothesis' negation as axiomatic? Gifted education that ends up with too few black students might be a red flag worth looking into, but that doesn't mean it necessarily needs to be ended as a "glaring symbol of segregation". It's logical that, "given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly" ... which means that if we want to avoid blaming innocents, we need to either make sure that "accepted truth" is always true or we need to stop always using it as a premise.

The most ironic tragedy behind the "everyone is the same" premise (in the stronger-than-just-anti-HBD sense that's starting to take hold, where even internal cultural differences are denied) is that it becomes so awkward that it ends up getting dropped anyway, just much more clumsily. Harvard goes from using "great emphasis on character and personality" to keep down Jewish numbers in the 1920s to using it to keep down Asian numbers in 2020 ... and yet: is the Personality Quotient test they're using at all detailed? Does it have a respectable inter-rater reliability and internal consistency reliability? Have they tried multiple tests, and what inter-method reliability did they see? Do they have evidence that higher Socio-Economic Status or expensive coaching or anything like that won't greatly affect the results? The SAT eliminated analogy questions because of worries about the SES bias of requiring students to know words (sure hope they don't read anything in college requiring a large vocabulary!), but our elite institutions are thrilled to rely on "does our admissions officer like your personality"?? Anyone truly watching out for racial biases from subjective inaccurate testing should worry that the call is coming from inside the house! An institution that actually cared about personality, rather than hoping it would be a plausible excuse for putting a thumb on the scale, would have been trying much harder to figure out how to evaluate it objectively.

At this point I would settle for undoing some of the damage that decades of attempts to enforce equal representation and the blank state theory have done to our society e.g. by bringing back tracking in schools, ending affirmative action, admitting that biological explanations are a possibility when investigating group differences in life outcome, prioritizing our immigration and foreign aid policies based on which populations have the most development potential (as crudely and imprecisely measured by national or sub-national IQ), and funding large enough genetic studies to uncover the basis of heritable personality and behavioral differences between groups. Pretty much all of these except for the last were the normal state of affairs prior to the mid-20th century.

(as crudely and imprecisely measured by national or sub-national IQ)

... why not as less-crudely and less-imprecisely measured by individual IQ, in the case of immigration? If it's that important then the extra cost of proctoring a test is going to be trivial compared to the advantage of extra accuracy.

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You seem to imply a certain set of policies but not said in a mean way that it would lead to limit the amount of dumb people in your country (immigration, pro-abortion, pro-life policies that encourage more upper class breeding) but it could also encourage more socialism - less spending on trying to educate people into upper class jobs and more just give them money to enjoy life. Previously I think the right even believed in merit and the poor deserved to be the poor and the left said let’s spend a ton of money and teach them to be professionals. The right has adopted hbd in certain forums so that cancels out a lot of the poor deserve to be poor and the lefts in a place where the reforms of the past failed so their doubling down on “structural racism” but now they struggle to point at real legal and opportunity barriers so it’s become this mythical “structural”.

No need to worry about me doubting your sincerity, this came off as a good faith question.

I would say “apply,” with regards to observed phenomena by considering genetics and biology as at least a perfectly reasonable cause exploration, and probably as the default causal explanation.

To walk through a real world example, we observe that in America, whites are 5’10 on average, blacks are 5’9, and Asians and Hispanics are 5’7. Say we wanted to explain why this is; our first area of investigation should be whether this is just a genetic quirk. If we have reason to believe it’s not, like finding different degrees of heritability across groups, then we might look to cultural or economic factors, like malnutrition rates, or a cultural practice of amputation at the knees (obviously this is exaggerated, but for height, I couldn’t think of another cultural mechanism).

Height is pretty low stakes, of course. Still, HBD sees this as the most effective way to model and understand the world around them, and the topic being controversial, like crime, intelligence, or social status, has no bearing on the use case of the model.

for height, I couldn’t think of another cultural mechanism

Lifestyle factors resulting in premature age-related shrinking maybe? Like spending more or less time on one's feet. This is fun.

Most urgently, abandon the idea that perfect representation in education or employment is a desirable goal. Populations have diverse interests and abilities, and that makes the dream of perfect representation a never-ending battle to offset those differing interests and abilities.

Like anything, it's an imprecise cluster of beliefs, but the core belief is basically what you outlined. It's the belief that intelligence is real and can be measured even if imperfectly, and that our best current measurements indicate both that it has a significant genetic component and that if you take the average intelligence of everyone within various genetic groups of people, then that average is sometimes different when comparing between different groups. I think that's the minimum of what one has to believe for one to believe in "HBD."

Much is made of intelligence and for good reason.

But I'd like to add:

  • Parental investment

  • Impulse control

  • Self-confidence

  • Time preference

  • General aggressiveness

  • Hormonal balances (e.g. testosterone)

  • Industriousness

  • Sexual fidelity

  • Instinct toward hygiene

  • Propensity to certain diseases

  • Aesthetic preferences

And so many more!

Yes culture matters, but we have only to look to the animal kingdom for the obvious genetic underpinnings of all of the above.

My current working metaphor is something like, "Culture is a house built upon a genetic foundation. If the foundation, the capacity, is there then the culture can take hold. But for any individual, cultural constructs will collapse to their point of sound genetic foundation."

(And if you don't believe me, try teaching good financial habits to someone with a nasty FOXP2 mutation. Or for that matter a sturgeon.)

Is this really true in the case of HBD? Almost all of the new evidence is validating what were previously commonplace beliefs.

This paper is just strong evidence in support of Ronald Fisher’s additive genetic model. Plenty of hereditarian work is just validating Galton.

The intellectual arguments were widely accepted, and then rejected following World War 2, despite the evidence still supporting them. I wouldn’t be so confident that theories rejected while having the weight of evidence will be adopted because the evidence, which was already pretty clear, becomes even more overwhelming.

The intellectual arguments were widely accepted, and then rejected following World War 2, despite the evidence still supporting them.

You're not wrong here, but I think an important thing to note is that "evidence" was in fact assembled and constructed to prop up the new consensus. Even though that evidence can't stand up to interrogation, actually trying to interrogate it was largely taken as evidence that you're a witch/believe lightning precedes thunder. The strategy wasn't to just go "Ok just ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is", but to actually assemble a convincing facsimile of evidence and say that doubting it gets you removed from polite society.

That people have now removed the figleaves and essentially demonstrated that tabula rasa is a polite fiction adopted for social rather than scientific reasons matters, and absolutely will have an impact on how these theories are interpreted by society.

I’d be interested in learning or reading more about this. My impression is that it really was just: “ignore all evidence, science doesn't apply here and you just have to accept what the societal elite say the science is" until Arthur Jensen and William Shockley attempted to remind everyone that hereditarianism is true, and that the blank slate consensus was fabricated.

The post war period had things like the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, but that really wasn’t evidenced based. It is a pure moral document (that many scientists refused to sign because it lacked evidence).

Only in the late 70s and 80s did figures like Lewontin and Gould emerge to try to claim that it was evidence-backed. This could be a blind spot for me, but that’s my understanding of the timeline.

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