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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.

Apologies, environmental, I mean, though culture overlaps with environmental.

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.

I think the true YesChad option is outright transhumanism.

Don't cut off the the nose to spite the face, give everyone better nosejobs. Or gene editing and cybernetic enhancement such that the playing field is leveled.

In a world of absolute genotypic and phenotypic freedom subsided by the government, everyone has true equality of opportunity, and if we somehow don't get equality of outcome, I guess everyone being better off makes it hard to cry too hard about it.

You know, a third way would be to simply eliminate the malformed. Not endorsing that but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Societies have been practicing some form or another of this basically forever.

Dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator is not the only way to achieve leveling; it's just the easiest. We could instead choose to uplift those among us who were born unlucky: subsidize cosmetic surgery for the ugly, ozempic for the overweight, and embryo selection for those traits that can't be altered in a single generation.

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.

Maybe they show that they care about the ugly by not wanting to explicitly refer to them as ugly and reify it.

I can't buy that, not when talking about the crowd who thinks the 90s/colorblindness approach to anti-racism is something in between a Stephen Colbert joke and a racists' cover story. The modern left-wing approach to fighting inequities is to point them out, loudly, and demand they be specifically and deliberately solved.

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.

Their TFR is actually above the American average.

The nonhispanic black TFR is 1.68, while the general American TFR is 1.67. If we assume that black immigrant TFR is higher than that of the ADOS African American community, the TFR of the latter would almost certainly be below the general American average.

This is a good point, but African Americans shrinking as a percentage of the population rather slowly(there’s no evidence they have a TFR as low as Asians or blue tribers) doesn’t meaningfully change things, although it probably alters the political outlook in Georgia.

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.

Perhaps it's due to current political and social will that one can't have such a... black... pilled 12%-13%, but it's not some fundamental law of the universe.

"We" in Western countries regularly tell White and Asian men who object to affirmative action, third-world immigration, income and wealth transfers, disproportionate intra-racial violent crime: Be better, sucks to suck, git gud, it's your personal skill issue, a Real Man wouldn't feel threatened by affirmative action, immigration, income/wealth redistribution, or violent crime.

A similar approach could easily be applied to American blacks with respect to a racially level playing field.

White and Asian men, however, generally do pretty ok for themselves relative to their peers.

Seems to me that the problem here is looking at them as 'the blacks' (okay you actually said 'the African American community') instead of as individuals. There is a high degree of European admixture in black Americans. The average American black has roughly 20% white genetics. Plenty of 'blacks' are half or even majority-white. One even became President! Treat individuals as individuals and this problem becomes a lot more tractable. Insist on lumping people into groups and those groups must shortly be at each others' throats. (EDIT: And, you know, it's not like they're actually 'a community' by any stretch.)

Besides which, the strategy which I perceive you to be espousing here might work today, and it might work tomorrow, but at some point it becomes untenable sheerly due to numbers. Perhaps a technological singularity will save us. I don't like betting on that.

In the meantime, every major institution is sliding because standards are being lowered to desperately attempt 'equitable' outcomes. The elements of our society which produced this wealth in the first place are precisely those under attack.

Most of them seem to see themselves as a group, though.

A whole lot of non-black entities have a major interest in making this so. I'd suggest that they're a substantial part of the problem.

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.

Yep, I stand by my prior post up the chain, there's very little information or science to engage with in the last 10 posts, just sweeping generalisations and opinion among people that agree with each other.

Now that may be because you've all 'done the work' already, but a post needs something more than back-slappimg surely?

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.

In order to be passed any potential immigration policy has to be justifiable in non-HBD (either group-based or individual) terms. Individually IQ-testing potential immigrants will never be considered acceptable, but screening them on the basis of "culture" is more palatable.

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.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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