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For the most part, SAT scores and the like – the distribution of individual human traits.
It also explains how North Koreans can have a functional, technologically sophisticated, orderly society in a situation that would have caused any African nation to implode in months.
It goes without saying that HBD is a skeleton key to a lion's share of American political enigmas.
But you probably understand the intellectually serious version of HBD at this point anyway; this flirtation with Hlynka's «Aryans of pure blood r superiors und prevail» Hitlerist gibberish is not something I need to knock down once again. And, of course, Nazis are less prominent in this school of thought than Jews.
HBD is a powerful framework for intra-social analysis; it allows us to ponder questions like these and its answers gracefully stand the test of time, while their rejection is a festering wound of academic culture.
I concede this is far removed from predicting international events, because the way people with different traits are assembled into a society is not trivially determined by those traits. It would have been interesting to discuss whether there is an inherent biological – or any other – reason explaining why, say, Ukrainians can have meritocratic leadership, while closely related (despite certain protestations) Russians are ruled by back alley thugs such as Zolotov and produce headlines like «“Russian Elon Musk” died from rape and torture in jail». And the OG Elon Musk's own biological potential did nothing for South Africa. Von Neumann, too, did relatively little for Hungary and Germany. I dabbled in theorizing about slots for qualitatively different expressions of human potential that some stable societies have and others lack. But it's a difficult topic.
I don't think Anglos (who are «basically mid», again) will devour the light cone; I'm no Cecil Rhodes who explicitly aspired to that nor someone who takes his racist delusions seriously. I'd guess that Musk is a mutt in Hlynka's terms, and Von Neumann's case is obvious enough. Those are the sort of people you need to come up with the idea of tiling the universe in self-replicating probes and the logistics to bootstrap this process.
The thing is, at least one of Anglo-derived societies had assembled the full stack of necessary slots. And it sure looks like their biology, which molds their moral instinct, played a role in making that possible.
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