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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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and not enough would want to be middle managers

I inhale at the thought of such a dreadful fate. What horror!

Seriously though, most countries already have progressive taxation and a welfare system. Wealth is redistributed from the most capable and luckiest to the less lucky and capable. That already cushions the blow for people who end up poor, regardless of whether that's from poor life choices or poor talent. I think it also serves to shore up social stability aside from moral concerns.

There should be some kind of balance between meritocracy and redistribution which is what I think we appreciate but DeBoer does not:

Talent, however defined, has always looked like just another fickle gift of nature, to me, and thus using it to hand out scarce goods is no more just than hereditary nobility.

It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway, which leads us disturbingly close to Handicapper-Generals.

As @orthoxerox and @Folamh3 suggest, it’s defensive. I’m sure he believes it, but it’s suicide for a mainstream commentator to openly discuss it in 2023. At the top of the article he links to his most recent piece in New York Magazine. Nobody who openly believes in group differences is writing opinion columns for that kind of publication. Even Andrew Sullivan (arguably their most famous writer) was fired for the fact that he hadn’t officially renounced putting the Bell Curve on the cover in 1994.

I’m sure he believes it

I don't think he believes it consciously, in the sense of holding that belief in his head but deliberately claiming otherwise. I think deBoer is smart enough to realise where his beliefs lead, but refuses to fully think through all of their implications, and comes up with complex and convincing-seeming epicycles to avoid confronting the more straightforward and parsimonious explanation. Orwell called it "crimestop".

It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway

Freddie's an odd one in that he's an absolute believer that IQ is mostly genetic and that believing this doesn't remotely imply any other beliefs about the dignity and worth of a low-IQ person - and yet, he is rabidly opposed to any suggestion that there might be IQ differences between ethnic groups, and thinks that believing there are to be an irretrievably racist stance. If you're having a hard time understanding how someone could hold both beliefs in their head at the same time - well, join the club with me and Scott, who describes how Freddie used to send him angry (and completely private) emails attacking Scott for his apparent endorsement of HBD.

He might simply deny that genetic differences between ethnic groups are that substantial. Remember he is mentally ill and dependent on treatment. Logicking himself into strange and contra-reality beliefs is probably just the sort of thing he does every now and then regardless of how smart he is.

If you're having a hard time understanding how someone could hold both beliefs in their head at the same time

My only working hypothesis is that it's a defensive mechanism. Freddie is either afraid of making the final conclusion because it contradicts his prior convictions or knows that saying it outright will turn him into a pariah, so he sticks to credo quia absurdum.

Agreed. Freddie is usually a very clearsighted writer, which makes the blindspots where he refuses to follow arguments to their obvious conclusions (HBD, the trans debate) all the more glaring.

I inhale at the thought of such a dreadful fate. What horror!

The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.

Seriously though, most countries already have progressive taxation and a welfare system. Wealth is redistributed from the most capable and luckiest to the less lucky and capable.

I agree, though of course wealth distribution is a continuous variable, not a discrete one. My view is that as societies become richer they become more and more capable of providing poor people with welfare. This is one of the benefits of being a rich society and part of the argument for why we shouldn't jeopardize the things that drive our societal wealth (though I realize that increasing welfare benefits can hurt that goal; there's some tradeoff and it's not always easy to decide what exactly the best path is).

I think it also serves to shore up social stability aside from moral concerns.

Good point.

It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway, which leads us disturbingly close to Handicapper-Generals.

I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability and he has believed this for a while (it's a major part of the premise of his first book). I don't think he's trying to retroactively justify his egalitarian beliefs; I think he really just sincerely thinks it's unfair that people who are kind but stupid will not do great in a meritocratic society and has somehow failed to see the reasons why a meritocratic society might be good despite that.

The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.

Fair. It's very important to have good management. But don't you think there's an excess of managers, many of whom aren't good? There are graphs circulating showing 400% or higher growth in administrators in universities and medicine, while growth of teaching staff and practitioners is much lower.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/policy-ten-administrators-for-every-one-us-doctor-092813

A Harvard Business Review analysis shows the healthcare workforce has grown by 75 percent since 1990, but 95 percent of new hires aren’t doctors.

I think there's a gross oversupply of managers and an enormous undersupply of management.

I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability

A rose by any other name.

Add in a bit of population-level inheritable disparities and you're there. Of course thoughtful upstanding deBoer will not be taking that final and obvious step into vile wrongthink. He will merely state all the relevant and true facts leading to that point and then not acknowledge it. And he's much better off not publicly destroying his public image in this manner.

I thought that believing that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability is believing in HBD, at least insofar as HBD is what people who use the term generally claim it to be and not just a euphemism for emotion-driven racism.

The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that racial differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable. This is an idea that deBoer clearly rejects while still agreeing that on an individual level such differences exist and are significantly heritable. But perhaps I've misunderstood the term.

The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that racial population-level differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable.

Would he really disagree with this? It's basic statistics. The sketchy part is attempting to map a distinct population onto some kind of "race". Since our populations are not as isolated as they were five hundred or five thousand years ago, race is a muddy lens today.

Since our populations are not as isolated as they were five hundred or five thousand years ago, race is a muddy lens today.

It may not be a top-level Zeiss, but it's still got plenty of clarity even if there is some vignetting around the edges. And self-identified race correlates well and robustly to objective measurements.

Ah I see, no you're right. I forgot about the difference between small-scale heritability and race-level heritability.

I always put a second requirement on HBD: there is significant heritibility of socially important traits, and the distribution of those traits is significantly uneven. IMO, if someone believes that notable genetic differences only happen at the level of the family, then they don't believe in HBD.

I always put a second requirement on HBD: there is significant heritibility of socially important traits, and the distribution of those traits is significantly uneven. IMO, if someone believes that notable genetic differences only happen at the level of the family, then they don't believe in HBD.

I am not sure that anyone actually believes this. I can see them getting to that point and stopping because if you go any further explicitly you get evicted from polite society, but I can't even imagine what kind of epicycle would be required to claim that these differences happen at a family level and then just immediately stop when you zoom out and look at extended families.

I am not sure that anyone actually believes this.

Really? I think it's the most common position.

I'm not confident about the hows and whys of that, but my guess is that people just don't think about the topic, or at least they don't think of that pair of stances at the same time using the same framework.

Its only the most common position because most people have never really confronted the evidence. The average person on the street doesn't even know that races have different average IQs or if they do they think they disappear by accounting for simple cofounders

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