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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.

It's only reprehensible because we have better alternatives, right? Say (tortured hypothetical) it's the year 1500, and you're picking crewmembers for your voyage in a week. You need a bunch, so all you have to evaluate them is a three minute chat, and they're not particularly educated so there's not much shared knowledge to go on. It's your experience from past voyages that jewish crewmembers are the best and africans are the worst, and this is still informative even after adjusting for your first impression. (Also, a bad crewmember might mean 'your ship sinks'). I think making the race-based judgement here is fine. The only other alternative is picking randomly to an extent. And if you have a moral issue with some people being deprived because they're paid less - how is 'not being chosen because you're black' morally worse than 'not being chosen because you're low iq'? Both are unchosen.

This, of course, isn't really true in the modern day. You can just give someone an IQ test or an interview problem or something.

Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.

I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.

Is it even possible to not pre-judge though? I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

And if you are acting on behalf of someone else, hiring for a job in someone elses company or choosing a school district for your kids, is it moral to not make the best informed choice possible?

I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.

I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

You don't need HBD for that. You just need to know the facts; HBD gives a reason for them, but even if HBD is false and there is some other reason for them, the same inferences may be drawn.

Except I'm not just coyly avoiding references to HBD but secretly referring to that alone, I'm deliberately including a broader range of groups like using someone's membership in the KKK to know you don't want to be friends with them, or using someone's presence on a sex offender registry to avoid hiring for daycare positions. This is also a form of using someone's group membership to pre judge them. Of course there are differences, I'm not trying to argue "these are the same therefore in order to be consistent you have to support or oppose both". My point is more "there are tons of differences between these things, which ones are the actually relevant distinctions and why?"

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