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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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They're not a separate population; all they have in common is being poor. Same reason it makes sense to consider Ashkenazi Jews as a population (in the sense of HBD) but not people born on the Fourth of July.

I literally argued that we can treat them as a separate population in a useful manner. Are you going to address that, instead of merely asserting it?

Or is your complaint that there's no clear lines, and only a spectrum? I see no reason why that should change our ability to talk about it.

Nor is there any reason why only having one feature in common should mean that we can't look at things with respect to that feature. (and, of course, it's not quite the one feature in common—everything that correlates with poverty will be something they are statistically more likely to have as well, and vice versa)

It's obvious why people born on the Fourth of July is useless: it has no correlation with genetics, and it causes no persistent groups. Socioeconomic class is not like that. Yes, there is class mobility, and intermarriage, but statistically, people are more likely to stay somewhere around where they started, relatively speaking. Of course, this varies from individual to individual, but there's no reason for it not to be useful on a population level.

There's no reason to require millenia-old groups to be able to talk about human genetics. All that matters are group differences derived in part from genotypes.

The way in which they can be treated as a different population is not the same in terms of magnitude or direction.

To put it another way, poor people don't show up in PCA of genes. There is no genetic difference when compared to race.

Well, there's presumably a handful genetic differences statistically, but you're right that it would be far more minor than groups with centuries or millenia of variation without intermarriage. (And unlikely to show up on a PCA, unless maybe you get to extreme minor quite-possibly-statistical-noise components)

There's no reason to require millenia-old groups to be able to talk about human genetics. All that matters are group differences derived in part from genotypes.

And what grouping usefully includes both dirt-poor Zeke from Appalachia and dirt-poor Malcolm from Alabama? You can see how blacks are a useful (if fuzzy at the edges) group; they've got sub-Saharan African ancestry. Same for Scots-Irish, or Cajuns or various other ethnicities. But "poor people" in America just don't work as such a group.

Sure, I could treat poor people as a whole as a group and maybe note that "Hey, people who are poor also tend to do poorly on standardized tests". And that would be interesting. But I don't think it falls within HBDs domain.

And what grouping usefully includes both dirt-poor Zeke from Appalachia and dirt-poor Malcolm from Alabama?

Likewise, what grouping usefully includes both the Namibian bushman, and the South African Zulu? Those are more genetically distinct groups than Zeke from Appalachia and Malcolm from Alabama? (I'm unsure whether you mean Malcolm to be black—looking it up, it looks like it makes up about the same proportion of each. It doesn't matter, though, as the Zulu is genetically more like you than like the bushman.) Further, HBD people seem perfectly fine talking about categories like "hispanic" which is itself a messy category, where different people have different portions of native american ancestry (and also, of course, different native american groups, depending on where the people are from), and sometimes black ancestry, making it less precise, than, say, "chinese".

But that's no reason to stop. If it yields consistent useful statistical information, that's good enough. You just have to be willing to recognize that your nice group there is actually more of a hodgepodge of different groups that might not all be the same, each of which themselves consist of a handful of non-identical individuals.

I'm not of course making any sort of claim at all like "poor people and rich people are as genetically distant as [insert two groups of your choice]." All I'm saying is that statistically they have genetic disparities along some relevant axes.

But I don't think it falls within HBDs domain.

So what is HBD about, then, if not that some groups are genetically more capable than others along axes, or otherwise vary in traits?

Likewise, what grouping usefully includes both the Namibian bushman, and the South African Zulu?

Very little, but there's only about 100,000 bushmen in the world, so they don't really figure into much. Zeke (white) and Malcolm (yes, intended to be black), on the other hand, are quite common archetypes in the US.

Further, HBD people seem perfectly fine talking about categories like "hispanic" which is itself a messy category

Yeah, "Hispanic" is messy and I don't trust a lot of generalizations about that category either. Some of the HBD people do try to quantify things about percent of indigenous versus European ancestry among Hispanics, which seems more valid as a general approach.

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