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I'm going to go kinda hard on your comment, not because I didn't wish many of the ideas were true, but because the evidence against them is so overwhelming.
There has been social interventions - in pro-'oppressed' direction. Affirmative action, government transfers have been helping black families for decades. Yet by many metrics blacks in America are doing worse than they were in the 1950s.
You might also find instructive the experience of the Chinese attempt in the cultural revolution to neutralize richer / more well-educated families by seizing their wealth, or outright jailing and even killing them. Yet just a few decades later, the same surnames who had wealth and status before found themselves overrepresented at the top of society.
If minority status is such a burden, why do Jews do so well economically almost everywhere around the world? I would argue that history has been even less kind to the Jews than to African-Americans, yet I don't think they form a permanent underclass in, say, Germany? Similarly, why do Chinese emigres tend to academically and economically dominate in most of the countries they emigrate to?
Regarding the rest of your post - I will agree that racism is keeping back many black American families. Where I DISAGREE is that most of this racism comes from the left, largely via the bigotry of low expectations.
I think you and I can agree that raising children in married, two-parent families is by far the best for them. Are you familiar with the black out-of-wedlock birthrate in America? Over 70% of black kids born in America are to unmarried women. Mostly, people don't talk about this, as it's considered impolite. But every time I've heard of this mentioned as a problem it was by people who were either conservative, or prefaced it first apologizing that they "didn't mean to echo conservative talking points". In other words, it's not conservatives that have put together the system of generous welfare benefits that makes all this possible.
As another example - look at education. I think you and I can agree that disruptive learning environments can absolutely fuck over a lot of kids and significantly impact their chances at a well-paying job in the future. And nothing is more disruptive than kids beating the shit out of others (or even you!) in school. Yet, because the perpetrators are also black, American educators are loathe to actually punish them. This was most evident in the Obama administration's guidance to 1) reduce punishments and 2) have greater rates of equities in punishments.
Look at Oregon governor Kate Brown signing legislation that allows kids to graduate high school without proving they can read, write, or do basic math - explicitly citing that current requirements disproportionately hurt black and brown kids. Look at school boards in San Francisco voting to stop teaching algebra before high school because those classes were disproportionately not-black.
Look at predominantly black cities all around America - how they spend $20, $30k, sometimes over $50k a year on students - and often have schools where not a single student is proficient at reading (or alternatively, math). Look at how they turn a blind eye to institutions that utterly fail their students as long as their motivations sound nice. If you actually cared about black kids succeeding in school, shouldn't you make noises to address the failures of, say, lebron james' school, which throws money at kids and yet is utterly failing them academically?
Look at how the media and government treat charter schools - some of which (Success Academy being a prime example) actually have great track records of helping poor black and latino kids achieve academic success. But because these places have strict behavioral requirements, the media would rather talk about how kids are sometimes being disciplined too harshly.
Right, this was posing a hypothetical.
I am not proposing a generic theory of 'any race that has bad things happen to them will be economically disadvantaged forever.' The world is too complicated for that to be true. I was talking narrowly and specifically about black americans, because I think that's the primary motte of the culture war version of this conversation.
The holocaust was very very very bad, I don't really see any point in making value judgements about whether it was 'worse' than chattel slavery or w/e. But it was a singular event. It wasn't multiple generations living as chattel without education, with it being illegal to teach them to read. It wasn't more decades of segregation and redlining and so forth. It wasn't the long development of a separate oppressed culture and dialect. All of the very specific things I mentioned in my post as causal factors, don't really apply to that situation.
I mean, ok, obviously I disagree with some of your points and characterizations, but my point was about HBD vs other causal factors for racial gaps. It sounds like you are listing a bunch of additional non-genetic factors that cause racial gaps. Does this mean you agree with me that there no strong evidence for HBD explaining racial gaps in this specific instance, because of things like the problems you list?
I think that there are many non-genetic explanations, many of which which exacerbate genetic explanations (for example, generous welfare policies enabling dysgenic selection).
If you don't believe in HBD, may I ask you - do you believe in HBD anywhere? Do you think all 'races' do not differ in height (I am aware of the effect of diet - such as many East Asian countries gaining several inches of average height in the last two generations). Do you think there is no West African advantage in sprinting, or East African advantage in distance running? If not, how do you explain the dominance of people from various 'races' in certain sports? If so, why do you think group differences can only be possible outside of cognition?
Yes, I believe in HBD. I'd really rather not think about it - because intragroup differences are often much larger than inter-group differences. One of the smartest kids I knew growing up was Black. One of the best athletes was Indian. But none of that changes what I see as overwhelming evidence for differences between 'races' (and I understand the fuzziness of the word). The only two defenses I've seen against HBD are "many of the people who've done this research are bad people with bad motives, who maybe use bad methods sometimes", and "hey if you believe this, we're going to tell everyone you're an odious racist".
Again, motte and bailey.
I don't believe there's sufficient evidence that black people are incapable of economic success such that we should conclude all current inequities are 'natural' and gear policy towards that conclusion. I don't believe there's reason to think that immigration is innately dysgenic and we should close the borders for that reason.
Are various populations different than some other populations by at least some amount on some metrics? Yes, trivially. Random variance alone would make that true, and I don't believe that's the only thing at play in every possible comparison of this type that you could make.
But this isn't the 'random facts about genetics and population statistics' thread, it's the culture war thread. The culture war over HBD is related to politics and policy concerns, and I don't think the people on the HBD side of that war have sufficient evidence to justify any of their policy proposals, or their general aesthetic and ethos on the topic.
If the thing you believe is just the incredibly trivial fact that some groups are at least somewhat different from some other groups on some factors based on population averages, but you don't agree with policy proposals that use specific types of racial inferiority as a bedrock premise, then my advice is that you should not say that you believe in HBD.
The 'some groups are different in some ways' thing is, as you say, trivially true and obvious. The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby. The obviously true thing doesn't have or need an acronym, this project is what 'HBD' actually means to most people, and if they react badly it's because they're reacting to that actual project, not the obvious motte.
If that's not your project, but you heard someone in the HBD movement say the motte and thought to yourself 'Well I agree with that, I must be an HBD believer', I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with. As someone in progressive spaces, I'm very used to the phenomenon, and the signs are easy to recognize once you're looking.
If that is your project, then that is the thing we actually disagree about, and stop trying to paint me as disagreeing with the trivially true motte.
I'd largely agree with this when it comes to identification and advice, actually?
The claim that different selected groups of humans have some genetic variation between them seems obviously true but also not particularly interesting. Yes, there's some minor genetic variation across the human race as a whole. So what?
The interesting and controversial part is the answer to the "so what?", and the problem I have with so-called 'HBD' is that their answer to that question, as far as I can tell, firstly massively outstrips the evidence they refer to, and secondly frequently appears to be both malicious in its intent and destructive in its policy goals.
Are there people who identify with HBD who aren't malicious or destructive? Sure. No group is homogenous. But it seems to me that enough of them are, that the general direction of the vague group of people that we refer to here as 'the HBD movement', is such that for as much as the motte is apparently true, the bailey is such that we should definitely avoid it.
Nara Burns makes a fair point about individuals below. I'm not going after Charles Murray or anything. But when he says that he has "never personally encountered" a person who advocates HBD with racist goals, I'm just confused, because, well, I've read the Motte.
it looks like you're using circular definition here.
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This reads to me like deliberate weak manning. At minimum you should probably reference a more specific example than "the HBD movement." For example Charles Murray is probably credibly part of any putative "HBD movement" but if you described him as "acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies" then I would say you either didn't read him, didn't understand him, or are willfully misunderstanding him. I assume there are some people out there using the (as you suggest) "trivial fact" of HBD for purely racist goals, but I have never personally encountered such a person.
I wasn't going to actually moderate you for the earlier quote but when I got to this one, it pushed you over the edge. I suspect we all get to be someone's useful idiot, sometimes, but "the only reasons you could possibly disagree with me here is that you are evil, or stupid" is not really a permissible discussion posture under our ruleset.
I think maybe the advice I want to give you here is to try to keep your arguments addressed to other arguments, rather than making them about (general or specific) people.
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Gosh it sure is convenient that being discriminated against takes hundreds of years for a population to recover from. I guess the complete and utter failure of progressive environmental intervention to even begin closing the gap over the course of generations doesn't mean anything. Nope, we have to let them have the reins of society all the way into like Star Trek times before we can notice that nothing they're doing works.
If the descendant effects of discrimination worked the way you need them to work to keep progressive orthodoxy viable, someone on one of these forums would have coughed up some compelling historical examples among other groups at some point in the last X years of having this argument. Instead it's the bog standard usual, the one thing anti-HBD types always seem to have for us: A bunch of just-so excuses for why this or that counter-example involving Jews or Asians totally shouldn't count.
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