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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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