site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25765 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We have these:

  1. Non-technical Universities
  2. Black underclass, where a large percentage of the men are dead or in prison.

Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.

Yeah, I suppose we do have non techicsl universities and a black underclass

We have the best non-technical universities and black underclasses, you wouldn't believe it

Yes, yes we do indeed have these.

One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"

The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.

  • -13

People have given you the standard answers of it making your positions defensible, and the real world comes knocking and you find out that merit isn't evenly distributed.

And of course, that I want to believe what's true. I find all the population genetics stuff really interesting in the same way that I find linguistics interesting, and group variation just makes sense as a possibility when you're used to thinking about populations of humans and genetics. (Seriously, read some Razib Khan or something. It's fun! Polynesian navigators, steppe nomads and the spread of the Indo-European languages, the original Americans crossing through Beringia and killing off all the megafauna, neanderthal ancestry, etc. It's a good time, if your interests are anything like mine, and doesn't require that you be a racist or something.)

But I do want to know: what alternative do you prefer? Why are there still disparities? What's your picture of the world? Does the data support that?

(This is not at all to say my picture of the world is complete: I do want to know how much of differences are environmental vs. genetic, as I imagine it's a mix, and I would want to know how different groups ended up with different genetic effects: what cultures and environments shaped things like that, because I don't really have a good picture of that in most cases, and it does seem necessary. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to say that just like variation within-group along many axes has a genetic component, so does variation between-group, and it seems silly to me to confidently assert that it has a 0% effect unless you have data or reasoning as to why that would happen, to back it up.)

But I do want to know: what alternative do you prefer? Why are there still disparities? What's your picture of the world? Does the data support that?

I'm not Hlynka- and in fact I believe in HBD even if I don't like it much- but I think that AADOS culture is just uniquely shitty and this is probably a bigger factor than genes. Furthermore, I think that this happened partly because the average black IQ is low, but that that's a minor factor, and a badly managed welfare state just has that effect on the urban poor, which blacks disproportionately are and were, and that one of the few continuing legacies of Jim Crow is, aside from incredibly annoying and pretentious activists, that most American blacks feel like they have more in common with each other on account of their race than they do with their white neighbors and coworkers, even when those other blacks live on the other side of the country and don't share a class background, which destroys the containment mechanism for trailer trash behavior in white communities. I'll also say that I think, but cannot prove, that southern culture is more vulnerable to that kind of undermining than average even if it doesn't have huge amounts of negative cultural memes in it itself, and this is the root of AADOS culture.

I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.

I'm pretty sure IQ has a bigger effect than culture on eg the percent of programmers who are black being low. Certainly culture has a bigger effect than IQ on the percent of blacks who commit crime, and even if there's a natural tendency towards that due to low IQ it's very easy to imagine stable social situations where black crime (and for that matter crime in the white underclass, low-IQ whites also generally aren't programmers) is much less frequent.

But most law abiding middle class people in stable two parent households are not programmers, or engineers, or in any other particularly high-IQ demanding career. Working-class whites seem to generally have much better outcomes than blacks do, and while yes they have an IQ advantage, it's a smaller one than whites as a whole, and hispanics are complicated but have very high upwards mobility compared to blacks with an even smaller IQ advantage. Most of the income gap is not a product of underrepresentation in high status careers.

There's a continuous spectrum of how intellectually challenging a job is, though. Managing, accounting, nursing, sales, secretary, plumber, cashier, janitor (not in exact order, maybe see here idk). The ones that are less intellectually challenging (generally) pay less well because they're less productive and because more people can do them. I don't really have any strong evidence either way for whether culture or IQ has a larger effect, but if anything I think the IQ->gap pathway is simpler than the culture->gap pathway. Black people who are employed will have a natural desire to get better employment and higher pay as much as white people do.

I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.

I am reminded of this thread from a little over a year ago.

I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition of literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter while arbitrarily dismissing any arguments, claims, and evidence to the contrary as "blank-slatism" and can't help but find it just as (if not even more) ridiculous.

I mean the answer is that these things do matter(I'm not thinking you disagree here). Catholic schools and no-excuse charters meaningfully improve black performance! And black neighborhoods where the majority of households are two parent families produce upwardly mobile children, not only by black standards but by national standards! The military also massively improves black life outcomes. Wokes don't want to talk about these things, but they have pre-existing biases against things like Catholic schools, the US military, and nuclear families, and they don't want to have to talk about why systemic racism doesn't apply to those blacks. "Hard" HBDers don't like to talk about these things either, with the partial exception of the military because they can point to selection effects as the driving force, because they have no explanation for why black children who receive scholarships to Catholic schools perform so much better than their public school peers, or whose neighbors are stable two parent families are highly upwardly mobile. As I guess you could call me a "soft HBDer"- HBD is a great explanation for why Ben Carson is literally the only black medical pioneer, and it's a decent explanation for why Africa is the poorest continent on average, but it doesn't explain why blacks show such little upwards mobility into the lower middle class, or account for Russia's dysfunction compared to other former communist states- there's a perfectly obvious explanation. To an anti-HBD conservative there's a perfectly obvious explanation.

That's a very reasonable take. I think I agree.

EDIT: At least, that's probably the largest factor in the dysfunction found in black America. I'm not sure how much of an effect that would have on IQ tests, etc. But in terms of real-world effects, yeah, that's probably the biggest problem.

Not mod-hatted, but borderline, because you're annoying me.

I modded Incanto below because "Shut up, I'm sick of you" is not a good response to someone who's being tiresome on a subject. But you really are being tiresome, and not because I disagree with you, but because it really looks like every time something even vaguely related to HBD comes up, you have to post some little jab that is clearly meant to provoke the HBDers on the Motte into going after you. Does this give you a smug sense of validation, or are you just spoiling for a fight? I don't know, but it's tiresome.

"One of the less stupid ideas..." "certain individuals" "I have my theories" - this is all weasel-wording to hide your real message which is "I want to openly display my contempt for you people." And as several people have noted, you do it even in the most tangentially related threads just because you have a hammer and you want to swing it.

As for "I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team."That is "I really want to tell you what I really think of you and display my contempt even more openly, but I know I'd get modded if I did so I am just going to handwave in that direction and expect you to understand I'm insulting you even though I'm not technically allowed to do that." Speak plainly, and if you know "speaking plainly" would get you modded, then either keep it to yourself, or figure out how to express what you want to say in an appropriate manner (it's not like people here don't call each other's ideas stupid and evil every day).

Fine, you want me to speak plainly let us speak plainly.

It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives. Thomas Sowell might not have mentioned HBD directly in Conflict of Visions but it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in pretty much everything that gets posted on the topic. Personally, the breaking point/scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and the bulk of the users here defended it. On a dime I saw users (including some who are active in this very thread right now) flip from "the data is obvious and supports our conclusion" to "we must manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another forum; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it cuts to the quick as It exposes HBD as a normative belief rather than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.

I know I catch a lot of flak for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding the topic here is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you have gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra the Sequences, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask is not whether a statement is true or false, the question is "Cui Bono?".

Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.

You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...

You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...

Now, hang on.

At this point, my problem as a moderator with "HBD" discussions in this space is that people are far too quick to resort to shorthanded arguments either way. Part of writing to include everyone is writing to include people who aren't already marinated in decades of internet debates concerning (respectively) "the real and charitably-interpreted science of human group differences" and/or "the historic use of 'Science!' to excuse the oppression of disfavored human groups."

Of course, I can't realistically require every poster to relitigate past issues in microscopic detail in every single post. But right now I think I am seeing the opposite problem more often, where the discussion history between community members is functioning as unnecessary conversational baggage.

I'd really like to see more discussion and less axe grinding, I think is what I'm getting at. You get a lot of leeway as a valuable member of the community and, frankly, as a past moderator. The bans you're eating are not because of heresy against the sociopolitical dogmas of Bay Area Rationalists (of any particular tribe). They are because you sometimes decide that a certain argument is worth burning through some of the goodwill you've accumulated over the years. I have definitely been there and done that. But you're doing it a lot lately, and that is a trend I'd like to see reversed.

I am not mod-hatting this comment as a warning. I am mod-hatting this comment because I am speaking as a moderator, here.

Race Norming

I don't see what the race norming scandal had to do with lying. As far as I understand it, it isn't facially unreasonable to estimate the past IQ of black people based on the black population mean instead of the general population mean for paying out injury settlements. I don't at all see how this is manipulating the data to reflect the truth. Especially since it's, like, for an injury settlement.

People who possess merit benefit from HBD awareness because if it succeeds 1) they don't have to keep pretending that they can't see the obvious correlations between race and achievement anywhere and 2) don't have to take 'affirmative action'-style hiring practices to hire supposedly high potential but socially disadvantaged minorities who will in fact perform poorly.

I don't see what the race norming scandal had to do with lying.

Charitably it might be more "trying to have your cake and eat it too" than "lying", but Hlynka tends to be cynical about his opponents. My example in that vein is a certain type of person suddenly defending the Ivy-League's "holistic" recruitment criteria, when someone points out they primarily discriminate against Asians.

As far as I understand it, it isn't facially unreasonable to estimate the past IQ of black people based on the black population mean instead of the general population mean for paying out injury settlements.

It might have been reasonable when settling the first case, for lack of alternatives. Once it becomes routine, I don't see an excuse for not simply testing each athlete at the start of their career.

I don't at all see how this is manipulating the data to reflect the truth.

It might give off a certain "working backwards from a conclusion vibe". Isn't the proper way to draw conclusions about group differences, to measure and aggregate individual results, rather than to say "this here bloke couldn't have been hurt by all these concussions, he was always a dum-dum, because he comes from a group of dum-dums"?

I don't see an excuse for not simply testing each athlete at the start of their career.

Except that this is exactly what the NFL had been doing since the 70s. The scandal, that is the behavior that users here were defending, was that the NFL got caught artificially lowering the Wonderlic scores of high-performing blacks "to more correctly reflect the baseline" (whatever that means) and (presumably) minimize disability payments to black players.

In other words, about as clear-cut a case of racial discrimination winning out over colorblind meritocracy as one could ask for. That a significant portion of active HBDers on the Motte came out against standardized testing and defended the NFL's behavior is a dead give-away for which side of the "meritocracy" debate they're really on.

I don't remember that debate on themotte, but I feel like this probably isn't an accurate description how that discussion went? I highly doubt the 'HBDers' were defending 'using a group mean instead of individual scores when the individual scores were easily available'

Wasn't that what you just did a moment ago?

More comments

I wasn't paying attention to the story when it was in the news, or was being discussed here. Thanks for pointing it out.

That's fair, and to be clear I'm not holding this against you, but this is why I describe it as a "scales falling from my eyes moment". I've already eaten a couple warnings and a ban for making comments to the effect of "[User] is a lying liar and here's the thread that proves it." which is why I dance around it now.

More comments

You'd get less pushback if you said this out loud. Especially since nothing about this argument you think is so difficult for people to understand is not regularly discussed on this forum and the limits of utilitarianism are commonly understood even by the people who espouse it depending on their utility functions.

Stop going after specific people and go after arguments. This passive-aggressive bullshit is something I expect from Americans, but as someone who tells us all frequently about how he is a member of the warrior caste, your snide jabs and thinly veiled sneers are irritating in the extreme. If you want a fight on the internet, you can get one quite easily without having to resort to these sneers where you pretend to hold yourself privy to some secret of the universe all the stupid rationalists don't get. Nothing is new under the sun, not least of which the things you think other people don't get or haven't considered.

I spoke plainly, before the server reset, about fighting ecological x-risk and climate change by nuking India, and by attachment, any other nation with significant growth potential, with the express goal of making sure that no country ever industrialized again. I was pilloried and given mod warnings, but I was still allowed to express my opinion.

By comparison, "cui bono" is barely even an argument. If you want to speak plainly, then you tell us. You tell us who benefits, and then we can see if that's true in the long or short term. Personally, I have little faith in the ability of anyone at all to plan for long term outcomes, especially if the outcomes are distributed over other people.

I largely agree with you that your commitment to "Racial Blindness" does require blindness to the reality of HBD. I disagree with others challenging you that they want race-blindness as a matter of policy but they just have an intellectual curiosity in the HBD topic. They aren't racists or bad people, because they want everyone to be blind to race as a matter of policy, they just want themselves to know the truth beneath the collective charade.

I agree with you this position is untenable. You can't really, truly believe "all men are created equal" and internalize HBD. I reject race-blindness on principle, I am going to believe my lying eyes. But I don't reject race-blindness because I'm a bad person, but because I've asked "who benefits from Race Blindness?"

The question "who benefits from Id Pol" is just so extremely easy to answer. Obviously all the groups which agitate for their interests on behalf of their identity and have radically changed culture and policy, to the benefit of their political and cultural power, as a direct result of their agitation benefit from Id Pol.

As far as "who benefits from Race Blindness?", that's a question which equally easy to answer: the people who radically agitate for their own racial interests while simultaneously demanding race blindness for White people benefit from Race Blindness. This encompasses every race except for White people, most notably the Jews who doggedly agitate for their ethnic interests while demanding race blindness from and perpetuating racial animosity towards White people. On the one hand, cats are out of bags and people are becoming aware of this pattern which has dominated culture and academia for the past century (just read the replies!). On the other hand, if you remain willfully blind to something like differences in the distribution of cognitive traits between races of people you are also going to remain blind to that pattern of behavior as well.

This is to say, I think you are correct to code people who accept HBD as intrinsically being enemies of race blindness- they call it a Noble Lie for a reason! If you believe the cause but don't support the Lie that justifies it, then you should seriously consider if this is an ideology you believe in.

Your personal moral convictions regarding HBD posters don't seem to be especially interesting or important to anyone, and I'm not sure why you would have ever expected otherwise.

Why don't you spend a little bit less time repeating them to an apparently disinterested audience, and a little more time doing things like backing up your ludicrous claims? You stated here that "those were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now" while in this post last week you said "those Anti-policing pushes have been spearheaded by the same class of people who are spearheading HBD awareness, namely secular progressive Democrats."

I want you to either defend these claims, by which I mean name actual names and cite actual evidence of progressive Democrats "spearheading" and "pushing" HBD, or flatly shut the fuck up and stop lying. I'm tired of watching you have these arguments with your feet firmly planted in Bizzarro World.

Step outside your extremely-online rationalist bubble and look around.

Look at who is pushing "Racial Consciousness", Look at who is arguing that things like colorblindness and standardized testing are "problematic" or "unscientific" and where they are arguing these things. Look at what flags they are flying. Only one of the two mainstream parties in the US has been actively campaigning against meritocracy and in favor of racial discrimination and it isn't the Republicans and they aren't doing it in any of the "red" states.

Oh, so you just call everything you disagree with on the subject of race "HBD" whether the stated reasoning has anything to do with genetics or not. Brilliant. Let me guess, you read their minds and decided you could disregard everything they were saying in favor of your own imagined "real" version of their arguments.

No, progressive Democrats are not HBD advocates. They generally get really agitated whenever anyone brings up HBD as an explanation for anything. Stop posting like anyone else knows or gives a shit about your personal imaginary versions of what everyone thinks.

You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...

No, dude.

It boggles me how a former mod, and someone who still interacts with us all the time (both positively and negatively) can continue to get it so badly wrong. I expect other axe-grinding ideologues to pull out these arguments about how dumb and converged and oblivious the mod team is, but you should know better.

You know we don't ban arguments. We don't ban people arguing HBD. We don't ban people arguing against HBD. You are allowed to say HBD is proof that blacks should be all be sent back to Africa, you are allowed to say that HBD is made-up bullshit, you are allowed to say that HBD is obviously true but we should still blah blah blah. And you are allowed to say that HBD is a product of liberal progressive values emanating from the Bay Area, or rationalists papering over their racial and class resentments. (I personally think that's one of your sillier takes, but whatever.)

Why do you get modded? Because it's not enough for you to disagree with people or tell them you think their beliefs are wrong, or even that you don't think they're being honest about their beliefs. You right here were very clearly trying to goad and bait the people you have a problem with (Cimrafa, BurdensomeCount, Hoffmeister, SecureSignals, etc.). You write in an antagonistic way - "You people are actually a bunch of leftists and you're lying about what you think FIGHT ME" - because you want a fight. And it's that last part - wanting a fight - which keeps getting you dinged. Not your weird version of horseshoe theory or your campaign against HBD. I mean, on the scale of people with obnoxious takes they can't shut up about that the mod team doesn't much like, you are nowhere near the "I wish this guy would just fucking go away" zone. And yet you get modded more often than a lot of the people with more extreme shitty hot takes. Why? Because you keep deliberately going after your enemies because you really, really want to get their goat. (Or maybe because you think Zorba will finally see the light and ban all the people you think we should ban? I dunno.)

The post I made above was expressing my annoyance about "I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team." Yes, it's quite possible your "theories" would not be considered charitable or kind by the mod team, because we don't look kindly on screeds trying to critique someone's beliefs by mapping out their perceived personal shortcomings. If you've got something else, talk about the beliefs.

It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives.

Of course some people who espouse HBD are basically white nationalists. And some aren't. You are treating them as one homogenous group.

It's not even very hard to tell the difference; the white nationalists don't like treating Jews and Asians as intelligent.

The most prominent white nationalist publication, American Renaissance, routinely discusses the average Asian IQ advantage over whites’. Other than the occasional contrarian crank like Neema Parvini (who is not a white nationalist, and who, as his name suggests, would not be invited into most white nationalists’ ideal state) few if any of even the most hardcore racialists dispute the data about Asian or Jewish IQ.

I don't see white nationalists claiming Jews aren't intelligent.

A common Nazi trope was condemning the Jews' "trickery" and "evil cunning" in cheating/inveigling money from "honest but simple" German workers and farmers.

They also don't like Jews and Asians, period. And it's not that hard to notice.

That happens a lot actually. Not among HBD people, but actual white nationalists, the kind who like hitler or explicitly say "I want a Christian White Nation".

And especially, more intelligent than whites.

That isn't what that post is about. The title of that post is "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". (In anticipated experiences). HBD pays rent, depending on how you interpret it, in anticipated experiences by predicting a lot of anticipated experiences, such as future differences in behavior of various races, future test scores of various races, future successes of countries populated almost entirely by various races, how effective interventions in schooling or income vs interventions in genes will be to modify such outcomes, etc. Yudkowsky is definitely not claiming that if something isn't politically useful, it isn't worth knowing.

But you can also still have widespread knowledge of HBD and also colorblind meritocracy. That we've been moving away from that a bit doesn't actually make it too unstable to maintain, most aspects of social organization ebb and flow with time. To make a larger scale comparison, if you think free-market capitalism and democracy are inevitable - consider communism, fascism, and the significant appeal that the two had within many liberal democracies around a century ago. They ended up being stable because they weathered tough storms, not because the water was calm. Similarly, 'colorblind meritocracy' is having a bit of a tough few decades, but that itself is very weak evidence against the thing's ability to persist.

Colourblind meritocracy is the best public policy approach, I fully agree. However, the challenge to colorblind meritocracy is that certain people argue "We can see racial minorities are still disadvantaged, therefore your 'colourblind meritocracy' is a lie propagated to support a system of racial supremacy". That challenge can only be defeated by pointing out that sometimes certain groups get arrested more because they are more criminal, or score lower on tests because they are less smart, or whatever. The individual should still be treated as an individual, but you cannot justify doing that unless you have an explanation other than "systemic racism" for when people notice your colourblind meritocracy finds certain colours have less merit.

That challenge can only be defeated by pointing out that sometimes certain groups get arrested more because they are more criminal, or score lower on tests because they are less smart, or whatever

No I don't think so. If your goal is to be rigorous and fact based, then asserting a different simple explanation for a complex and highly path dependent process is more likely to be wrong. It's also just not logically how you disprove things anyway.

On a political basis, where facts don't matter, or where people are unlikely to be swayed by mere facts only, it's also not an effective challenge for the reason I said downthread: you're just confirming your opponent's biases.

I think there are many possible antidotes to the idea that we need institutional discrimination to fix prior discrimination and HBD is among the worst of these.

I don't know how the HBD vs racism argument got wrapped up with meritocracy, but it seems to me they are totally orthogonal . I wouldn't make someone with down syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, or extreme lead poisoning, or who suffered so much racism that they didn't learn to read, the CEO of my company, no matter how unfair their circumstances, no matter that their conditions is totally out of their control. Meritocracy doesn't need any explanation whatsoever for why differences in abilities exist.

No I don't think so. If your goal is to be rigorous and fact based, then asserting a different simple explanation for a complex and highly path dependent process is more likely to be wrong. It's also just not logically how you disprove things anyway.

But it is obviously the correct answer in those specific cases, at least. The reason Jews score well on tests is because they're smarter (on average). The reason blacks are arrested more is because a larger share of the crime is done by them. These are the simplest and correct answers to those questions. It might not be as good of an answer to the larger question of why groups are disadvantaged across the board, but it is the most accurate answer in those specific cases.

Meritocracy doesn't need any explanation whatsoever for why differences in abilities exist.

The problem is there's already an explanation: there aren't really any differences in abilities, you're just discriminating. And that explanation is enough to get you to pay massive fines or go to jail.

Really getting tired of your constant baiting and insinuation on this topic.

We're tired of people posting low effort "I hate this post, shut up" responses. If you don't have anything more substantive to say than that, keep it to yourself.

You know, I've always hated the term "HBD" because it's abstract and euphemistic to the point of seeming cowardly, as if the point of the term is to hide what it actually means. I don't know who coined the term, but maybe concealment was actually the intention. The vast majority of the time, when somebody uses the term they mean "being aware of genetically caused differences in intelligence and behavior between human groups". BAOGCDIIABBHG doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but it's much more honest.

But anyway, whatever we call it, I don't think it's incompatible with colorblind meritocracy. I think that "HBD" is probably correct, but I don't want to use it to justify discriminating against people based on the average characteristics of the genetic groups that they belong to. Why not have an HBD-aware colorblind meritocracy, where "colorblind" in this case would mean "being aware of color, but not discriminating against individuals because of it"?

One of the problems is that terms like this often succumb to a kind of definition creep. Any postulated definition for 'HBD' shifts as the term is used.

'HBD' stands for 'human biodiversity'. The minimalist definition of it is something like what you said - being aware that there is genetic differentiation among modern human populations. That minimal definition is obvious, uncontroversial among all but the most radical blank-slatists, and also useless for most practical purposes. More importantly, it's not the way the term is used in practice. The category 'people who agree that there is genetic differentiation between human populations' is so vast and expansive as to massively outrun the term itself. When people talk about "being aware of HBD" or the like, they appear to mean something beyond just the motte of the term.

I would take a middling definition of HBD to be something more like, "1) there is genetic differentiation among modern human populations, 2) that differentiation more-or-less, if imperfectly, maps on to popular understandings of race, and 3) this has consequences for public policy". It seems to me that anyone who denies any of those three points is not really an HBDer beyond the most minimal sense of the term. There's room for debate about exactly what the differentiation is, how significant it is, what sorts of policy conclusions should follow, and so on, but the basic point is that race, in a genetic sense, both exists and is important.

And then past there I think there's a maximalist definition that accepts everything in the middling definition, but runs with specific implications for policy - this is the sort that just openly says that black people are genetically less capable and there's a dysgenic issue and so on.

The problem is that anyone criticising HBD (or more pertinently, HBDers-as-a-community) has a very strong incentive to portray the whole group as following the maximalist definition, and anyone defending HBD/HBDers-as-a-community has a strong incentive to portray HBD as only the minimalist definition. Probably most people who identify as HBDers are somewhere in the middle. Minimalists are unlikely to use the term even if they agree with the minimalist definition, because using it lumps them in with the others (including the maximalists, who most minimalists surely recoil from), and then of course even true maximalists have an incentive to water their views down and present themselves as moderates.

Anyway, realistically I just don't think it's a useful term. 'HBD' is too broad to be useful. I think it would be more practical if maximalists and the top end of moderates just ditched the euphemism and called themselves racialists or something - that's a more accurate label for what they are. Maybe they could use 'race realists'? That's a term that's gone around the block a bit. But as it is I feel like 'HBD' is a silly euphemism that people use mostly in order to avoid saying the word 'race'. Even though that is clearly what it's about.

What exactly do you consider an "HBD aware" set of policies? If you are going to attack a strawman, at least say what that strawman is. As a sort of HBDer (I never particularly liked the ring of the term, but please tell me what I am allowed to call the position that a lot of valued traits including in particular intelligence are heritable and different ethnic groups have different averages in them, without being lumped in with people who want to advocate for spoils for or collusion their own ethnic group), I don't recall ever arguing or wishing for anything other than colorblind and meritocratic policies, and the posts you regularly make seemingly just to try and remind people to associate the former with the latter are really rather tiresome. I'm struggling to understand why you are doing this - are you trying to troll us anti-racial-spoils hereditarians into surrender or meltdown because you think we're legitimising actual racists? If so, why even bother with the complete political non-force that are card-carrying racists? Is it because you think that they are unfairly associated with your political beliefs?

Then I ask you the same question that I keep asking and that no one here seems to have an answer for. Assuming for the sake of argument that HBD is true and that group differences are, as a rule, more determinative than individual variance, what of it? What value does "HBD Awareness" add over individual assessments of merit? Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?

Can you point me to a single poster here who affirms HBD and is opposed to colorblind meritocracy?

See my reply to @Amadan

Ah, yes, thank you, for some of the people you listed there, that would be entirely conceivable.

Do you think it might be worth discriminating (sorry, had to make the pun) in your tirades between those who are white identitarians (roughly), who have racial animus, and those where that's not the case?

We definitely have people in each of those camps here, and that seems like that's worth distinguishing between. Your comments that it's essentially a normative claim make a lot more sense now; just don't lump everyone else in with that.

There are two types of discrimination. Against citizens and against non citizens. I think that HBD discrimination against non citizens is totally ok. So you can tune the migration flows accordingly.

I think like this question has been answered multiple times, and you never seem to as much as acknowledge the answer: the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casuallycausally involved in the outcome or its measurement.

This argument is currently ubiquitous, which is not surprising because if HBD is false, it's compelling. It's also being used to justify a wide range of measures that I believe to be materially disadvantageous for most humans, morally repugnant and often also concretely detrimental to myself (since as a working academic I have encountered the gamut of measures from finding myself on the wrong side of quotas to being hit with pressure from above and busywork due to vocal individual students who underperformed while belonging to a putatively disadvantaged group). Do you disagree with the point that if HBD is false and yet we observe the outcomes that we do, measures such as quotas, embedding of political officers in institutions that produce excessive discrepancies, loyalty/attitude tests for workers in outcome-assessment jobs and mandatory reeducation are at least justifiable?

You offer up "colourblind meritocracy" as an alternative to HBD as if in the world where the consensus belief is not-HBD plus we must have a colourblind meritocracy, people would look at the differences in outcomes and just go like "shucks, guess we must try at the colourblind meritocracy thing harder". This strikes me as very far-fetched. Certainly, if I had an axiomatic belief in non-HBD, I would think the state of reality is horrifying enough to warrant most of what is being done, only more and better.

the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination.

Does it though?

My impression is essentially that of @Doubletree2 below, with an additional coda from my reply to @Amadan;

"Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit."

See also Clarence Thomas' comments on Affirmative Action and the "soft bigotry" of low expectations.

Edit: Formatting

I could be wrong, but I don't think the poster you're responding to is opposed to "Anglo/American norms about the equality of opportunity and equality before the law," but is in fact arguing that we'd have them better if we accept something like HBD, because thinking HBD is false in a world where HBD is true tends to lead to the breakdown of those norms.

the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casually involved in the outcome or its measurement.

It doesn't actually do this though, in practical terms, in a conflict/political context. If you respond to the blank-slatist-unequal-outcomes with "actually, black people are genetically less intelligent so there's no problem here", you're not just shooting yourself in the foot, you're shooting yourself in the face.

The person who makes the former argument already believes that society is full of people who believe black people are inherently stupider/more criminal/whatever and make real consequential decisions based on that belief. When you say then, "yes I do believe black people are inherently stupider and intend to make practical, perhaps policy decisions based on that, and here's all the science that shows I'm right", that is not a counter argument. It is exactly the opposite of a counterargument.

I'm confused as to what you are trying to say here, but it seems like you are conflating the signifier and what it signifies. Specifically, you seem to be taking the contents of the putative counterargument to be "someone exists who believes X", as opposed to the contents of X (and, implicitly, the evidence that would result in someone believing that). Of course my goal is not just to stand in the market place and announce to everyone that I believe in heredity-plus-group-average differences. Rather, my goal is for other people, including people like you, but at least people at the levers of power, to be convinced of it, so that they may make better decisions. Imagine, to take an example from your posting history, that you are trying to convince someone that election fraud in the US was not a significant factor, and certainly did not cause Trump's loss; but their reaction starts out with "What of it? Even if there was actually no election fraud, why do you care so much to prove that?" and then, as you try to respond that and/or point them at evidence for your position, they change their response to "I already knew you believed that there was no election fraud, so you are not telling me anything new".

As an aside, I don't think the word "inherent" adds much to the discussion here. What's the difference between someone being merely stupid and being inherently stupid? It seems that the usage here only serves to sound a little like "invariably", which is emphatically not what the hereditarian thesis is about - there exist plenty of intelligent/prosocial and unintelligent/antisocial members of any ethnic group.

Given the analogy youve made with election deniers (totally not the same structure at all), it's probable my point didn't come across.

When you said "hbd counters the [institutional racism] argument", I imagined someone actually making that argument in the context of unequal outcomes. I.e. Saying the real words to a real person, perhaps in a public forum, who has prior beliefs in the opposite stance (differences are due to systemic racism).

But, it sounds like that is not what you had in mind. So who is making the argument, who is the recipient, and what is the forum where the argument is occurring?

Asiding your aside: "inherent" seems to me to be the crux of the whole debate! I did not mean "invariably". If intelligence were easily malleable, making stupid people smarter would just be a matter of better education or nutrition or something. Yet the HBD stance is that your intelligence is capped from the moment you're conceived.

I think the phrase 'HBD awareness' is being used specifically to side step the practical political realities of how unpopular the concept is. That is, I do not think most people mean a literal awareness campaign where they want to just go around and tell progressives that race realism is correct, or some such, and think that would work. I assume when 'HBD awareness' is being brought up it is normally presupposing a world where people are at least open to being convinced that HBD is correct, or already think that it is correct, and then reasoning about the possible policy realities from that point.

I think that "HBD awareness" serves same purpose on the Alt Right that "Race Consciousness" and "Social Justice" serve on the woke. That is as euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit that has become fashionable amongst queer theater kids but remains deeply unpopular amongst the general population.

It's arguments as soldiers all the way down.

It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.

As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.

HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.

The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.

More comments

I was speaking specifically to this comment thread/similar comment threads here on the Motte and am not sure how people more generally use 'HBD awareness' in conversation.

From this thread, you said, paraphrasing, 'Assuming for the sake of the argument that HBD is correct, what does being "HBD aware" add,' and 4bpp, again paraphrasing, explained that HBD is an 'alternative to the normal structural racism argument used to explain disparate outcomes, with HBD we could stop enforcing disparate impact laws, because disparate impact would not longer be considered iron-clad proof of racial discrimination'. Finally Doubletree2 chimed in, yes I am still paraphrasing, saying that 'explaining HBD to the structural racism people would just convince them that structural racism is correct, cause you sound like a racist'. I was responding to what I felt was Doubletree2's confusion as to what was being discussed, and that nobody was using 'HBD awareness' to mean, telling progressives HBD things. In both your prompt and 4bpp's response it is a basic assumption of the thought experiment that HBD is accepted enough to inform policy.

Anti HBD is used to promote discrimination based on the idea that underperformers are oppressed by evil racist groups. Moreover, to the extend that there is redistribution from one ethnic group in favor of others, then HBD reveals this fact and that rather than contempt for inequality remaining, appreciation for being helped can be the more honest and ethical response.

Anti HBD promotes discrimination, mistreatment of those who don't buy into it and is part of the lysenkoist regime where people whose views don't fit to it are slandered or implied to be nazi or nazi adjesent. This kind of regime leads to a lot of discirmination and worse. It leads to good people censored and losing their career. It has lead to murders too as in the Soviet Union.

It is a bad thing to slander and keep down people who believe something that is true. Truth matters. I would also say that it is a bad thing to promote falsehoods and people who promote them to have high status due to doing so.

However it is also detrimental relating to the problems of suppressing facts. You can't adequately deal with problems if you are living in a fantasy world. For example, if like most American liberals you are polled to have a wrong idea of black criminality and police shooting of blacks, then you are going to reach the wrong recommendations about what ought to be done, and even consider the correct policies to be racist.

Indeed, part of correct response to crime that could be effective could even involve say racial profiling. Knowing the facts leads to a more informed decision which can lead to less crime victims and a better society. Indeed, ironically black Americans would probably benefit more by policies that are realistic and focuses more than a politically correct regime would upon the demographic that a very disproportionate share of the violent crime which is young black men.

You are making a circular argument since by using the term discrimination, you seem to be using it under the connotation of prejudice, and unfairness.

I would also consider HBD and being even more willing to oppose mass migration of foreigners because many would be of lower human capital and net drain financially, to also be a case of non unethical/prejudiced narrative, but in fact the opposite as the idea that a people are not sovereign and don't have self determination to be ruled in favor of their interests and should be pathologically altruist in favor of foreign groups at their expense would be anti native racist. Knowing HBD helps people take a more informed decision on issues like mass migration. Which is one of the reasons is suppressed, so people take a more uninformed pro migration decision.

That being said I do think certain HBD narratives could be used to justify bad things and should be kept down. We have seen them in motte more so in the Israel/Palestinian conflict where certain posters have justified violation of human rights and destruction of Palestinians in part by using the arguement of them being inferior to the superior race of the Jews. I do think this kind of support of destruction of a group is obviously incredibly unethical. But we should be supressing and treating as taboo and being unpleasant and willing to give backlash, and keeping out of influence to the people who have such view, this kind of narrative/viewpoint, not HBD as a whole.

We should be hostile to "We do better and we are superior, give us all your stuff" for the same reason that we should be hostile towards "We do worse, give us all your stuff so we aren't inferior" deserves hostility. So a certain ethical prior is necessary. Or at minimum not accepting the premise that inequalities of such manner justify taking from others what is rightfully theirs.

So yeah, there is an element of unfairness HBD narrative (which is a narrative that uses HBD and not something inherent to it) that I am not against being critical off, but HBD is also related to narratives that are good and useful and even most importantly undermine some very harmful anti-HBD narratives I explained in the beginning, and are in fact dominant and doing a lot of damage right now.

Interestingly, on an individual basis the belief of human differences in intelligence is quite common and that does tend to come along with views more in line to what I promote here. We also see the belief in biological differences in ability to become muscular in discussions related to fitness to lead to something more in line with what I promote. Imagine how stupid discussions about fitness where if people denied biological athletic differences. It is simply efficient and useful knowledge for society.

The arrogance of the people who think suppressing truths is noble and only bad motives could lead to promoting truths is really astounding. It is in fact far more the case that falsehoods and lies are motivated by bad intentions.

Much of that relates to the desire to win politically by buying into the sacredness of one's political faction and evil of opposition, which is a false view. For if your faction was so noble, and your opposition so evil, your political faction wouldn't have to win by suppressing the truth.

We should be hostile to "We do better and we are superior, give us all your stuff" for the same reason that we should be hostile towards "We do worse, give us all your stuff so we aren't inferior" deserves hostility. So a certain ethical prior is necessary. Or at minimum not accepting the premise that inequalities of such manner justify taking from others what is rightfully theirs.

The left has been sufficiently successful at constraining the Overton window such that people—including HBD-adjacent crime-thinkers—forget the opposite of affirmative action and reparations is not colorblindness, but rather massive transfers of resources and opportunities from blacks and latinos to whites and Asians.

If a racial spoils system is on the table, and if not for fears of Cancellation, why shouldn’t whites and Asians advocate for themselves instead of bending the knee and washing feet? Colorblindness is already the compromise position.

If a racial spoils system is on the table, and if not for fears of Cancellation, why shouldn’t whites and Asians advocate for themselves instead of bending the knee and washing feet?

Asians are. Whites won't, because for elite whites it's unthinkable and whites for whom it is thinkable for are irrelevant "deplorables" who can simply be shut down by any means available.

Sure, Asian Americans sometimes exhibit more asabiyyah than white Americans. However, that’s like being richer than someone with zero or negative net worth, having more backbone than someone with zero or negative self worth. And I had hypothetical offensive rather than defensive self-advocacy in mind, hence the mentioning of a “racial spoils system.”

Asian Americans do sometimes manage to muster up some defensive advocacy, like showing up to vote against affirmative action in UC schools or mildly objecting to their grannies getting bustled in the street. However, they lack the ethno-narcissism, the offensive self-advocacy of blacks (and to a lesser extent, latinos) in demanding to be treated better than other races in law, politics, governance, education, employment, healthcare, entertainment and mainstream media in an absolute sense, not just relative to the current state of affairs.

In such arenas, Asian self-advocacy ends where black and latino feelings begin. For example, in the link you provided, I clicked around a few pages and didn’t see anywhere Noticing as to who is actually committing the acts of AAPI hatred. No “despite”-posting… despite… how relevant it’d be. #StopAsianHate quickly lost momentum as it became undeniable who was actually doing the granny-punching. For decades now it’s pretty typical that the Asian thought-leader responses to black-on-Asian violence are calls for solidarity (presumably, to create a united front against the true bad persons that are whites) and not RETVRN TO ROOFTOP. Any Asian solidarity with blacks is and/or would be unreciprocated—a one-way street—for interracial crime, net-income transfers, and racial preferences flow only unidirectionally.

It’s also funny that the website is #StopAAPIHate, I suppose a movement having evolved from #StopAsianHate, when basically all the external violence inflicted is upon the AA rather than PI part. I guess it was a strategic maneuver to bring a more fashionable minority group (or, at least, a less unfashionable one) under the fold for optics and numbers. A lot more violence against PIs relative to AAs is intra-group violence, a phenomenon young PI men would be happy to tell you, reminisce and/or brag about.

In mainstream spaces, Western-raised Asian women will sometimes bemoan that, historically, Asian women have been depicted as submissive, exotic sex objects, rather than kickass #GirlBosses. Asian men will sometimes bemoan (and the odd Asian woman here or there, even if it just so happens her boyfriend/husband is white, teehee) why there aren’t more masculine Asian men depicted in film, television, music, as opposed to Asian minstrel shows that make them look like small-dicked asexuals, such as Ken Jeong’s Hangover character. A eunuch has more dignity than that. Even in The Departed, where the Asian mob characters don’t look like obvious pushovers, Nicholson’s character basically calls them small-dicked chinks to their faces while the audience laughs. Nicholson's character calling an analogous group of black mobsters a bunch of low-IQ chimps would be far less imaginable.

Yet, the same Asian men and women won’t dare ask why so many doctors and scientists are so blackwashed in TV and film at the expense of Asians, in contrary to the proportions in real life. Just like Asian Americans might sometimes complain about and oppose affirmative action, but only insofar as they are discriminated against relative to whites, and avoiding the elephant in the room that are racial preferences against them and in favor of blacks and latinos.

Yes, in ${CurrentYear} Asian Americans barely exhibit any sort of defensive self-advocacy and no material offensive self-advocacy, and whites exhibit neither defensive or offensive material positive self-advocacy, oftentimes negative self-advocacy. Supposed white supremacists like Steve Sailer or whoever exhibit but a fraction of the in-group preference (if Sailer even does at all) that blacks do in the mainstream. Black in-group preference is tolerated and encouraged, codified in law and practice.

White Americans—and to a lesser extent, Asian Americans—currently don’t (or barely) engage in any self-advocacy, but it’s not some fundamental law of the universe that they can’t or won’t. And perhaps they should.

Cooperating with defect bots is a quokka’s venture. If a colorblind system isn’t in play, where the chips fall where they may, then who gets the racial spoils is up for debate. Yes, madam, we’ve established what sort of system you want. Now we’re just haggling over in which direction the literal and metaphorical checks should be cut, and in what quantities.

Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?

The standard answer around here is that the purpose is to be a response to systemic racism arguments, that assume differences in outcome must come from racism. Not that I don't see how this approach could backfire badly, but I don't think it's fair to act like you never got an answer.

Why are you failing to understand that the race-blind meritocracy we have tried ends with predictable racial disparities, which leads to DEI to combat “systemic racism”?

Most of the posters I see here support race-blind individualism and recognize that the hereditarian reality will have to be acknowledged such that “systemic racism” won’t move elites and institutions to jettison the meritocracy.

Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, most of us here want individual assessments of merit, not race-based discrimination.

Because unlike most of the users here, I am not working backwards from a preexisting conclusion.

That's not an answer to the question you were asked.

To reiterate the argument that everyone's saying:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality"
  4. Everyone finds this compelling, and we lose our raceblind meritocracy

What many proponents of HBD-ish things want is:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality"
  4. Others point out, "Those are due to differences in ability, not discrimination; this was to be expected"
  5. We get to keep our raceblind meritocracy.

I'm sure you've heard this argument at least 30 times at this point. Is there a reason that it's wrong? (It might be tricky to get to work in practice, because people don't like the idea of racial differences of ability. But it's appealing, at least—just explaining why something is the case is always a tempting possibility when people are insinuating that it's the case for other reasons and so endorsing bad policy.)

I don't think most users here are working backwards from a preexisting conclusion; I think you're uncharitably lumping everyone in one bucket.

Edit: And you seem to be the one working backwards from a preexisting conclusion? You've made literally no, as far as I can see, arguments that none of the disparity between groups is genetic, you've just been arguing that those who hold such a position are morally bad.

Missing from this paradigm:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality."
  4. Others point out, "Those are due to nature being racist, not discrimination by humans; we need to fix this with gene editing or something of that sort."
  5. We get to keep our raceblind meritocracy and close the racial gaps.

Sure. (though I don't expect gene editing etc. to be unique to the disadvantaged)

Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?

For the sake of truth.

The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero.

HBD is not a reason in favour of meritocracy so much as it is a reason against the current undeserved ethnic spoils arrangement we have. That exists by dint of the idea that all people are the same, and therefore all outcomes across groups should be proportionate, with no variance, and any deviation from that is necessarily due to -isms. By shattering the idea that all people are fundamentally the same, we remove any reason to think that outcomes across groups should be the same, which is an important step in shuttering the affirmative action industry.

Once AA and naked racial spoils agitation are removed we will naturally return to meritocracy.

we remove any reason to think that outcomes across groups should be the same

This gets back to that effort-post I need to write, but, for some "outcomes across groups should be the same" doesn't need a reason, because the "should" in that statement is expressing deontic modality, not epistemic modality. That "equity" — equal outcomes across groups — is a terminal value, a moral obligation of our society to provide, and which needs no further justification given its self-evident moral correctness. Like the Jamaican HBD blogger who argued that blacks are indeed genetically predisposed to higher criminality, but that their incarceration rate should be population-proportional no matter how much more crime they commit, as part of his general position that society is obligated to redistribute from 'genetic haves' to 'genetic have-nots' however much is necessary to equalize group outcomes despite the differences in ability, intelligence, behavior, etc.

Exactly colorblind meritocracy isn’t a stable political equilibrium. I guess I am a progressive in the sense that I do want to see society improve. Americas thirst to improve will always exists. 15% of the American population getting .5% of the seats at Harvard based on a colorblind meritocracy sticks out. All the disparate results will look like something we should improve. The solution back in the ‘90s was blaming black culture. Going back to rich white people lecturing on culture feels like it’s going back and is an example of a wrong policy solution.

The one interesting thing is the wokesters seems to have implemented Affirmative Action for the NBA’s slam dunk contest as the winner the last two years was a white guy with only one NBA star participating and the rest minor leaguers. We’ve gotten a black Harvard President and a white slam dunk winner. But I think it’s better having an old white dude running Harvard and watching Jordan dunk. I don’t think a meritocracy is sustainable without a general understanding of hbd. And I wish Hanania would speak directly on how his color blind meritocracy is going to be sustainable.

The bad black culture meme worked for about 50 years. When that didn’t fix things we got wokism. We aren’t going back to blaming culture and we need a new reason why.

Colorblind meritocracy can be stable. Capitalism should naturally produce one, so most of what you need to is just keep the government small.

Unfortunately, keeping the government small is not stable.

It’s not with a Democracy which most capitalist are.

Yeah. Unfortunately, more despotic governments have their own problems as well.

The American system was better before the successive democratic innovations like primaries. I wish we could have a more stable system.

But I also don't trust the current elite class much, so, we're kind of stuck.

15% of the American population getting .5% of the seats at Harvard based on a colorblind meritocracy sticks out. All the disparate results will look like something we should improve.

Only through the lens of blank slatism and a pathological, reality-denying devotion to the idea of equality between peoples. Why insist on believing that evolution stopped at the neck? I cannot fathom it.

If you want to improve society, are you best off using your force multipliers on high value or low value propositions? Why bother spending billions bringing the dismal up to the lofty heights of "barely acceptable, sometimes" when the brilliant could do so much more with it?

Maybe it is time to start leaving some children behind.

Well the progressive worldview is exactly the opposite.

We should help the most needy the most. (Marxists and Christians of the world, unite!)

The low value proposition is the high value morality.

(For the record, people can and do hold these views without being a blank statist. Freddie deBoer, for example.)

Welfare already does that.

There's no additional need to patronise the dismal by pretending for the sake of their egos that they're just as good as everyone else and definitely got their positions because they're awesome and not through several thumbs on the scale, and that they absolutely pay their way and contribute meaningfully.

If you MUST keep a pet population of ethnic underclasses for some reason, I still don't understand why you'd throw good money after bad trying to convince them they're not as obviously deficient as they actually are. Why do we need to throw away billions salving the egos of people who can never meaningfully give anything of worth back?

The message should be to just take your handouts and be grateful. If you want to escape the shame of basically being a pet of the taxpayer, do better in life.

As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.

Why do we need to throw away billions salving the egos of people who can never meaningfully give anything of worth back?

Because if you won't, they'll provide a political power base for those who will.

The normal answer to that would be "But the 60% of the population I'll be taking the billions from are a much larger political power base". Unfortunately the greatest trick the progressives pulled is to convince white people they don't matter.

More comments

I’m not a progressive so you don’t need to convince me.

As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.

Keep in mind the real demand signal frequently comes from well-off do gooders, who on average are quite intelligent, in the US at least. The underclass doesn’t have political power.

You used italics for quotes. The ordinary way to quote things is to use ">", so that it looks

like this. You can use the view source button to see how people format things.

If that was deliberate, ignore, of course.

The message should be to just take your handouts and be grateful. If you want to escape the shame of basically being a pet of the taxpayer, do better in life.

The line from Colonel Jessup comes to mind: “I would rather that you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way.”

As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.

Indeed.

Hence the pipeline of non-Asian minorities enrolling in schools they wouldn’t have gotten into in the first place if not for affirmative action -> Noticing that their white and Asian classmates are far stronger academically -> complaining that professors or The System are racist -> demanding further accommodations.

Even places that lack the belief in the biological equality of different populations have mostly ended up with some form of racial spoils system à la affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia or on the basis of caste in India, or else simply tried to expel the higher achieving population as Uganda did with the Indians or most Medieval European states did with the Jews at one time or another. The stated explanation is usually some form of "disparate economic outcomes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups are an incitement to violence and the higher achieving group must either pay the rest of us a bribe for their own safety or get out."

Only in places where the different groups exist on a continuum, Latin America for example, do we see less conflict on these particular grounds (I suppose you could argue that the class-based violence that occasionally consumes these countries is a proxy for it, but poor black Brazilians hating their rich white overlords because they're rich and not because they're white seems like an improvement over our situation). It may be trivial to say that there would be no racism if we all interbred until there were no distinctions, but it seems like we might only need to go halfway or less to get that benefit.

One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"

Link.

Note that it's pay rent in anticipated experiences. Not pay rent in popular political slogans. Not pay rent with gains in social status. Not pay rent with any utilitarian benefit. You seem to be using that term exactly the opposite way of Yudkowski, as HBDers have no problem linking those beliefs to anticipated outcomes.

You seem to be using that term exactly the opposite way of Yudkowski, as HBDers have no problem linking those beliefs to anticipated outcomes.

Am I? Are they?

My reply to you is effectively the same as my reply to @The_Nybbler, even if HBD is true (and that is an "if") what value does "HBD Awareness" add over a colorblind meritocracy in terms of anticipated experiences?

  • -13

Am I? Are they?

Yes, unless I'm severely misreading your tone. Even your own beliefs about HBD are "paying rent" in the Yudkowskian sense: You anticipate that adopting it would have a specific utilitarian effect.

even if HBD is true (and that is an "if") what value does "HBD Awareness" add over a colorblind meritocracy in terms of anticipated experiences?

That's a category error. HBD is a set of beliefs. Colorblind meritocracy is a set of policies.

A person that believed in blank-slatism would anticipate that a (true) colorblind meritocracy would provide demographically-equal outcomes, and might (or might not) promote those policies depending on how it lines up with their values. A person that believed in HBD would anticipate that a (true) colorblind meritocracy would provide demographically-unequal outcomes, and might (or might not) promote those policies depending on how it lines up with their values.

You anticipate that adopting it would have a specific utilitarian effect.

No, I don't. I believe that those pushing it believe it will, and that belief is one of the reasons I am skeptical because contra Scott and Elizer politics doesn't happen in a vacuum.

OK, then, how do you explain it, if this "colorblind meritocracy" is implemented and black doctors virtually disappear, black lawyers are largely relegated to the bottom of the profession, black-owned firms virtually disappear from government contracting, black students are missing from the Ivy League, and drop back to a few percentage points at state flagships, etc, etc?

What is there to explain? If the HBDers are correct, a color blind and meritocratic set of policies will lead to the same outcome as an "HBD aware" set, and if they are wrong, it is not I who owes anyone an explanation, it is they.

Their explanation is "it's racism, so we have to bring back affirmative action".

an "HBD aware" set

What is that set of policies? My first thought was colorblind meritocracy, but that's obviously not what you're referring to.

HBD aware could also promote the current policy framework. Reasoning that blacks will never achieve equal representation in a meritocracy they could argue for affirmative action in order to make a more stable society (I personally do support some affirmative action). You can’t have a stable Democracy where 15% of an easily identifiable ethnic group gets .3% of the elites if that. Those people vote too.

You tell me. What value does HBD awareness add unless one is looking to justify discrimination based on qualities other than individual merit?

I think HBD is true, and that's a damn shame. But, the reason Ben Carson is literally the only notable medical innovator to be black has to be a reason in a country with American racial politics. In a colorblind meritocracy Ben Carson, a bunch of Asians, and some whites would be recognized as medical geniuses. 'Why are so few of our medical geniuses black?' is a genuine question that is admittedly often asked by insane grifters.

It means that you're willing to accept than group differences might just actually be due to individual merit, not discrimination, which means we don't have to try to toss out our whole meritocratic system every time we see a disparity.

That's what it offers. An actual, colorblind, meritocratic system.

Am I convinced that we're able to get there? The path seems hard; people won't like to hear it. But that's the dream.

No, you tell me.

As-is, you might as well be asking me to define iouyqrwe while also basing your arguments on it.

why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested

Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001

Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.

Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.

https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984

Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.

People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads

the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero

What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?

If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?

Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread

I don't see a thread, just a single post with no responses.

Do I need to create a Xitter account to see the rest? Because that's not happening.

Twitter removed the ability to view threads without an account, yes. It is very annoying.

I admit I made a new account on an alt email after nitter got zucked... Alas it's not even on threadreader.

I can conceive it I just don't believe that's the real motive.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians. As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit. The greatest trick the DNC ever played was convincing the media and a whole generation of idiots with PHDs that they weren't the real racists.

  • -18

pushing HBD now

That's Steve Sailor, Amren, VDARE, James Watson, Kevin McDonald, Jared Taylor, Richard Lynn, Phillip Rushton... These guys weren't pushing DEI through Bush era, they've been consistent. See the enormous list:

https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/

If anything it's the Joe Biden's of the world that switched camp from 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle' to 'white Europeans are going to be a minority by 2017 and that's the source of our strength'.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians.

Like who?

Either start naming some Bush-era pushers of DEI who have transitioned to pushing HBD or stop foisting your hallucinations on us. You're constantly saying goofy shit like this while everyone else scratches their heads. Like this post from last week.

Yes and it's no coincidence that those Anti-policing pushes have been spearheaded by the same class of people who are spearheading HBD awareness, namely secular progressive Democrats.

Like... what? Progressive Democrats are spearheading HBD awareness? Gosh all the progs I hear from on Twitter and Reddit sure will be surprised, so why don't you just go ahead and list some of these progressive anti-policing Democrat HBD advocates for us?

@HlynkaCG why don’t you pony up and answer his question? It’s been ten hours since this question was posed to you, and you haven’t replied, despite answering other, less incisive, questions more recently.

You constantly claim that “nobody ever answer your questions” (despite having received countless high-quality answers of the years, all of which you forget immediately after reading them) so your lack of a rejoinder to this (presumably very easy for you to answer) question is pretty conspicuous.

Imagine the partisan-flipped alternate universe version of this. Bunch of progressives sitting around an internet forum all baffled while one of the other users rants about conservative Republicans pushing their LGBT ideology. When someone says they support LGBT he gets really combative and insists they're really a conservative, when someone asks exactly which Republicans support it he feigns blindness.

I mean this is just getting stupid. He insists on inserting himself into these conversations but then also insists on holding them in a fantasy world that only he inhabits.

As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit.

Looking at the election map of 1916, I see Wilson opposed by a coalition of New England Yankees and the places they settled in the upper Midwest. As best I can tell, these same Yankees and their intellectual descendants at the colleges they founded are the ones in charge of the Democratic Party today and peddling the latest racist "anti-racist" dogma.

I think the fact that New Hampshire broke the other way kind of throws a wrench into your theory.

That the brahmins in Cambridge and New Haven hadn't quite achieved the level of state control that they wield now doesn't mean that they weren't backing Wilson

New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.

Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):

What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now

This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?

This just isn't true.

You are wrong, the reason that Ryan Long, Bill Burr, and the Babylon Bee's various bits about woke people and racists believing essentially the same things are so funny and have gained such traction is because it is true.

  • -17

Wokes may be secret HBD believers- for my part I think most of them really do drink their own koolaid, but sure, a lot of what they do pattern matches to having HBD beliefs but worshipping blacks for whatever reason- but they're definitely not pushing HBD.

You’re conflating “having beliefs that appear the same” with “the same people.”

I don't think I am. Neither in Specific cases like Spencer, Yarvin, Unz, Sailer, Et Al. Nor in the more general category of Secular Progressive Blue/Grey-tribe Academics who mostly reside in California.

As I've observed in previous threads on the topic, that the Sunni and the Shia consider themselves to be completely different and often go to war against one another does not invalidate "Muslim" as a meaningful category.

Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.[37][39] His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime"

Yarvin was a libertarian before he was a reactionary.

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.[15] Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set.[13][16]

Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 and was "He was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013". "He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly"

Sailer "Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][12] "

As far as I can tell, you are just factually wrong. These people were not pushing 'DEI' during the 'bush administration'. Which is what you claimed. And their ideology before being reactionary seems to have mostly been conservative.

Even if you were right about those people, it wouldn't matter because you claimed "I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now". If that was true, then there would be around 50x more people pushing HBD. A lot of people were pro-diversity two decades ago.

Also, people change ideologies sometimes. Reactionaries have to come from somewhere if there were fewer of them 20 years ago. But a lot of them seem to have come from conservatism.

More comments

I think the reason that it isn't true is that people whose job it was elect Democrats, or who wrote intersectional social theory papers, or worked on diversity in HR during the Bush administration are, almost entirely, not currently HBD believers. I don't really see what the 'wokes are racist' youtube video has to do with that.

The fundamental issue is, assuming HBD is correct, anywhere that adopts "colorblind meritocracy" will see massive disparities across racial lines. How do you expect blank slatists to reconcile this outcome with their beliefs? They will believe the system is flawed, racist, nepotistic, etc. Meritocracy + blank slatism is not a stable equilibrium: you need some kind of explanation as to why there are more losers among some groups than others, or else the legitimacy of the system will be called into question.

"Cultural differences" is the major non-HBD "defense", and personally I don't think it's robust enough on its own: e.g., even rich blacks score worse than poor whites on the SAT.

rich blacks score worse than poor whites on the SAT.

rich blacks are disproportionately occupied in show business and sports, so...

"Cultural differences" is the major non-HBD "defense", and personally I don't think it's robust enough on its own: e.g., even rich blacks score worse than poor whites on the SAT.

There's a bit of a category mismatch going on there, so that isn't really a very compelling argument imo. Culture is orthogonal to wealth, so for example one can be rich while still also being steeped in a culture which says that academic success is bad (and one would expect such people to do worse on a test). What you really need to measure is how people from different cultures do on the SAT, not people of different wealth levels.

What I don't understand is what you think there is to reconcile. To me you seem to be to be starting from a desired conclusion IE on of strict race-essentialism and bio-determinism and then working backwards. If I am not someone who believes in those things, or who otherwise does not buy into the Left's wider narratives about group and class identity, where is the contradiction?

  • -11

To me you seem to be to be starting from a desired conclusion

Do you think anti-HBD people never do this? There is no problem starting with desired conclusion and working backwards. The problem appears when person investigates X, finds no evidence for it and somehow still explains science supports X over Y.

This is a great article, well worth the full read. Especially in context with the comments written about it here. It seems the author hits the nail on the head when he talks about the elusive nature of the point of contention and the issue he has with getting 'liberals' to engage with it. He is also conveniently vindicated as being correct as this issue is exemplified in the comments here post after post. Where every manner of framing the issue away from reality is tried. It would be a miss for me to not highlight those comments if not for the convenience of the columns author already doing it for me:

At this stage, short of some grand conspiracy of white people “to keep the black man down” (the Woke explanation) the cause of group disparities must come down to some combination of the following sources:

Genetic group differences stemming from human bio-diversity, as attested to by a growing mountain of evidence,

Deep historically situated cultural differences that are almost impossible to change,

Recently developed behavioral differences that cannot be modified with tools we consider "liberal" and acceptable in the modern world.

On paper, and when I talk to them personally, many of the liberal-centrist types tell me they understand this problem. They have read Steven Pinker, they have read the Bell Curve, and they know the issues with Affirmative Action and disparate impact in the context of persistent group differences. Their eyes are open. They've got this one.

So what is their solution? More individualism and objective standards for achievement. We need to go back to color blindness, the legal fiction of equality, and judging everyone like a blank slate even though they are not. We can just call that a "meritocracy" as we did in the 1990s. Let the chips fall where they may, and be done with the matter once and for all.

Perhaps this is a great “debate club idea”, but who is going to own the consequences if indeed we were to tear down all disparate impact regulations, equal opportunity programs, and affirmative action? I don’t think an appeal to "meritocracy" would cut it.

Many commenters here seem to have missed this part of the article and what follows. It would be much better for everyone if they didn't. Though I would suspect the problem they have with it is hard for them to verbalize. Since any movement in this direction on their part is an explicit admission that they are willing to break baseline social taboos. To stand up in person and say you don't care about starving children in Africa because you don't recognize borders, would be an obvious low status signal. You would have to be stupid or of low moral character to say such a thing. The same would also be true for saying you don't see a problem with extremely poor black educational attainment or medical conditions like obesity and heart disease, because you don't see race. You would have to be a fool or the most brilliant of racist comedians to earnestly say such a thing in public under your own name.

Many people here do want HBD to be talked about more mainstream because it will lead to better policy and outcomes.

They won’t say it under their own name because of the current political situation where if you start saying things are genetic society will ban you from earning an income.

It’s not because they don’t want to deal with it. It’s because people don’t want to starve themselves from Unemployment.

Few industries let you speak truth. Trump mostly gets to. Hedge Fund managers get to or equivalent trader that can print money. Deshaun Watson gets to. Unless you are a really special talent you don’t get to.

The difference is that HBD folks have to own it. Many academics throughout the years have done so for decades at great professional and personal risk. Yes, the truth is ugly and the fallout of widespread recognition and actualization of it might be even more ugly. But that's the fight being had.

Versus the likes of James Lindsey who simply ignore the inevitable fallout of their advocacy for colorblind meritocracy, acting as if the negative consequences simply won't happen. Not that he or the likes of him would ever allow the conversation to even get to that point, as that would be too great of an admission. No, the 'liberals' act not just like they have the most functional solution, but the most morally correct one. Like the author points out, it's as if they can't see that the system they are advocating for might end up shipping a bunch of melted ice cream. They refuse to even engage with the proposition. Instead they just assert that they are shipping ice cream to everyone the same way so it's fair.

Contrast this complete lack of self criticism with the way they engage with topics like HBD, where suddenly every little detail becomes functionally impossible to deal with. They don't actually have to engage with the truth proposition of HBD, they can just ignore it through the cover that any real world implementation derived from HBD is impossible, even if the results would not necessarily differ in any way compared to the 'liberal' one, the only difference being moral palatability, which is really only a cover for social acceptability. 'At least we are not nazis!' when in function they are shipping the same melted ice cream.

The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.

The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways. Some time ago I read a book of MLK's speeches, and MLK frequently appealed to the idea that unless America can show it offers equal treatment to AAs, it's going to lose the battle for hearts and minds in the wider global context.

Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.

The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad. It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are, from Chavists to parties like EFF in South Africa to radical Islamists (who surely would be willing to say that there's no racial discrimination in an Islam, whether that's true or not).

Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that), the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine. Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.

Black African countries are very, very weak. Russia/Wagner managed to coup 3 while fighting Ukraine, they're pushovers. Most of them aren't even food secure. Yemen is especially reliant on imports. If we actually wanted to beat the Houthis as opposed to looking like we were doing something, they'd have no choice but unconditional surrender.

The original blank-slatist assumption was that once Africa was decolonized, they'd turn into powerful, modern industrialized states like Italy or Japan. So it would make sense to court them. But in reality... African countries have basically non-existent power projection and manufacturing, all they can do is offer bases and natural resource exports. It would be pretty easy to secure the resource-rich ones. If Wagner can do it, so could Blackwater (provided that there was no democracy-promotion mission).

Again, I wasn't talking simply about Africa, and the sheer size of population alone would mean this sort of a policy would inevitably become costly. After all, it's not something that America is doing now in a major way at least, despite there being unfriendly regimes - Black Hawk Down is still a point of reference.

and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that)

The Houthis did take over, they won the war and for all intents and purposes are the government of Yemen.

For an example of pirates not being able to be wildly disruptive to global trade because they didn’t take over, you don’t even have to leave the general area; the Somali pirates mostly just increased the price of insurance.

Insist on believing the lie and forcing everyone in the country to act as if it is true, or suffer this imagined parade of foreign policy issues?

Naa, I'm not worried about Africans hating us. Africans are happily cooperating with Russia and China, after all, who certainly don't engage in affirmative action towards blacks. Providing special privileges for American blacks so African blacks will like America more would be a terrible idea even if it would actually work. I'm not actually suggesting we go back to the days when the Soviets could say "and you are lynching negros" and be correct after all.

Providing special privileges for American blacks so African blacks will like America more would be a terrible idea even if it would actually work.

Yeah, this would be absurd. Especially since special privileges for American blacks are already more than provided for.

Throwing idpol privileges toward a domestically negative value-add populace in the hopes that an internationally negative value-add populace will like the US more strikes me as some absurd, farcical combination of pathetic, cucked, extortionary.

If we accept that cross-generational grievances are a thing, and that Black Americans are entitled to some greater degree of moral and political consideration than other Americans (Black Lives Mattering More), Black Africans are just as guilty as White Americans with regard to the slave trade, if not more. "Sorry for buying what you were selling," was the online wrong-think-sphere term of art in reacting to Biden apologizing to African leaders over the "original sin" of the slave trade.

Good for the Chinese if they're better able to make use of the natural resources in Sub-Saharan Africa than the native populaces. After all, the young Chinese men working there are just refugees seeking a better life away from a tyrannical, oppressive government, and subpar socioeconomic and cultural conditions. They're merely Lao Yang-maxxing; let them cook.

From your comment below:

OK, fine, if Africans want to consider the US a terrible country forever because of past anti-African racism, unless we forever pay by engaging in domestic pro-black racism, I'm willing to endure their hatred. And that of the rest of the world too.

Indeed, how awful it would be for developed countries if Sub-Saharan countries considered the US, Canada, Europe, East Asia and the like as terrible racist regions, and started forcibly forbidding their natives from visiting—much less migrating—to such awful countries to avoid anti-black racism for their own good.

Africans are happily cooperating with Russia and China, after all, who certainly don't engage in affirmative action towards blacks.

Neither has a notorious history of anti-African racism to compensate for, though. And it's not just the Black Africans - though they're an easy example here precisely because the polls show that they are strongly pro-American and the current efforts of USA to recompensate past wrongs provide an easy partial explanation (there are other factors too, of course, like the work of American-derived Christian churches and so on), the US treatment of African-Americans has generally tended to globally be seen as symbolic of the wider idea of American white supremacy and "sins of the nation", so to say.

Neither has a notorious history of anti-African racism to compensate for, though.

OK, fine, if Africans want to consider the US a terrible country forever because of past anti-African racism, unless we forever pay by engaging in domestic pro-black racism, I'm willing to endure their hatred. And that of the rest of the world too. Though I doubt any such change in hatred would amount to a gnat's whisker. This is just another in a long line of excuses to maintain these policies.

"Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)"

That is not exactly a fair presentation of of the philosophical basis of meritocracy.

Yes, but that's how it would be presented, at the very least.

The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.

While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.

By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.

Yes, sure, all that is older than the Cold War, but it was Cold War that created the suitable preconditions for civil rights legislation to be actualized. Plenty of seeds existed, but the field needed fertilizer.

My understanding is that while the Northern public opinion, at least, was that segregation was a bad thing, there was a lack of political will to make the actual push, as there were fears that the South would get mad and violent (or at least cause political problems). The urgency of the global struggle was an essential factor in creating that political will, which was of course then compounded the fact that Southern resistance turned out to be largely a paper tiger.

I guess my only quibble is with the word 'essential'. It's not crazy to think that, absent the national distractions of the Depression and the War, something along the same vein would have happened even earlier. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly organized and I'm of the opinion that another important factor was the prosperity of the post-war era. The foundations for that prosperity were lain in the massive productivity gains of the 30's, so an alt-40's where the Depression and the War don't happen could well have seen an alt-Civil Rights movement.

The Cold War provided an impetus, but it was one of many and not an essential one.

In practice no one would perceive the disappearance of the black professional class. You'd just have more of them graduating from lower ranked schools, perhaps even with better graduation rates as ability and challenge get better aligned. Doctors and lawyers from lesser schools still get to call themselves doctors and lawyers.

Very few people will get enough contact with employers that feed from Ivies to ever notice. My employer leans fairly heavily towards prestigious schools and even I don't have enough anecdotal contact with the top law firms, finance industry, consulting, etc. to form an impression of the racial demographics of such places.

Very few people will get enough contact with employers that feed from Ivies to ever notice.

I feel that the few people who do get enough contact with Ivies have outsized influence, i.e. they're often prestigious journalists or politicians or executives at major corporations. And, from recent history, they tend to make this known to others while also framing it as a problem to be solved. I think either their influence over the rest of us or their race-essentialist views would have to be reduced for the populace really not to notice or not to care.

Doctors and lawyers from lesser schools still get to call themselves doctors and lawyers.

Lawyers, sure. But the number of new doctors is effectively capped by the number of residency slots, so removing affirmative action before that point reduces the number of new black doctors dramatically.

Additionally the level of affirmative action in medicine is extremely intense, I haven't looked at the data in a few years so I don't know where it's at now, but it used to be absurd - something like 90% percent of black med students would not have ended up in medicine if put on a fair playing field.

The residency slots are capped by the AMA, are they not? Seems like a relatively easy fix while we are talking about grandiose civil rights reform.

No, they're set by the Federal government directly.

Seems pretty easy for the federal government to fix, then.

And then wonder why the costs spiral out of control.

Here's a thought experiment.

Imagine a world where communities from all over choose to send their best and brightest to global centers of higher learning, where they would get exposure to the most recent and best medical treatments, and physics knowledge, and mathematical discoveries, and engineering techniques. And then they would return back to their local communities, and use that knowledge to improve the lives of the people in their home communities, while also finding ways to integrate that knowledge with their existing values and traditions and all the various particularities that make up a specific, rooted real community with its own memories and allegiances.

And then imagine that those centers of higher learning were very careful to balance how many learners from different communities there were, to make sure that all these different communities got access to that knowledge and were then able to integrate it locally in their own particular way.

Would that be a bad, or facial objectionable world?

You might think I'm trying to make something like a pro-affirmative action case here, but at least for the current world we live in, I see this thought experiment as exactly the opposite. IF different groups maintained healthy boundaries around their own communities, and there was no public rhetoric about particular communities having any moral culpability for the outcomes of other groups (because having healthy boundaries means rejecting appeals to some shared, universalist morality can not exist under meaningful pluralism), THEN different groups having representatives who came to centers of higher learning (however their groups chose those representatives) to bring that knowledge and expertise back to their own communities would kind of be their own business, or so it seems to me. And I think (assuming you were not offended by the existence of groups and group cohesion in the first place) most people could see the resulting world being better off for the entire process. I can appreciate, say, some local Nigerian community wanting access to knowledge about medical instrument sterilization without needing to trot out an SAT to see if they deserve that knowledge.

Now, obviously, what I'm describing is a theoretical story about how Universities could function, but it is not at all how they actually function. What I hope this thought experiment suggests is that you really need universities extracting talented people from the provinces, socially re-engineering them to identify with and then merge into the global ruling class and have contempt for the values and traditions of their home cultures, and then segregating them into communities of the winners who have massive powers over the losers back home, to arrive at a point where race (or group) based affirmative action is going to generate massive amounts of totally predictable moral agitation, especially in a democracy. Or at least that's my own instinct.

Which is to say, from this perspective, affirmative action is a red herring and rhetorical distraction. The real problem is the old progressive impulse towards erasing local distinctions, massively centralizing power, flattening all differences and allegiances in the name of "universalism", and going all in on social engineering. The line between "integration" and "cultural genocide" is, it seems to me, a very who/whom distinction.

And if I had to hazard a guess, I suspect there's no shortage of black Americans who would be sympathetic to the argument here... but of course, that has never been the point.

I think this is a significant enough point that we ought to consider why this doesn't seem to be happening. Notably, pretty much everybody who manages to make it into the PMC Elite one way or another seems to abandon whatever community they had previously been a part of and show loyalty only towards that PMC Elite. They only respect the support and advancement of other more junior members of that community and seem to act only to maintain and increase the power of that community.

The stereotypical MAGA Appalachian coal miner, if they manage to make it into the elite, will pretty much always adopt their values and consider their former neighbors to be unredeemable racist hicks to be sneered at and driven into the dirt.

The black person, whether or not they actually grew up in "the projects" will also adopt elite values and won't ever do anything to actually improve the life and culture of those communities. They'll spout the usual platitudes about "institutional racism", but won't do anything about it except more entitlement programs that only create dependency and more affirmative action style reforms that prioritize racism supremacy and entitlement over actually improving yourself.

Every other "community" that I can think of repeats the same points. I think the Amish are one of the few types of communities that retain strong loyalty to their own community, but they don't seek positions in the PMC Elite. There are also some super-religious Jewish and Christian communities that I think do similarly, but people of those religions who make it into the Elite also show no loyalty to any such tight-knit communities of the same or similar religion.

You hit the nail on the head here, and highlighted something that isn’t often discussed but is absolutely crucial to the dominance of modernistic liberal culture. Hyper mobility of location and the willingness to abandon your birth culture is completely baked into the current ruling class. In order to pass the crucible and become an elite, you absolutely must be willing to throw your previous, place-rooted culture under the bus. It’s not even hidden or very subtle.

Part of this culture is the criticism or doubt in almost everything. New York WASPs are out of touch and bad because they’re rich. Deep South folks are out of touch and bad because they love white people and hate black people. Californians are okay but there are still plenty of bad apples there that need to be eradicated.

Overall the modern elite liberal culture demands total obedience to the demands of their ideology. While it’s not explicitly written in a declaration of loyalty like previous political ideologies have created, the social reality is undeniable. And the lack of an explicitly written down creed which denounces one’s culture of birth, while simultaneously demanding this denunciation socially, is in my opinion modern progressivism’s most impressive and almost unique strength.

Strip a man of the ideals and culture he grew up with, and he will have no recourse but to toe the party line and double down on the latest progressive ideology.

I think a more parsimonious explanation is that people naturally become friends with, care more about, and adopt the beliefs of the people they spend time around and believe in the same things as. So when someone leaves their old community behind to join a new one - especially one whose people are in general smarter, more capable, generally better to be around - they just are going to care about their new community more. And then different groups of people generally find reasons to dislike other groups. Deep South folks also dislike liberal elites, it does just happen in general.

Modern elite liberal culture actually demands less obedience to its ideology than most other ideologies. For instance, it doesn't literally demand obedience. Which, you'd think that's a low bar, but not one that most historical ideologies meet! Christianity, for instance, does actually have divine commands that you must follow, a holy book that's indisputably correct, heresies, and so on.

This is because it's incentivized.

It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.

Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.

And it's not incentivized by 'capitalism' or 'globalism', it's incentivized by ... nature, causation itself. It's just useful for very capable people to be around very capable people. It's more fun, but mostly it's just vastly more productive - Einstein in a hunter gatherer village is a town priest, or a very good trapper. Einstein in a major city is Einstein. And we all benefit from Einstein and the (at least) hundred thousand other very smart people whose work our complicated society rests on.

It’s incentivized by ‘nature’ in the same way Big Macs are incentivized by nature. Sure it is great in the short term, but there’s a reason cultured and place rootedness evolved. I’d imagine this hyper mobility would begin to lead to anomie, loss of community, general unrest… oh wait….

Having supersonic aircraft and computers and industrial agriculture is more incentivized by nature than 'not atomizing communities' is disincentivized. And taking all the smartest people and putting them in the same social circles is very useful for that. It's much easier for a smart elite group to somehow get an above-replacement fertility rate, or develop agi, than for small rooted communities to evolve computers and nukes, so the former seems more fit in the long run i think. A lot of stable equilibria in nature look locally like 'unrest', e.g. groups of related animals fighting over territory. Big Macs are basically pure negative in a way that 'having all the most capable people in the world develop technology together' isn't.

Having supersonic aircraft and computers and industrial agriculture is more incentivized by nature than 'not atomizing communities' is disincentivized.

In the absence of predation, deer are incentivized by nature to reproduce much more than they're incentivized to balance their population against the food sources... right up until they overgraze and overpopulate, and have a mass die-off.

Feedback systems are complex and discontinuous. Maybe "not atomized communities" is more incentivized than you think, and the incentive just lags a bit.

More comments

Strip a man of the ideals and culture he grew up with, and he will have no recourse but to toe the party line and double down on the latest progressive ideology.

Somehow I feel Orwell must have written something like this.

There are maga and conservative Christian and Jewish elites that show substantial loyalty to the communities they come from, though.

admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.

No, but if the people managing all the dissent turned their weapons on the people who have a problem with human biodiversity (completely implausible), it could be managed.

You could run some nice features about black kids who were sent to Ivies, struggled, dropped out and are doing just fine in whatever 110 IQ vocation they found. And so on.

After all, it's if the regime is as nihilistic as some say, then to the FBI it'd not matter that it'd have to suddenly deal with black power types outraged the federal gravy train is over.

I don't think this is true - there are too many true believers, a transition from Kendi America to Sailer's America would be just too painful. It might happen following a disastrous loss in war though. E.g. a loss of Taiwan to China, Japan and Korea becoming neutral, that kind of thing.

A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.

We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.

Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.

Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.

The classical liberal argument is that there would be a balance of power, because each major player would fight for its own power. EG, the three branches of the US government would all fight for their own power, and thus keep each other in check.

It doesn't work so well when one branch voluntarily surrenders all of its power to another.

The argument seems to be meritocracy is not possible because some people are going to be 'losers' in the system. Even if there wasn't race to coordinate around the 'losers' in the system could coordinate around a measure like IQ. Maybe the general argument is correct but I don't see a strong reason why race should be treated in a special way.

Because it's visible, so it's easy to organize around it. People will know what side you are just by looking at you.

I note that he studiously avoids describing the losers in his equity based system. Or what happens when ALL tribes start collectively 'bargaining' for better outcomes?

Just terrible incentives all around.

Base Maga or what the media claims is base Maga has virtually zero representation in the current system.

I will define the caricature of Maga as a West Virginian living in a trailer park. I don’t think it just classifies to this type but it’s good enough to work with. When the immigrants first moved to West Virginia to work in Coal Mines or Pittsburgh they were poor people but unfiltered and had a mix of smart and stupid people.

My Catholic Church in my parents generation (now the middle of no where) produced a founding member of Silicon Valley and a founding member of the PE industry. Those people are like 80 now. Their dads probably worked in the mills. The high IQ mill kids long since filtered out and now their kids just blend in with the blue tribe and grew up somewhere else. I believe Hannania has commented that West Virginia is low IQ. They probably are because every kid with some ability long since left.

The point I’m getting to is the remaining population in these areas are long since separated from their highest ability co-ethnics. They have no connection to the whites who go to Harvard. They have little political representation. WV actually has very good roads so about all they get into is some Manchin infrastructure grift.

These people have no hope of going to Harvard. An African American has hope for that with lower standards.

The issue with affirmative action is these people superficially look like the white people going to Harvard but are not those people.

What would we be left with if we wanted to do affirmative action fairly because some groups have low HBD but we want representation for them in the elites? We would have to have some points system where everyone pushes for their groups particular oppression or group weakness to get special treatment for everything.

Apple in their ads had one with the “black female women” lecturing Tim Cook on esg or something. Maybe we also need coal miner son from West Virginia getting their own ad lecturing Cook.

I think the Maga people or a percent of it do roughly fit this caricature and if you are going to claim black peoples have realized they can’t get to the elites on merit alone then I think it’s also apparent my caricature has realized they can’t get to Harvard on merit alone except they have to compete in the primary admittance program against billionaire kids.

My personal opinion besides all the rhetoric is we do need to make sure 4-5% of African Americans get into Harvard with a boost for representation in the elites. 14% is too high and often just rich foreigners. And we probably do need to get 2-3% of WV coal miner kids into Harvard (is this 0% now?).

But some how we need to get there with out everyone talking about it because then it’s just status games on the oppression pyramid.

What people rarely try to figure out is, how well is the black community actually doing today compared to in the past? For all I know, African Americans might be doing better now than at any previous point in the history of the US. And not just absolutely, but also in relative terms.

Before we talk about how to approach African American issues, we should probably try to figure out how well African Americans actually are doing right now - for real, not just through the prism of political agendas and media.

There is such a thing as the black middle class after all, and it's not small. The white unemployment rate in 2023 was 3.3%, the black was 5.5%. That does not seem to indicate a huge difference, even when one takes into account that the unemployment rate does not entirely represent what people usually think of as unemployment. Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297. Huge difference, but it's not like an order of magnitude. It's much smaller than the difference between the median income of the average American and the median income of a truly upper class American.

Both sides of the political divide, for their own reasons, focus heavily on a subset of the overall African-American population: inner-city black people living in poor, dysfunctional, crime-ridden communities.

For the left, focusing on that subset lets them hammer on the idea that black people are horribly oppressed and a lot more must be done to help them, and in general, a lot more must be done to make society more equal and to make up for past injustices. For the right, focusing on that subset lets them hammer on ideas like Democratic mismanagement of cities, the need for law and order, the importance of culture and stable nuclear families, and (for some) genetic discrepancies. Meanwhile the entertainment media has an incentive to focus on that subset because it is easier to write interesting inner city black characters than characters who are black accountants or middle managers.

But how representative is that subset really?

I don't know, I haven't looked into the data in enough detail to be confident. But it is quite possible that the majority of commentators of all kinds, whether they are progressive, liberal, conservative, or "grey tribe" - are arguing about the wrong things.

Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297

Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.

I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.

I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.

Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.

Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.

What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.

I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.

Overall likely doing well with but some extremes.

What percent of our African American community is still best represented by TheWire type communities? I could interview question answer that and my guess is 10-25% or a few million to 10 million. These would be the highly violent Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, Southside of Chicago plus a bunch of southern cities. Conservatives hate on NYC but based on murder rate it feels to me like this environment has been nearly eliminated from NYC. Did they move? Or is it some story like stop and frisk eliminated the cycle of violence. I don’t think these communities stand up well versus anywhere except true third world with higher violence.

At the other end I have long been of the view American African American culture is the second most influential global culture behind only neoliberal globohomo Disney Americana general cultural influence. At the high end American blacks has more of a cultural voice than just about anyone else.

My conclusion is the lows are quite low, the average is very solid, and the high end has done phenomenal.

What people rarely try to figure out is, how well is the black community actually doing today compared to in the past?

It seems to me there isn't much incentive to figure this out. For the people who do care about analyzing this kind of thing in terms of race, finding out the truth about the current state of things is scary, since it could reduce enthusiasm for whatever policies they want to push. For the people who don't care about seeing this in terms of race, they just wouldn't really have that much investment in this question intrinsically.

There is no rule of the universe that says we need to pay attention to race. No reason something like "the black professional class" when referenced needs to elicit anything but confusion the way that the "blonde working class" might. Why do people like Greene never have to answer the reverse question? When we enter our two hundredth year of affirmative action and the gap still doesn't close are the African Americans not going to ask the same question of why? If blank slatism is still the only option on merit then what possible conclusion could they reach besides a conspiracy among the other races? Why would this be a more acceptable answer?

What actual mechanism causes some poor black kid in a bad area of town to have any idea whatsoever how many black people are accepted into Harvard? If not told by people intentionally trying to stoke up racial animus would they ever notice if zero black people were in Harvard even after a hundred years? The solution is easy. Stop taking the statistics, make it illegal, or at least highly suspect, to ask for race on a survey not specifically for the purpose of determining health differences. This is the obvious and only stable way forward, we will find our way to it or suffer disasters.

I think what you describe is the current situation in France. While I do not see a realistic path to get this implemented in the USA anytime soon, France at least sets a precedent for a modern Western country to make it illegal to gather racial data.

I can assure you, the fact that France doesn't measure statistics based on race doesn't mean that it lacks urban dysfunction or racial grievance. In fact, I'm not sure if this policy makes any practical difference compared to other European countries that do measure this stuff.

And while police and other organs of the state may not officially measure race or ethnicity, they do measure 'where your grandparents were born' which is effectively the same thing.

Okay, this would be great.

How do you make it happen?

Probably needs to be sold as a kind of color blind absolutism without going too much into the goals beyond that. Claim that people are using race data to do nefarious things and ban it. Might need to make an example out of some of the racial hustlers. It is probably unrealistic but the other options aren't particular realistic either, what does maximal freedom of association look like and how could it be sold?

I'm gonna tap the sign.

My position is that I like meritocracy, and I also understand that 'merit' has a bit of a floating definition that means different things to different people. There is probably no true 'objective' measure of merit that we can calculate, and certainly not one everyone will automatically accept.

Be that as it may.

Subjectively all I am asking for is assurances that your attempts to tweak the numbers toward your preferred distribution are tied to responsibility for outcomes that results in that you are on the hook for, and ideally that YOU are eating the cost of those tweaks both up front and on the back end.

If you're going to MANDATE racial quotas of one form or another, and also extend special protections to those who engage in such quotas, and also actively try to deflect any blame for the possible harms/negative outcomes people point out, then I'm going to have a problem. I of course will apply this logic to those who insist that we should have white people in charge of everything too.

Fundamentally, my objection is actually not that Harvard Et al. have racial preferences in admissions, I object to Harvard Et al. getting paid by a government that redistributes the gains of society so Harvard incurs no risk when selecting students (i.e. shields Harvard from consequences, to some extent) AND that Harvard Et al. are acting as gatekeepers into the very halls of the elite and upper echelons of government that are deciding how these racial preferences are defined and how the money is distributed. Nobody at any point in this chain has any 'skin in the game' that will filter them out if they turn out to be making bad/wrong decisions (defined here as those decisions that actually harm people they are charged with representing/assisting).

For example, HBCUs tend not to bother me in the least, I don't really begrudge blacks having a college 'set aside' for them, provided they're not teaching/endorsing hardcore racial animus. They have a 'plausible' argument that a school designed by and staffed by blacks may be better suited to providing for and supporting the education of other (culturally similar) blacks. I don't buy the need to protect the students from racism, but I see a tight feedback loop where the decisionmakers are directly accountable to most stakeholders.

Are HBCUs "anti-meritocratic?" From the 10,000 foot up view, probably! But they are presumably 'allowed' to impose their own internal version of 'meritocracy' that selects for features that aren't colorblind and advances a goal that isn't defined merely by "the best person for the job as defined by test scores and performance."

Just, don't force my participation.

So the question is, if Harvard is having an outsized influence on who gets to be President, who gets on the Supreme Court, who becomes CEO of huge corporations, and various other privileges enjoyed by elites, where exactly can I, a mere state-school peon, register any particular grievances I may have if the people they're putting out are not actually good at their jobs and are causing problems which directly impact my life?

For example, HBCUs tend not to bother me in the least, I don't really begrudge blacks having a college 'set aside' for them, provided they're not teaching/endorsing hardcore racial animus. They have a 'plausible' argument that a school designed by and staffed by blacks may be better suited to providing for and supporting the education of other (culturally similar) blacks. I don't buy the need to protect the students from racism, but I see a tight feedback loop where the decisionmakers are directly accountable to most stakeholders.

I, lily white and with an appearance which goes from "aryan nordic" in the summer to "vampiric" in the winter, could go to an HBCU if I wanted to. I don't, and most other whites don't either. These schools are also not in the present day helping the black community very much; they are not very prestigious and going someplace else is a better decision for people who have that option(admissions requirements are extremely low at most HBCUs). I don't begrudge keeping a few universities around for low performers; future claims adjusters and receptionists have to go somewhere when our society won't acknowledge that there's a cheaper way to prove basic literacy, but the fetishization of HBCUs is entirely for historical reasons.

I don't know nearly enough to make any judgment call on this count. Just making the point that 'merit' can be defined differently or take a back seat to other concerns in certain contexts, but I don't want to be forced to participate in the system that intentionally goes for a different definition than I use.

Unfortunately, a bunch of the racial preferences are mandated to some extent by the government. (For example, in the government and everything that acts as a government contractor, which is something like 30% of the economy.)

Yep. And I marvel at the way businesses will ruthless adapt to/exploit this sort of incentive without regard to its initial intent.

Dividing up the country doesn't work.

  • American leadership aren't willing to enforce borders. They want cheap labor (or votes). After dividing the country, how do you make that stick?
  • Smart black Americans don't strongly want to live in a black-only area, but would rather live in the same areas, and work at the same institutions, as their mostly-white (the country being majority white) peers. These are the people you would need to run and staff the institutions that would run a "black" region.
  • The "white" region is likely to out-earn the "black" region even if it's just a matter of size and population. Given the above two points, they are likely to begin brain-draining the "black" region of talent, reducing institution quality, reducing production power, reducing earnings, reducing tax revenues.

Despite leaning more towards the James Lindsay position, it is difficult to see a world in which a pure meritocracy could work in our present multi-ethnic democracy.

Define "work". Because I see no reasons why it wouldn't be a functional civilisation. If your definition of "work" is that the racial makeup of elite universities mirrors their prevalence in the population, then no, it won't "work". But if it's that the lights remain on and things get done, then of course it would work, and it would work better than our current one. Certainly more efficiently, once you strip out all the DEI bloat from everything.

If the contention is that underperforming ethnicities would cry foul and riot, I put it to you that this is in no way significantly different from the current world. The only response needed is "git gud".

The claim is that even if you gather the political capital to force race-free, meritocratic admissions, after a little people will see that it leads to distributions you don't like, leading to reimposition of the problematic norms.

If you've already got the political capital to force race-free, meritocratic admissions you will by necessity have completely dismantled the currently existing political infrastructure that agitates for the reimposition of those problematic norms.

A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.

Well, yes. The existing social order likes things the way they are. To change things, it must be overturned.

I'm gonna start by pointing out that Anton Chigurgh and his "if the rule that you live brought you to this" is not the hero of the story.

This is where the argument is weakest and where Greene, perhaps intentionally, glosses over providing details of what he is really advocating for.

Hell, there's problems even if we carefully ignore the actual racial crux he's trying to get everyone to focus on to hide from the rest of his issues.

The absolutely (and unrealistically) most charitable version of Greene's proposed solution is something like the Richmond Fed proposal from Four Replies to Unnecessariat, with all the problems and faults only magnified by real or perceived "hunger games gonna happen isn't it" happening to minorities progressives care about. We don't have a way to actually encourage this sort of clear separation between super-IQ-people and us simple peasants that's compatible with even a sick parody of free association, hilariously aggressive (if supposedly unintentional hah) efforts to use price discrimination, and there's just a big shrug when considering how all those non-big-brain areas are supposed to handle their administrative and practical requirements. There's no clear political doctrine for, or serious economic understanding around, how the simple peasants are supposed to live and work.

There's a reason there's so much overlap with what the Richmond Fed suggested and what PoiThePoi complained about: extent motions toward this as a policy have been absolutely destructive to both the winners and losers.

I mean, there's a bunch of other disagreements -- I absolutely think that there's a whole lot of ruin that needs to be undone in education, and that a lot of the strongest claims of HBD proponents get squishy when pulled to areas outside of academia and high-frequency trading, and a thousand other race-specific disagreements with the dissident right. But they're ultimately cover for the real reason to kill the Buddha, here, and that's where the Shangri-La Greene et all advocate isn't happening.

I'm gonna start by pointing out that Anton Chigurgh and his "if the rule that you live brought you to this" is not the hero of the story.

That story had a 'hero?'

Definitely no winners by the end, although Chigurh was the 'last man standing' if we care about that, so his rules at least kept him alive.

They knew the results of the system they proposed in advance

All the negative consequences of an immorality fall on the person who instigated the immoralty. If meritocracy is the morally correct way, then whoever introduces the notion of affirmative action bears the shame and guilt of having supplied immoral benefits to millions of people. The party which corrects a moral deficit in society is often wrongfully blamed for its negative effects. We see this with the issue of slavery and discrimination: despite every race or tribe discriminating against other races or tribes, enslaving them or worse, it’s white people who are solely blamed for black slavery in America. Yet, given that the blacks enslaved came from a culture which practiced much worse slavery, this is an absurd and ridiculous attack: the whole word bears the same “blame”, or in other words no blame at all. White people, being perhaps the first race to decide that other races do not deserve eternal subjugation, should be praised for their moral advancement, not shamed for the immorality of everyone else. This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.

No one buys an answer like this, or should

I buy it. I’ll do one better: the ivy’s are stocked with 1st to 3rd generation Africans, not the descendants of former slaves, which means we can tell the descendants of former slaves that the descendants of their original enslavers are no longer getting wrongful benefits.

The African American community of the late 1950s and early 1960s felt, with justification, that they were a humiliated underclass inside America

Segregation was actually a way to correct this, by completely separating the races and then putting black taxes toward black things and white taxes toward white things. But in actual fact, white funds and white resources went disproportionally toward the benefit of blacks, due to a collection of factors like military security / better policing / better development / cities etc. Were blacks actually given their own nation they would be Haiti or Liberia, but America attempted to effectually give them their own nation and allow them the fruit of white labor where it didn’t interfere with white civilization. Yeah, maybe you wince when you read that, but then I’d like to hear your argument against it: there was nothing stopping blacks from building their exclusive towns and cities in segregated America (look at the Mormons), yet they chose the obviously advantageous position of living in segregated sections of cities built by people 1000 years more developed than them. I would do the same! To get back to the point, segregation was supposed to allow blacks to compete with other blacks and whites other whites, not to put the races against each other. They were supposed to be totally separated social hierarchies (hence: segregated), not one social hierarchy. IMO this failed mostly due to really really bad argumentation on half of the segregation side, not due to anything necessarily immoral about segregation provided that one side’s majority wishes to live out their destiny separately (after all, this is literally the basis of every single polity with immigration restriction, aka most countries).

What does he mean by "freedom of association", "reservations" and "power-sharing arrangements

I think I see where he is going — we can effectively have white-only communities by going extreme on freedom of association, thus decreasing the social neuroticism about race. I pretty much agree that this would be good, total freedom of association for any descriptor one wants solves all the hysteria. But you will still have to face that eternally leftist voting block, the unmarried women of America who once consumed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and now consume Te Nehates Coates (sp), who believe that when people exclude other people based on heritage they are committing a racism. You need to solve that issue before you can implement some kind of extremism freedom of association policy.

It may be that I am consuming a lot of mainstream media uncritically, but I am under the impression that the KKK and so forth did a great deal of damage to American blacks creating economic centers - for example, the Tulsa Massacre.

This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.

Your argument seems to imply that it if you abduct a child from a society in which some number of forced child brothels exist, and then keep that child in your basement and rape them every day, you haven't committed any sin because that was something that could have happened to them in their society anyway. True or false?

  • -13

Your argument seems to imply that it if you abduct a child from a society in which some number of forced child brothels exist, and then keep that child in your basement and rape them every day, you haven't committed any sin because that was something that could have happened to them in their society anyway. True or false?

If someone from America goes to visit Kidfuckistan, purchases a bunch of child prostitutes, brings them to America, and starts his own child brothel, I can't imagine anyone around here arguing that he shouldn't be thrown into prison for eternity at the very least.

At the same time, once the guy was in the slammer and everything, it would be pretty weird if the kids grew up and decided they were proud Kidfuckistani-Americans and the two weeks they spent as prostitutes in the US before the FBI kicked in the door were a historically unique evil.

We have(or had) more than one actual pedophile willing to write 10,000 word manifestos about it.

Pedophile != slaver.

At least one of them ranted about how only white adult men have rights and enslaving children for their sexual gratification was therefore acceptable as long as they weren't already the property of another man. I think his name was LibertAryan or something(he was also a nazi).

Let’s use the example of child labor. If much of the world is employing child labor — and not only that, but only some Europeans and a few select other places have developed convincing religio-philosophical arguments for why it is wrong — then if you also employ that labor you are not committing a moral infraction. Why? Because it is agreed upon as morally permissible between people, and because you have not been convinced of the philosophical argument to the contrary. (Let’s recall that the scientific view in the 19th century was that blacks were genetically inferior, and also that inferior people like the mentally ill do not necessarily have a right to freedom. The arguments against slavery were largely religious in nature, with the southerners talking about “science” in their arguments and the northerners speaking about the dignity of God’s creation).

For an action to be immoral requires (1) something approximating a consensus of norms or moral points of reference, because it is a social group which decide what is moral, and (2) the actual common knowledge that a thing being committed is immoral. The histrionic comparison of one epoch to another can get pretty silly without remembering these two things. The people of the 19th century were not magically more good or more evil, they just had a lower level of knowledge, different views on the sanctity of the individual, different inter-group norms, etc. Reading 19th century journals will convince you that, if anything, the emotional intelligence and compassion of the average middle class person was probably greater than those today. So why would it be likely thay they were more evil (in the sense of accruing blame for actions they are responsible for), versus less knowledgable?

With the slavery of Africans, given that everyone enslaved belonged to a group which practiced slavery and found it permissible, they would have behaved exactly the same way as the slavers had they the oppprtunity. Tribes enslaving other tribes. So they have no moral argument against their enslavement, in the sense that whites as a group owe them something. They were being treated according to their own principles.

Should white people have realized that black people are also humans like white people? But they eventually did, and then we had a civil war because they cared so much about it. This is run of the mill pre-20th century moral progress. It’s not like the Japanese didn’t think they were superior in the 19th century when they were killing all castaway European sailors, or the Chinese when they were killing European embassy delegations, or the Arabs when they were castrating their African slaves, etc etc.

To answer your specific qualification though,

in which some number of forced child brothels exist […] something that could have happened to them in their society

No no, slavery was much more endemic in Western Africa than “some slavery existed”. There’s little if any evidence of serious moral knowledge that slavery is wrong in Western Africa. Remember that slavery is unfortunate is not the same as slavery is a moral wrong.

If you apply even a modicum of charity, no, it doesn't necessarily imply that. It stands simply for the proposition that the second society (the one into which you are abducted) is not committing (in the general case) a worse sin than the first society (the one from which you were abducted), and may in fact be committing a less-worse (but still sinful) act. None of this requires anyone in either society to have purely clean hands.

Greene seems to preen like he's speaking hard truths to doubters, but he's clearly eliding the hardest truth: if you remove merit, quality suffers.

What is Greene implying? If you push the big button that says "disparate impact" and "dignity, uplift," good things go up. There are no trade-offs. (He also says "freedom of association," and I think he means it, but I don't think he really means it: freedom of association means bringing back the secret societies and country clubs the Civil Rights Era had to destroy in the first place.)

It's tiresome at this point to talk through all the examples: diversity over merit in airline pilots and traffic controllers, judges, trade negotiators, engineers, etc.

I think the liberal position is a belief that equality and excellence are really the same thing. If only we stop shackling minorities, excellence will flourish. I think it sounds nice and in many cases is probably true: think of all the gifted kids who could excel with the right opportunity. But somewhere along the way this all becomes entangled with race, and ethno-narcissisms, and ugly political realities: Harvard can't just admit the best students, it has to have a little chinese, some black, some latino, a little ethiopian, some finno-ugric-somalian-jew. And so the dream of "equality" or equity defeats itself, because true excellence cannot flourish when every class and tribe asserts privileges and rights that must be upheld.'

My belief is that the world is shaped, on the whole, by the truly excellent. And the only question is whether you create a system that rewards them, whoever they may be, or one that stands in their way.

(He also says "freedom of association," and I think he means it, but I don't think he really means it: freedom of association means bringing back the secret societies and country clubs the Civil Rights Era had to destroy in the first place.)

He does mean it, and he's well aware of the implications.

Reading the article and then this comment makes me wonder if you skipped the article.

To make a long story short, the 'truly excellent' want minorities at Harvard. Now what do we do with your 'liberal position'?

Somebody who is not me has a position that is not mine. Looks like I have been totally eviscerated.

I'm sure the author of the article feels the same way about your comment.

Great talking to you!

Don't do this kind of petty low-effort back-and-forth sniping (you and @hanikrummihundursvin both).

Speak plainly and without mockery.

if you remove merit, quality suffers.

If you remove merit, yes.

If you remove 'merit', not necessarily.

We all know Goodhart's Law, right?

There may be some abstract sense in which, for the next marginal position you want to hire for, you could in principle rank every person in the world on how much they would increase your long-term profitability, control that for how much pay they would demand, and get a ranked-order listing of candidates by merit.

But why in the world would you think that whatever combination of resumes/test scores/etc you get from your limited candidate pool, combined with whatever HR person has to make the decision, would return anything close to the same result?

Like, the first problem is that we don't even really know what we actually need for any marginal position, the second problem is that we only have very indirect proxy measures of the things we think we need, and the third problem is that everyone knows what those measures are, and we are mostly selecting on ability to produce those measures, not the things they are proxies for.

(and the zeroth problem is that the HR person is probably underpaid and overworked and lazy and doesn't care that much and isn't that competent and doesn't know that much about the position, to begin with)

If the options were 1. Have a true, perfect meritocracy vs 2. Have affirmative action, obviously you pick 1.

But the option is 'Everything is a shitshow, our metrics are fucked, most of what happens is arbitrary and depends on starting conditions.'

Given which, we may as well throw in additional arbitrary bullshit that 1. We expect to work counter to some of the other anti-meritocratic arbitrary bullshit already in the system, maybe readjusting us slightly more on target, and 2. Accomplishes other important social projects we care about.

My belief is that the world is shaped, on the whole, by the truly excellent. And the only question is whether you create a system that rewards them, whoever they may be, or one that stands in their way.

Are you referring to Trump or to Biden here? I guess both, since they were both leader of the free world for a while.

Or maybe Sam Bankman-Fried? He really rose to the top and gained incredible wealth and influence incredibly quickly, he must be one of the truly excellent elites that we should reward and let guide our future.

And etc. This is a nice sentiment, but it's not how the world works by default, and it's not how the world works today. Things are way more contingent and contextual and stochastic than that, and the traits that lead to someone seizing power and influence aren't identical with the traits that make them excellent at wielding it for the public good.

You don't get this outcome by default, just by taking a hands-off approach. You have to monitor and regulate the system to make it give you an outcome like that.

  • -11

I guess every job in society should just be handed out by lottery then, since figuring out if someone would be good at something or not is apparently impossible. That sure does make hiring easier. Every time say... a civil engineer... quits or retires we can just replace them with someone who was working at McDonald's the day before. Have fun next time you're driving across a bridge.

Unfortunately the dissident right doesn't really have realistic political solutions besides the Sam Hyde "just kill em" semi-irony that I can't see ever catching on in the US. Although it's irritating to hear so many bad arguments and poor evidence trotted out to defend progressivism, dealing with multi-ethnic societies is hard. If you don't support mass deportations of citizens or mass murder then you need to advocate for policies that work within a society as multiethnic as the one you're in. Maybe that means racial spoils systems a la Singapore or South Africa.

That being said, I don't think raceblindness is actually as politically untenable as Greene implies. If you poll people, most don't support affirmative action or other racial spoils-type policies. Moreover, I think it needs to be emphasized that there's only one ethnic group driving these politics in the US, and they're quite a small minority (although obviously they have many sympathizers). I don't think abandoning colorblindness just to placate blacks or cut down on race riots necessarily follows, if the truth about group differences that so many liberal elites supposedly know but don't say were publicly acknowledged, imo black advocacy would start to be perceived less like equality or even equity and more as the unmitigated black self-interest that I see it as. If this happened, these policies would become politically untenable, and raceblindness might make a comeback. France has a large ethnic-minority underclass and manages to maintain raceblindness (although obviously it isn't a paradise over there). I think raceblindness can be viable in the US, and if you have ethical or other reasons to prefer it it's not unreasonable to, although obviously in the current political climate it's impossible. People who want raceblindness need to be pointing to how ineffective all the effort and resources poured into closing the achievement gap has been, they need to point out that black underrepresentation isn't because of anti-black racism and that prioritizing diverse candidates means hiring less qualified candidates. These are common talking points online, if they go mainstream it could change politics drastically. As Greene says, these things are already sometimes admitted in private by educated people. These sorts of public taboos can collapse pretty quickly (although they can also persist for a long time).

I quite enjoyed this essay, I think Greene is right about centrist liberals not (publicly) acknowledging the actual consequences of what they're advocating for, and maybe not even being willing to live with those consequences. I think his proposed solutions are pretty undercooked though, if I were his editor I would probably just remove that part of the essay.

Moreover, I think it needs to be emphasized that there's only one ethnic group driving these politics in the US, and they're quite a small minority (although obviously they have many sympathizers).

And it’s not even all of them; blacks don’t have majority support for affirmative action despite massively benefitting from it.

racial spoils system a la Singapore

Did you mean Malaysia? Singapore rather famously does not have racial preferences enshrined in the law, modulo a couple of ceremonial quirks such as Malay being the “national language”.

There are legal requirements that the slate of parliamentary candidates for each electoral district must be racially representative, and that public housing estates must have a minimum level of diversity among residents. But I would hardly call that a “spoils system”, as it doesn’t privilege any one race above others.

I was referring to the political affirmative action, but you're right in that it's nowhere near S. Africa and probably is less "spoils"-y than the US in some ways. I think you understate it though, they literally only allowed Malay candidates to run for president in 2017. Most in the US would balk at that sort of blatant ethnic discrimination, which is why we have memes like "one of many factors".

Unfortunately the dissident right doesn't really have realistic political solutions besides the Sam Hyde "just kill em" semi-irony that I can't see ever catching on in the US.

I mean, I could put that right back at Greene. He doesn't really have a solution besides "And then people start dying, but at least we won't be racist"

That being said, I don't think raceblindness is actually as politically untenable as Greene implies. If you poll people, most don't support affirmative action or other racial spoils-type policies.

Maybe, but the people polled probably believe they can have their cake and eat it too. Greene at least grapples with the cold, hard fact that the average African American IQ is significantly lower than everyone else in America, and they have the outcomes to match if you took a cohort of any other skin color with the same IQ. Most people against affirmative action have probably have no awareness of this fact, it's so heavily repressed, and simply believe affirmative action isn't necessary anymore because we've "fixed" the problem.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats