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Good post but I don't think your conclusion follows. Yes, obviously much of politics is just personality differences such as some vibesy favoring of equity over gross outcomes but facts do in fact matter. I believe politics would look radically different if HBD was mainstreamed for two reasons.
First, in the early 20th century it was mainstream, and the sort of eugenics that anti-HBDers now use as a boogeyman was popular among elites. The cause of this was the popularization of evolution as an idea, which most people just assumed meant HBD. I don't see why a similar thing can't happen again. As I've also argued here, there are HBD arguments for all the positions that progressives favor, but that doesn't mean that those arguments would be made or would be as convincing to as many people as the ones currently being made. This ties in to my second reason for being bullish on HBD prompting political alignment: talking to people. Your one example of the HBD left wing blogger is a funny exception to the rule, can you talk to regular progressives or even just normal people and really believe they would just pivot on a dime to using HBD arguments to justify the same positions? I'm sure some would, but without magic dirt arguments like food deserts, lead poisoning, systemic racism, underfunded schools etc. do you really think the American public would support the hard and soft racial spoils systems we have in place? My impression is that they decidedly would not and most simply hold views based on false premises. Their views would change even by being aware of entry-level racial differences in, say, crime. Most people are remarkably unaware of the reality of race despite how important an issue it is. Part of the reason the system even exists is because it isn't talked about in the mainstream, look at the SFFA case and the casuistry employed by some of our most decorated academics to lie about what Harvard's admissions were doing. Obviously they lie because AA is on shaky legal ground, but they also lie in op-eds and, as far as I can tell, to themselves. Why would they do this if the facts didn't matter?
On a less bullish note, your post reminded of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and specifically his reference to Planck's principle. The sad truth is that to get people to accept a new idea, especially the elites who have really committed themselves to an old idea, is not easy. Kuhn makes the point that the strength of the respective evidence for competing paradigms doesn't seem to explain which is adopted. Likewise for explanatory power. Science and politics are obviously different, but I think in neither does the marketplace of ideas actually work. A good model for how politically inconvenient facts are adopted is the AIDs epidemic, read this thread if you want the long version. Quite early, there was evidence that gay sex and hyperpromiscuity were behind the spread of the mysterious disease, but many in the gay community refused to change their habits. There were op-eds written saying that there was no evidence and that those trying to shut down the bathhouses were really trying to shut down gay sexuality etc. Eventually, when the evidence became overwhelming, this denial was whitewashed with the narrative of it being the government's fault. This suggests that if HBD is adopted by elites in my lifetime it will be done quietly, there will be some narrative excusing why it wasn't adopted earlier, and most normal people will be continue to be unaware. Despite this pessimism, I still think that if HBD were popularized, politics would drastically change.
No, but what the American public does or does not support is irrelevant. So long as the ruling elites support the spoils system, they'll cram it down Americans' throats whether they like it or not.
I don't think "the marketplace of ideas" works well at all — it selects not for truth, but mimetic virulence. Which is one of the many reasons I remain generally opposed to democracy.
While I agree that there is the danger that popular opinion can be hijacked by untruthful, even malignant (but nevertheless popular) ideas, I would ask what your alternative to democracy would be? The marketplace of rhetoric and mentalizing the public may select for what you're calling "mimetic virulence" but I don't think that's true for ideas. Isn't the problem rather that ideas are suppressed?
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