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This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.
And yet, the replication crisis is real, so much so that 'every field has bad papers' can very well be that bad papers are norm, and good papers the exception, to the degree that 'the field' is based on the bad and not the good and can be routinely disregarded when appeals to academic authority are made.
I am making an explicit and factual claim that the field of biology has established a very large number of undeniably true and useful complex claims. I'm also claiming that the scientific consensus on the heritability of IQ and other traits is strong enough that it's clearly true. Also that, while the scientific consensus isn't there on racial differences in the heritable parts of IQ, the evidence is strong enough that one should believe it. I think that most of the "HBD Cinematic Universe" as in the things people believe on twitter is shoddy and false, but the core results are independent from that!
As are the core claims, because the core claims as much from what people believe on twitter as in the non-consensus-but-valid research.
Skepticism and not deferring belief is as valid against a non-consensus as it is against the replication-crisis-tainted consensus, as the counter-establishment types are operating in the same fundamental ecosystem, with the same underlying incentives: to over-claim, under-demonstrate, and fail to replicate without selective utilization of data.
When the bad research is the norm, and not the exception, skepticism of anything from the field is warranted and sensible. The issue is not that one of a thousand papers are compromised- it's that upwards to 900+ of the 1000 papers are compromised, and if you can't determine which are which, 'look for the good ones' is meaningless admonishment.
I am confident in the core claim that there is a >=50% genetic component to general competence, or a 'general factor' of intelligence, ie IQ, and that potential caveats (gene environment interactions etc) are unimportant. That's also supported by mainstream science. The only remaining core claim is that various races have, on average, significantly different amounts of that. The science there is less strong, primarily I think because researching that topic head on with the millions of individual datapoints you need is something a big biobank might not want to happen. But nevertheless there is some science there, if you take polygenic scores for individual IQ and compare black and white individuals, the average black score is lower, and ... I struggle to think of alternative explanations for the patterns of racial differences in achievement across the world. Say the black/white gap is systemic racism, there remain many large, persistent, and universal-across-subject gaps with no clear environmental explanation.
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