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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

I had to google what on earth HBD was. For others (from less wrong)

>... HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.

I'd just note that noticing differences between races, eg black people are blacker is not racism really, it's more discriminating against races.

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I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of people would consider the statement "The average African American is less intelligent that the average "white" American, this is partially due to genes and cannot be entirely fixed without genetic engineering." to be textbook racism.

Ah, but it's not so much about "less intelligent" than about "lower IQ", which assumes that IQ is actually a good measure of intelligence!

Indeed it does. The question of how good a measure IQ is is an interesting one.

Scores on Raven's progressive matrices certainly correlate well with all sorts of things (working memory, income, ability to do computer programming, ability to write a popular story), so I guess it depends in how you are defining "intelligence".

According to Taleb, low IQ actually is... but not high IQ !

Do you have a source for this? I can find him saying it could be true (if it weren't for test scores influencing later worklife via people judging you for them) but not actually saying it is true.

You're right, I poorly formulated that sentence.

Yeah but at least partly because it's probably untrue.

So if it was true it wouldn't be considered racist?

It most likely would (considering all the things that are considered racist nowadays, which includes a set of all things and then some). But that's a descriptive statement, not normative. It really shouldn't be.

HBD is just how that particular crowd (less-wrong rationalists, a.k.a reactionaries who can spell) dog-whistles their racism.

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