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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

As someone with zero context on any of this, what is this?

HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

In the framework of materialism the above is a trivial conclusion: mind is a function of neurons that are a function of DNA.

That would be true if HBD people came to random, or even just varied, conclusions about gene/intelligence determinism, but of course, they come to a consistent and specific conclusion about it: a hierarchy of race-determined intelligence that goes Asians, Europeans, Everything Else, and then people of African ancestry.

Are you saying that the simple fact that many people have come to the same conclusion disconfirms that conclusion?

No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.

Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.

The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:

> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.

No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).

I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.

It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than jasonhansel has.

jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence

You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.

I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.

This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.

I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.

Race however is a social construct and that's where your tidy conclusion falls apart.

Race is a social construct in the context of American racial history and politics, where categories were invented long before the concept of genomic ancestry and "Hispanic" counts as a race. In the rest of the world and within the context of this discussion and other discussions of this sort "race" is a noisy proxy for continental-level ancestry, and it so happens that even American "races" correspond decently well to proportions of ancestry traceable to continental-level populations, with their distinct histories and adaptations. Separating unlabeled genomes into N clusters, we predictably arrive at close matches to traditional racial classifications.

The fact that some small (half a million, a few tens of thousands...) populations constitute distinct clusters that pop out at small Ns is a nice gotcha, but entirely beside the point – which is the a priori plausibility of noteworthy and systemic heritable differences between people of major races, irrespective of their belonging to any social constructs.

Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.

If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.

Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.

I agree that a more fine-grained classification is more useful. However, the fact that all the greatest long-distance endurance runners are of Kalenjin descent (Nilotic race) tells us next to nothing about any other trait. All the best sprinters are also Africans – but predominantly of Bantu ancestry, pretty diverse in this case. As are most NBA stars, and the great proportion of other athletes defined by a rather obvious subset of physical excellences linked to fast-twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, somehow no Bantu group excels in swimming. So using this method of yours, we derive that a great deal of a people belonging to a major race can have a similar ability profile in sports. Not too good for your argument.

If you have to refer to non-central examples, this only shows that your actual case is weak.

It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.

But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.

https://nautil.us/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-abo...

I would not call an obsolete social construct that only racists are still hanging on, "real" :

https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...

Ask the people who are oppressed by it if it's real.

Agreed that we should be dismantling it, but something has to be real to be dismantled right?

Agreed, we just seemed to be using two different meanings of "real".

The lines are a social construct, but there is a real physical spectrum underneath it.

It’s also a trivially false conclusion. No amount of great DNA can counteract lead poisoning.

Between populations there are bound to be differences, but there are a bunch of issues with trying to map that basic fact on to racial IQ rankings:

1) Race isn’t a well-defined variable. It’s socially-constructed. Example: Italian-Americans have not always been considered white. And many people are mixed race.

2) Intelligence isn’t a great metric either. I’m not even convinced it’s a single number. There are people who are great at maintaining dozens of relationships, and can remember things about each person. There are people who are killer at problem solving. And there are people who have uncanny kinesthetic coordination. Which one is more fundamental to human cognitive tasks?

3) Distributions. What do we care about within a population? Is it the mean? That tells us nothing about how skewed the population is. Is it the median? There are problems with that as well. The population could have a bimodal or multimodal distribution. Then what?

4) Confounding variables. You know what’s a lot easier to measure than IQ? Money. Unfortunately a person’s quality of education is highly correlated to the wealth of their parents. And so is stress, which knocks down IQ as well. And there are a ton of other confounding variables too that I don’t know about because I’m not a social scientist. If you do a straight-up tally of IQ you’re not necessarily even measuring anything cognitive at all.

There have been a few adoption based studies that work to correct for confounders. Nothing conclusive obviously, but it's not like no one has thought of that stuff.

The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?

While not endorsing the sentiment that we should disregard literally everything this author ever says, there are a variety of ways to be a "heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy", and "racial supremacist" is a particularly bad one. The objection isn't simply that the author doesn't believer workers should own the means of production.

I don't see Scott arguing for "racial supremacy" in any of the quoted emails though? He said he thinks genetic differences in intelligence are likely real, which is fundamentally different from "race x is superior to race y."

You didn't type the links he approvingly cited in by hand, and pull them up in archive.org, to see what they said, did you? That makes sense --- it's a pain --- but why would you hang your argument on the premise that nobody else took the time to do it? The links lay it pretty bare.

Somebody should take the time to further archive them, since this author keeps popping up, and, inconvenient though this truth is, it remains the apparent truth that he sent emails saying he believed this stuff.

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