I think most normies would find hereditarianism more palatable if they understood that the bell curves overlap. In other words the argument is not "all whites are smarter than all blacks" - and therefore the argument cannot be used to judge an entire race of people. Millions of blacks are smarter than millions of whites or Asians. If anything, the policy implication is to reject the disparate-impact reasoning that assumes equal group outcomes should be the default expectation, while remaining committed to equal treatment at the individual level
This is a good point but i actually think that even bell curve overlap isn't necessary. Assume there was less variance and actually every black person had exactly 85 IQ and every white person had 100. That still doesn't make genocide or slavery or jim crow OK, there is no immediate relationahip between those positive and normative claims.
In fact if you want to be cheeky you could even flip it and tell normies "You are basing not being racist on the shaky idea that blacks are just as good at math as whites are. Thus you're implying that if that wasn't true then racism would be OK. I believe in treating black people decently regardless of what the science shows about their IQ, so my moral anti-racism is actually stronger than yours."
This type of argument relies on a very strange abstraction of moral desert from someone's psychological traits. In this way of thinking, someone can have an IQ of 80, have schizophrenia, and severe anger issues, and yet none of this justifies treating them poorly or discriminating against them unless they do something bad. But in the real world, having a low IQ is correlated with reasoning deficits that lead to decreased impulse control and increased bad behavior. So one of the reasons why this discourse is uncomfortable is because arguing that the races have an IQ gap in the aggregate does imply that they have an ethical gap in the aggregate.
I think plenty of people (probably a majority?) think there is never a justification for treating *anyone* "poorly" for any reason other than that they have first demonstrated that they treat others poorly. So I disagree this is a big issue unless one is already in the minority of people who think it's fine to go around treating random people poorly for no real reason or based on the most sketchy and bare evidence or assumptions. It's not as if we live in a world where one is subject to danger and violence on a regular basis and people need to walk around defensive. Almost everyone lives to old age.
This is another argument someone can make about this, but it is a different argument than the one I was replying to.
In regard to this specific argument, I would say that I think there are three separate questions your argument here is conflating. Question 1 is whether it is okay to ever call people slurs or visibly bully them for no reason (obviously no and this would even apply to someone who looked homeless). Question 2 is whether making general trait-based judgments based on things like race, gender, self-presentation, and accent help people navigate social dynamics better than not doing so (in a way that can sometimes lead to 'mistreatment' in a more abstract mediated sense). Question 3 is whether or not we should have a commitment rooted in liberal principles of not making generalistic judgments even if they help people navigate social dynamics better.
One issue I have is White neighborhoods, turning into Black neighborhoods, and then becoming abandoned. I know that this causes a lot of human suffering that our society just cannot recognize. The Whites who move away get accused of being racist, when in fact they just accurately saw what was happening, that they could not stop, and got out before the place turned really violent. It makes me so angry. But, could I be in favor of segregation??? That seems just awful. So, I see the problem, and I just do not know what can be done.
I mean it’s true that it would be more difficult not to have heavy discrimination if 90% of a group were insane and violent, although even if that were the case it would be still desirable to try to identify the 10% who aren’t if possible.
In the real world I think every group has a clear majority of people who are functional enough that they don’t need to be involuntarily committed or jailed even if that majority is more overwhelming for some groups than others. Everyone else should then just be encouraged to participate in society on the basis of individualism and meritocracy, and using group averages to argue for special treatment/reparations or for categorical discrimination should be discouraged.
You can make this argument, but it is a different argument than the argument 'it is racist to presume that aggregate intelligence differences assume an aggregate group level difference in ethical character'.
If the point is antisocial behavior then men have lower “aggregate group level ethical character” than women I guess. My point wasn’t to deny statistics, my point is that emphasizing them isn’t necessary to reject BLM and that denying them isn’t necessary to reject racism.
I would agree that men have lower aggregate group level ethical character than women, and the way people treat unkept young men versus unkept young women in public reflects this. But I think that the argument 'it is antiliberal or possibly ineffective socially to apply group level judgments to individuals too much' is a better argument than 'it is bad to assume that intelligence corresponds with virtue'.
Yeah … unfortunately a lot of race science enthusiasts are also enthusiastic about letting people suffer because they’re less smart. It truly makes no sense. What is stopping the race science world from also having a well developed ecosystem of moral reasoning that explained that all people are equally deserving of justice and rights and to be free of tyranny etc?
Also I have a general question about this essay - how is the author making the jump from “certain traits are more prevalent” to “some races are smarter”? “Smart” is like “good at sports”. Smart how? Good at what spot? A marathon runner can’t trade places with a powerlifter. if genetics showed that a population is more likely to have perfect pitch, another is better at arithmetic, another has more people with photographic memories - which of these populations is “smarter”?
Yes, lot of the people who are most enthusiastic about pointing out group differences have bad normative views but there are also a lot of us who just don’t buy the idea that these group differences are 100% environmental and believe that thinking so is harmful in its own way.
Regarding intelligence, it is relatively uncontroversial among psychometricians that different intelligences (verbal, quantitative, working memory etc.) are highly correlated, much more so than different sports. When they analyze results from different cognitive tests and perform factor analysis they detect a general g factor which they take to be the indicator of general intelligence. Stuart Ritchie (basically a mainstream liberal, not really a race science guy) has a really good short book on this called Intelligence: All That Matters which recaps the basics of intelligence research (measurement, importance for social outcomes, g factor and heritability) pretty well.
I really like this retort. Liberals implicitly do think people are their intelligence, but they don't follow it to the logical conclusion -- if someone is smarter, are they more deserving of rights and human dignity?
No, liberalism endows all people with equal rights. That’s the meaning of “all men are created equal … “ it doesn’t mean that literally all men are the same height and weight and have all the same skills. It means that every individual is endowed with dignity and deserves respect- exactly not conditional on whether they’re good at some particular skill or good at anything at all. Just by being alive, by being born, we are each valuable.
that's certainly what I think. so why does it so offend liberals that some people are smarter than others? and the cause of that is genetic, not environmental?
It doesn’t, inherently, which is what Hanania’s post is about. The problem is that unlike the scientist he’s profiling above, most of the people who are enthusiastic about proving that intelligence has a genetic component are using that to justify injustice.
Racism does, in fact, exist. And racism manifestly makes people’s lives worse. Most race scientists aren’t doing race science to say “people are different in predictable ways, so let’s organize ourselves to ensure that success is possible for people with a variety of innate abilities.” Instead the point of that race science is to say, “look at these people who are suffering, it’s not because of anything someone else did to them, but because of their innate inferiority, their suffering is fine, because it’s nature’s punishment for being inferior.” <—- that is what liberals object to.
Hanania actually wrote a much more thoughtful and sophisticated piece in which he argued that even if you could convince liberals to agree that there were inherent intelligence differences between races, they (we) would simply start arguing for equality on a different basis. Egalitarianism is the point.
He puts out so much slop like this, but occasionally he writes something uniquely insightful.
Also, even if this was true, it would only stay true for about five minutes because of intergroup mating. The parents IQs might be reliably 85 and 100, but the offspring's would not.
Isn't your claim undermined by the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years of mating prior to the last "about five minutes" that got us to this current moment and set of realities? Why would this be true starting now and going forward and now in reverse for every generation that got us here?
Universal literacy, economic mobility, cars, planes, telephones, the internet, Tinder, much more widespread shared language (English), etc. There are almost countless differences between the mating environments of humans thousands of years ago and today/past 100 years.
By assortative mating (smart likes smart, dumb gets stuck with dumb) and the stigma (from both sides) against white men marrying black women, I think that would take a lot longer than 5 minutes to erase. Even white women who marry black men are regarded, even in Canada where we don't have a slavery legacy, as lower caste.
Genocide no, but then African Americans didn't experience genocide. Genocide needs at the very least a demographic proof of collapsing population. Slavery? Sure, but there was also a lot of white people slavery in Eurasia too. Look at the Greeks and Romans, for example. Last - Jim Crow. That's a bit different. Britain had a long history of differential electoral franchise depending on wealth, that was only abolished after WW1, IIRC.
Awareness of distributional differences warrants unequal treatment of strangers, if no worse than what everyone already does instinctively. As Jesse Jackson put it, "There is nothing more painful to me... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
This concern is still more environmentally derived than phenotype derived. I grew up in a small Southern town with an ~30% black population. My high school was around half black. Because the town was so small there was a lot of functional integration - one post office, one grocery store, one movie theatre, etc. I had 0 concerns about black people who I saw around everywhere all the time doing anything to me. There just wasn't hardly any crime. Somebody clutching their purse in my hometown because there was a black guy walking down the sidewalk is being *objectively* irrational. "Rural" trumped everything else. It was one of those cliche places where you could leave your computer in your car or your door unlocked and nothing would happen.
I've also been in some extremely dodgy parts of LA and definitely paid a lot more attention to things like where I parked and what I left in my car. This just didn't matter at home.
Jesse Jackson's problem isn't that there are black people around. It's that he apparently lived in a shit neighborhood. He should move to Atlanta or some such place where there are thriving middle class black neighborhoods.
Yeah, I think that's more about the density of cities than anything. I also grew up in a similar rural population in the south and never felt threatened among a group of back people because I was generally only two degree removed from their parents. Plus, my first grade teacher was a black woman who spent most of her career teaching in segregated schools (I didn't know that at the time) and she was my favorite teacher at any level.
Sure, but Singapore also does things like preventing neighborhoods from becoming ethnic enclaves.
80% of housing there is government owned, and they have strict rules around the density of different ethnic groups allowed to live in that housing. If you brought that policy to America there would not be any majority-black or -latino neighborhoods.
I have always been fascinated by (mostly) White individuals’ obsessions with IQ measurements as means to demonstrate that Black people are “less intelligent “ than White people. All to point out our unworthiness as citizens of this great nation. Well, who cares what these so-called scientists/scholars think or thought about us. So many of these so-called “race scientists” were Jewish which seems to be ironic considering the Nazi connection to race science/Eugenics. The approximately 50 M Black Americans ( total Black alone and in combination with another race) will continue to strive with varying degrees of individual success.
The painful truth, though, is that the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that the groups really do differ significantly in average intelligence (although we are only in the early stages of figuring out how much of those differences are due to environmental versus genetic causes). Very few of the serious, well-researched hereditarians that I’ve come across are making anything like the argument that you’re describing, that any racial group is collectively unworthy of citizenship (and since the bell curves overlap, anyone who did consider intelligence to be a criterion for citizenship would make far more sense if they argued for citizenship to be granted or denied on the basis of a race-neutral IQ test). Many of them seem to be simply curious about human diversity, and many are others are concerned about the damage done to society when egalitarian ideologues assume, on the basis of no good evidence, that groups _must_ be equal in their average underlying ability, and then demand to tear down crucial functional institutions when those institutions produce results that, at the group level, reflect the actual differences in average ability.
Nazis's antisemitism didn't grow out of race science. It grew out of conviction that Jews had magical powers, even though they didn't explain it that way or admit it to themselves.
However, it was a modern form of witchdoctory, not race science. The reason Nazi Germany and Wehrmacht did Holocaust was they thought they lost WW1 due to Jews, and would win WW2 if they eliminate them.
The Nazis very much believed in “race science” . They used race science to develop their theory of human hierarchy (aryans at the top) implement the insane Nazi policies
There is "science" and there is real science. Just like we've seen with Wuhan Corona Virus. Or with Dialectic Materialism or with Critical Race Theory or with Lysenkoism. Or with the Geocentric model of the universe.
It doesn't matter if you just call something "science" if in its core it is a belief in magic and noble or not so noble lies. Reality takes a measure of your beliefs and if they are false you fail. Just like Nazis failed even though they had industrial capacity under their control with exceeded that of the US and Soviet Union.
In its core, science is a method. It is a disinterested approach to test out competing theories and see which ones fit. This is what separates it from magical beliefs and witchdoctory.
The painful truth, though, is that the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that the groups really do differ significantly in average intelligence (although we are only in the early stages of figuring out how much of those differences are due to environmental versus genetic causes). Very few of the serious, well-researched hereditarians that I’ve come across are making anything like the argument that you’re describing, that any racial group is collectively unworthy of citizenship (and since the bell curves overlap, anyone who did consider intelligence to be a criterion for citizenship would make far more sense if they argued for citizenship to be granted or denied on the basis of a race-neutral IQ test). Many of them seem to be simply curious about human diversity, and many are others are concerned about the damage done to society when egalitarian ideologues assume, on the basis of no good evidence, that groups _must_ be equal in their average underlying ability, and then demand to tear down crucial functional institutions when those institutions produce results that, at the group level, reflect the actual differences in average ability.
That is really only true when you have literally no other information about someone, and even in that case it is a very unreliable indicator (given how large the overlap is). As an illustration if two populations have a difference in mean IQ of 10 points, with a 15 pt SD, in 32% of random pairings the person from the lower mean group would have a higher IQ.
From a strictly Bayesian perspective sure you can use race to update your priors when you have no other information, but that is a far cry from how most people read the theory (or how bigots often try to use it!)
"Use [of] race to update your priors" does justify some micro aggressions. You can butter it up, but it's a real implication, and part of what makes it hard to swallow. It's just more pleasant to say "we're all the same" and lock your car door. It's also insulting and it feeds people's insecurities.
I just don't think the practical implication is "treat Black people as less intelligent as a rule." It's "if you know nothing else, race moves your expectation of a person's intelligence a bit." Those are different claims and a lot of people conflate them.
Re: microaggressions, I think we're talking past each other. Its not that it is wrong for priors to affect how people behave under uncertainty, its that the existence of a group mean difference doesn't justify the groyper interpretation of the bell curve, which that by virtue of being white you are smarter than a random Black person.
It's not an accident. It's a deliberate strawman to trigger an emotional reaction that renders discussion impossible. Much like phrases like "X believes black people are genetically dumber".
Echoing my comment below, the fact that the bell curves overlap is much less important than how they overlap. That's why the figure on p 279 of The Bell Curve is so devastating.
I don't think it would help a whole lot honestly. 2 bell curves with a shifted mean will have astronomical differences at the tail end. If one group has mean 100, and the other mean 85 (both with SD of 15), there is 43 times more 145+ IQ individuals in group 1. You will always notice that.
That's why Cofnas said black people would effectively disappear from all public life other than sports and entertainment because that's what the hypothesis implies.
The problem with this is that stratified outcomes in a multi-racial society will inevitably foster bitter resentment, hence why even Cofnas advocated for a quasi-affirmative action policy in a recent interview.
I think the ever-increasing scientific evidence of biological differences between both individuals and groups over the last 60 years is a key reason for the Woke hysteria of the last 12 years. The Left simply has no logical or scientific argument to fall back on, so they try to shame others from telling the truth.
Unfortunately, it has worked so far, but the increasing importance of biomedical research will ultimately overcome their nonsensical ideology.
The data has been piling up, especially since DNA scans for measuring racial ancestry emerged in this century. The hereditarian hypothesis for racial differences in IQ twice survived a major challenge in the late 2010s that could have falsified it. For a century, scientists going back to Margaret Mead in 1926 have been talking about seeing if there is a correlation among African Americans between their percentage of white ancestry and their IQ. But, we didn't have a reliable way to measure racial admixture until the 21st Century. Finally, Pesta in 2018 and Fuerst in 2019 measured the correlation between white ancestry (from DNA) and IQ for both the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment cohort and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort, two ultra-high quality databases of 10,000+ young Americans.
The correlation between white admixture and IQ among self-identified African-Americans turned out to be right about what hereditarians had figured.
That doesn't prove that genes cause the racial IQ gaps, but it could have falsified the hereditarian theory in the Popperian mode if the result had found no correlation.
The New York Times responded by ignoring these findings for years, and then finally in 2026 running a front page story about how scandalous it was that scientists were using data to test forbidden ideas.
I think so but not in so direct a fashion: wokes are the ones that are so deep in the epistemic bubble that they don't even consider that they're wrong.
It's more that every center-left solution that assumed either a lack of differences or ones we can overcome has utterly failed. So the center left is intellectually discredited, and the woke have an easy argument for taking over.
Wokeism is like the Antifa movement: mythical except to American Rightists. For most Black people” to be “woke” is to be aware that racism or corruption exists in our society.
there are offensives to shore up various prevailing beliefs against emerging scientific evidence of anomalies. but woke has a more significant and durable social basis than the sum of eroding ideas and those with a vested interest to protect them.
the woke hysteria has significant drivers in social and political dynamics that push expansion of governance stratum and victimology paradigm. as practitioners become more autonomous (due to technology advance) in their fields governance as a mediation method appeals to and absorbs the leaders among them. victimology appeals to the lay governors as a distorted or misdirected empathy and in the condition of technology advance causing industrial obsolescence and impoverishing heartland and precariat, the phony victim praise and coddling gains steam as an alternative to nativist revolt with a means to pacify and reduce expectations of the falling majority, while simultaneously providing more funding and jobs to the tenders of victims, by increasing their clientele. and broadly outside social work fields per se, victimology paradigm spreads a copy of misdirected empathy in many domains that can be exploited by the lay practitioners in various parochial interests.
these broad trends will continue as the chasm between empowered practitioners of automation engineering and operations on the one hand, and the industrial epoch paradigm of liberal neutrality toward ethics on the other, grows and grows and grows. the superstructure lags and becomes more of a fetter on the advancing base. as long as liberalism holds there will be woke 1, 2, 3 and more.
the role of emerging facts, like scientific learning about genetic differences, or say the 20th century social experience that disproved the postulate of an industrial social group replacing the operation of capital by political fiat, are chinks in the logical and political armor of liberal paradigm that force the defenders to adjust their beliefs hence woke views as logical adjustments. e.g. we have other victims to replace industrial workers. but the underlying driver isnt pragmatic logical adjustment, it is automation and the incapacity of liberal paradigm to manage it.
If I was pumping gas into a US Army jeep at night in a village in the Mekong Delta in 1967, and an "Asian" woman appeared, reaching into her jacket, I'd probably shoot her on the spot. In that scenario, the black guy appearing out of nowhere was probably one of my squad mates come to help defend against the imminent mortar attack.
I dunno. In 1967 about a half-million GIs were rubbing shoulders with Asians every day. Black and white they had to back each other up against enemies they couldn't easily tell from friends and civilians, and who were sometimes all the same people. I just used pumping gas to be parallel with Soothsayer's original framing.
No that's precisely my point - attire and manner are things chosen by individuals. They tell you something about the individual.
You're correct that knowing *only* race tells you *only* something about base rates, and if the race involved has a higher base rate for crime, you should be cautious accordingly.
The same is true for other characteristics - youth commit more crimes, boys more than girls, people with tattoos, what kind of bumper stickers are on their car, etc.
But once you see attire, manner, other things that distinguish individuals from each other, you adjust. These other things tell you far more than group membership.
Some signals are opt in, others aren’t. Our culture urges us to suggest that we discount involuntary signals. But we still incorporate them into our expectations, instincts and behavior.
Yeah but that's not what the woke crowd is doing. They are saying that disparity implies discrimination and we need massive affirmative action to fix it.
You don’t need to persuade Richard Hanania of that. You need to persuade the progressives who are trying to wreck the institutions and selection processes that society depends on simply because when they are applied neutrally, some groups do better on average than others.
People have eyes. MLK put it best: "If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas." If all races have on average equal abilities, this should be right. Yet no standardized testing measure in history has ever produced proportional outcomes. Only quota systems or quasi-quota, which in every case do so by lowering standards.
When your treating people as individuals produces unequal outcomes between groups, you can't just not justify why this happens. The resentment it breeds has to go somewhere, and it reliably goes towards blaming any overperforming groups for conspiring against underperformers.
We have to accept that people differ, and there are correlations between genetic background and those differences. This is just reality, and nothing good ever came from ignoring reality.
But they are *only* statistical correlations. They tell us nothing about individuals.
Once we accept that, let the chips fall where they may. Maybe there will be more Jewish physicists and more Black musicians. So what? There will still be *some* black physicists and *some* Jewish musicians. Proportions may differ. Let it be.
OK, so Whites and Asians are the smartest and blacks are the dumbest. Yes. We know. I'm happy to be an outlier among my race, but it does hurt to accept group inferiority as a state of being.
What policy prescriptions should we draw from this? I'm a big Transhumanism guy. I want genetic engineering so everyone can have insane IQ. That's long term, medium term if we're lucky.
I like the schooling track systems done Europeans like. The dumb kids get sent to work with their hands, and the smart kids get their college track.
Should we make IQ screening a prerequisite to housing? Should we make it a prerequisite for food aid? Should we allow insurers to price your specific IQ into your insurance? I think yes on all of these, but eventually we're going to screen our way into a cognitive jungle where squalor and misery is the norm.
What are we supposed to do when those places reliably look very black? People will generally not accept permanent underclass status and treatment? Something needs to be done for the bottom quintile. That something can be quite sinister. The resistance to race and IQ talk stems from the natural conclusion that rightists tend to have about these things.
The good (?) news is that the difference in average IQ between whites and blacks will shortly fade into irrelevance next to the difference in IQ between machines and humans.
Hell yeah brother. I'm ready to be assimilated (unironically). I'm very AI-pilled. If medium term Transhumanism fantasies have any hope, AI research is the way. I'm 100% for it.
That plan assumes that the AI doesn't kill or exploit us. What prevents it from developing advanced technology, and colonizing human societies in the same way humans have historically colonized each other?
I am. I have a kid on the way, but sure, if I run it by my wife and it works out, I might.
On AI: I'm fully accelerationist about it. If we die, we die, that's out of my hands. Success is our best bet at a way out of the current global crises we're staring down. I have 121 IQ, this is 135+ genius territory. Nothing I or anyone in this comment section says can affect the outcome. I pray for Star Trek, and if it's Terminator then I suspect the end will be quick. The computer would just want us dead, and when it gets the chance it'll snipe us all quickly.
A lot of problems get solved when you ask the question "what is abundance/prosperity/progress for?" Isn't the point of it to make life suck less? Like, say, because of AI it becomes possible to cure cancer for $10. Should we exclude some bum with cancer from purchasing the cure because he got the $10 by panhandling? What about someone who got cancer because they are fat and smoke?
Isn't the point to make solutions to problems *so cheap and abundant* that we don't even have to waste time on stupid questions like "who deserves this and who doesn't?"
I am a libertarian, but I very much endorse this prosperity based concept of "Star Trek socialism" as Freddie deBoer called it once. In a world with food replicators, it's very stupid to even ask if people who don't work should get to eat delicious food.
Hah Hah. Use E = mc^2 to calculate the energy (presumably derived from table-top fusion reactors) to "replicate" a cheeseburger or even a breadstick or a single millet seed. That's just the mass equivalence. Now arrange all those quarks and electrons so produced into the macromolecules that make delicious food. Next figure out how to turn those macromolecules into doctors and nurses so there is no queuing or payment for health care.
I think economics will be the study of scarcity (not abundance) for a few millennia yet.
I don't see why any of the far-fetched dystopian outcomes you suggest would follow from accepting this fact. The more obvious implication is simply that we stop crying discrimination for every single state of the world that doesn't match the current population percentages. Whether that's by race, gender, religion, etc. Many other forces at work, including genetics and culture.
As time passes and we understand more about genetics, we'll likely discover genetics trumps all, but for now -- the sinister implication that everything is caused by "the man," a malevolent actor behind the scenes, should be rubbished.
I think there is probably some merit to active slum clearance. A lot of problems are caused by *concentrations* of the lumpenproletariat, not by any specific person's likelihood of being in it. Mayberry can afford to treat Otis (the town drunk in the Andy Griffith show) with lots of patience and tolerance because he's the only town drunk. All you can do with Skid Row is try to avoid it.
At least you can avoid Skid Row. If you disperse it through slum clearance you may not be able to. If if metastasizes, it acts as a magnet for other bums because the users draw the dealers who create more addicted users.
Resistance to group differences was also strong in the 00s, the days of compassionate conservatism, when a republican administration fought for spending on public health in Africa.
I suspect it's driven by the other thing. "It does hurt to accept group inferiority." You may look past that hurt feeling, but others are more sensitive to it and less driven by truth seeking. Our culture also makes it awkward or rude to accept group superiority on the flip side, so whites and asians cringe at group differences too.
I've been thinking about "soft eugenics" which would be designed on the principle that participation is voluntary, and demographic parity should be maintained. This policy is just a shower thought, I'm not officially endorsing it, so don't cancel me.
* For criminals, a year off your sentence if you opt for sterilization.
* Every criminal who gets sterilized triggers a "procreation talent search" for a talented person of that criminal's ethnicity, which we encourage to procreate. This would be in the form of cash bonuses for sperm and egg donation, or cash bonuses for married couples who have babies. The cash bonus is based on the amount of money saved since we don't have to imprison the convict in question for the final year of their sentence. The "procreation talent search" seeks healthy, law-abiding, highly-educated citizens with a history of supporting themselves effectively and paying their taxes. Again, to maintain demographic parity, the winner of the talent search (the person or couple receiving the cash bonus) should have an identical ethnic background to the person who opted for sterilization.
Assuming you're heredity-pilled, this policy should: reduce mass incarceration, reduce crime, improve our long-term national fiscal prospects, increase economic growth, reduce racial inequality and stereotyping, maybe even address the fertility crisis. All for the low, low price of being told that you're Hitler. Sound appealing?
Sounds good. I would imagine that the opt-in would work better than the first read of this felt seeing it. Criminals are dumb with low time preference, so time off a sentence for the end of their contribution to the genetic line might be a strong trade. Messing with the amnesty time might be required, but I could see it.
For the birthrate thing, I'm skeptical of baby bonuses in terms of effectiveness, it's fine but I think I'd go further. Find criminal women, offer them an amnesty and some money to do surrogacy for very high IQ individuals, ethnicity matched if possible (highest IQ available if not), commensurate with the number of kids they agree to crank out. Very high quality genes mixed with very low probably comes out positive.
But if you are smart, then you are not part of an inferior group. It is you who identifies yourself as black, as if that is the most important thing you or everyone else should know about you. If we said you have to have an IQ above 85 to be let out of the pens and allowed to mingle freely in society, you would be among the group granted freedom, not in an inferior group at all. And many white people would be penned up also as being not fully fit to self-govern in open society. The bottom quintile might be heavily black, but not as exclusively black as if we penned up all black people *because they were black*, apartheid-style.
If society knew that people with IQ under 85 had to stay in their place, ankle monitors and all, there would be less stigma against a black person like you moving in the >85 circles because we would know you were probably not criminal, schizophrenic, possessed of poor impulse control, or just too dumb to take on a job we were looking to hire for.
"Those places" already look and act very black. The underclass doesn't seem to mind being rendered permanently so as long as it is anesthetized with money and drugs. And we don't mind as long as the violence stays there and doesn't leak out into the suburbs aboard all those LRT trams that small cities started to build during the Obama years. So the status quo since the Great Society is probably what the bottom quintile gets. "But they've got too much already and besides we've got the cops!" Phil Ochs sang sardonically back in 1967 ("Outside of a Small Circle of Friends") Things seem to be holding up OK.
I think "humans will never accept racial differences in intelligence, regardless of what evidence or data comes forward" is too strong. Americans & Europeans will not accept the idea in the near- to medium-term future, because racial equality has become a sacred value supported by the sacred memory of the Holocaust in Europe & slavery/segregation in the US. (I use 'sacred' here in Durkheim's sense, to mean that these things must not, in many people's view, be profaned by contact with, e.g., counterarguments or mockery.) But this need not be permanent: sacred stories often lose their sacrality over time & thus become acceptable to criticize. For a few US examples: the settling of the West is no longer seen as unambiguously heroic, but rather is commonly criticized for its effects on the Indians & the environment; orderly direct democracy was once fundamental to the idea of American 'liberty', but as it died out (see https://scholars-stage.org/pining-for-democracy-a-few-readings/ ) that has been forgotten, allowing criticism of, e.g., Andrew Jackson to become conventional. Nor is a belief in the equality of abilities of racial groups necessary to the political systems of America & Europe, even assuming no radical revolution: at the beginning of the 20th century, America outside the South & much of Europe were governed under theoretically-egalitarian (as regards political rights) liberalism while most people believed in white superiority & saw no contradiction therein.
(Nor was there a contradiction, as can be seen in one of Lincoln's senate-campaign speeches where he reconciles the two ideas: "I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." From https://mason.gmu.edu/~zschrag/hist120spring05/lincoln_ottawa.htm )
The whole concept of “stereotypes” (a relatively recent coinage) is pretty much junk. It functions mostly to stigmatize the use of generalizations with respect to population groups. But generalizations are a useful intellectual tool in any realm, if you know what purpose they do and don't serve.
IMO it also licenses a lot of left-wing gnostic thinking: the average person is ignorant of the *real* nature of the world because they rely on...observation. True knowledge is found in the depths of left-wing departments where we can replace unreliable sense data with Theory.
It's given all the wrong people a sense of intellectual superiority.
Right. The project to ban stereotypes or the use of stylized examples to understand complex reality is foolish. This is how people naturally understand the world.
Stereotypes are the furthest thing from junk. Their tendency towards accuracy is among the few unambiguous triumphs of the social sciences in recent times:
Though as you mentioned, this is precisely because their generalizations. Generalizations form because their average popular perceptions of the tendencies of reality.
I don't think race realism entails unlimited Indians. We have genetic interests a la Frank Salter. Preferring your own group over high IQ outsiders is not irrational bias; it's what the whole evolutionary game is about.
Preferring your own extended family is evolutionarily rational; preferring everyone who resembles you in certain parts of their physical appearance is less so.
Is it though? Globalization can't be undone. We have an awareness of the world we did not have for most of human history. There's no going back, there is only preservation and particularism if you don't want developed white countries to get overwhelmed.
There is no reason to slavishly value the replication of one's genes just because that's what evolution accidentally shat out. Evolution is meaningless.
Take it all the way to the gene level then. A gene is either beneficial in evolutionary terms or it's not (or neutral). And your "genetic interest" at this level is just successful replication. If all you care about is this, *fitness* should be the measure of who you want in your group/to interbreed with because that's more likely to result in successful gene replication over longer periods of time. Gene replication is what evolution "wants."
You are just using the term "genetic interest" to set aside some specific (probably mostly physical) phenotype bundle you want to preserve for aesthetic reasons. Your ability to replicate your genes successfully is not contingent on the preservation of any particular physical phenotype. (Without resorting to the absurd. Obviously, you couldn't kill all females or all males and have a viable species). And gene replication is the only "genetic interest" that you have.
Preferring them how? If you mean caring about the welfare of your own group, unlimited Indians would clearly increase that. Having more Indian doctors to treat illnesses and more Indian entrepreneurs to create jobs will make your group healthier and richer.
Territories don't have given carrying capacities. Carrying capacities increase with human ingenuity. In fact, unlimited Indians might increase the carrying capacity of your territory by a significant margin by bringing in more Indian scientists and engineers. It might be able to support more members of your group that before, even with the added Indians.w
Indian Americans are the most wealthy and productive ethnic group in America. An "infinite Indian hive" full of such people would be a utopia of abundance and excellence. Your and my grandchildren would be angry and disappointed to not live in such a place.
I think it's incredibly irrational to choose to worship and do the bidding of your genes when you (as in the subjective experiencing you) know for a fact that your genes are amoral, unconscious, and don't have any point or purpose other than replication for no reason, til the next giant asteroid comes along. Literally the most irrational thing I can imagine.
More importantly, there is a ton of anti-American sentiment in India, of the most intense third-worldist variety. I don't want immigrants who hate my country.
>Maybe get news from somewhere other than the websites of racial socialists.
Did you notice that the author of the article is an Indian-American who worked in the US consulate?
You said “screening them for ability hasn’t worked out well.”
It clearly has. Even with the poorly designed H1B system, Indian immigration is a major benefit. If you had a good system, it would be even better, which undermines your point.
"Even with the poorly designed H1B system, Indian immigration is a major benefit."
This is basically the streetlight fallacy. You're talking about what you can measure (Indian-American incomes) instead of what we actually want to know (whether Indian immigration is a benefit). You seem to ignore all of the reasons people give to believe Indian immigration hasn't been, or will not be, beneficial in favor of just repeating unrelated talking points about e.g. income. I don't believe you ever responded to this article for instance: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-case-against-indian-immigration
If Indian immigration is something you care about, I suggest you stop with the generic boosterism and actually write a blog post about what a policy improvement on H-1B would look like in your mind. If it's a well-designed policy, perhaps you can kill two birds with one stone, and both address the concerns of critics, and also increase skilled immigration of Indian entrepreneurs and such. Generic boosterism will tend to make critics *more* worried, not less.
You're the statistician, not me, but it seems you're going WAY beyond what the Reich research established. To the layman (at least this one), the only relevance this has to "HBD" is that it demonstrates that evolution can happen a lot faster than we thought. It doesn't show us what the selection pressures were, much less that such pressures weren't also occuring in sub-saharan Africa. I'm a big fan, but this really makes me sad.
Right, you can posit the exact same selection pressures operating on differing populations in radically different environments over thousands of years, hitting the exact same results. I don't know why you would posit that though, unless one wants it to be true. But perhaps Reich is gathering the data right now to prove this. I'd like to see a prediction market on that.
Reich says genetic data is hard to come by in warm climates due to degradation.
There were sophisticated commercial societies in subsaharan Africa prior to colonialism. So it basically comes down to what you believe was distinctive about the European environment.
Thatcher is right. Reich's lab is doing wonderful research, and it's unsettling to see the results abused in this way.
Agriculture and herding dramatically changed sub-Saharan Africa just as they did West Eurasia and East Asia. You don't need to posit identical selection pressures or identical genetic responses. In his book, Reich mentions that the ability to digest animal milk emerged independently in three different African populations, with a distinct genetic basis in each group.
As Ebenezer comments, it's harder to obtain ancient DNA in Africa because of the climate. IIRC they've made some headway through improvements in extraction methods. The other challenge is Africa's extraordinary genetic diversity and population structure.
It's not a coy pose on the part of Reich and his colleagues. The paper also says nothing about the pace or trajectory of recent human evolution in East Asia.
Reich was pretty clear that his research tells him Western Europeans got a lot smarter in the last 3000 years. But it has nothing to say about RELATIVE intelligence. He doesn’t have the data (at least not yet) to see what happened to the IQs of people in other parts of the world.
If I remember correctly he said it was likely the same increase happened everywhere in the world.
I think Hanania is arguing that Europeans and Africans were likely the same IQ 3000 years ago but that Europeans got a lot smarter than Africans in the last 3000 years?
But Reich doesn’t say anything about the relative IQ of the two groups were 3000 years ago or what happens to the IQ of Africans in the last 3000 years.
However, African-Americans get way higher test scores than Africans. That suggests an environmental component to African underperformance. Also it's good to see e.g. Kenya as a bright spot--they're outscoring Chile for example.
Africa is a more diverse continent and kinda stopped by the artificial borders imposed on them, mostly south of the Sahara.
That said, there is just by numbers a probability of having many tribes just be smarted than the average,some people have pointed towards the Igbo at some point.
I was a graduate student in psychology at Johns Hopkins during the 70s when Lewontin and Gould were making their terrible arguments, so reading the current post was a déjà vu experience. Liberal academics were so frightened by race science that they threw the kitchen sink against it. In addition to Lewontin's fallacious argument, academics also argued that IQ scores are culturally biased and meaningless. Funny how a meaningless construct predicts many important life outcomes. They also argued that race is a purely social construct such that race categories are arbitrary and meaningless. Funny how race can be a meaningless construct in science but a meaningful construct for affirmative action and reparations. There are some half-truths, though, in these fallacious arguments. IQ is not necessarily the most important predictor of all life outcomes, and, per Coleman Hughes, race is a social construct inspired by a biological reality. The race science debates are so fraught with hidden agendas that I have always stayed away from the topic.
I agree with you that public opinion probably doesn't work like Cofnas' mind when he's writing a philosophy article, but I think you greatly underestimate the probability that hereditarianism could gain mainstream acceptance. Consider how many beliefs we now take for granted that in ages past would have been considered absurd or taboo. Hereditarianism is effectively the default worldview for most human cultures throughout most of history, and even today, many of our ordinary stereotypes and folk beliefs are grounded in it ("you two will make such smart babies!").
Perhaps the hereditarian revolution has already begun. Cofnas' exposure of Arday was the catalyst that propelled him into major newspapers, a BBC interview, and at least half a dozen "mainstream" podcasts, where, if he gets the chance, he talks about hereditarianism. In fact, as a direct consequence of the Arday affaire, some substack authors who once exhorted their readers to "shut up about race and IQ" are now... talking about race and IQ.
Well said. People have seen it as a default worldview long before genetics/science was understood as it is today. How can it be denied now, and into the future?...especially while there's simultaneous discussion surrounding genetic screening/fertility tech companies that can select for IQ markers etc.? (I don't know how accurate that truly is though...embryonic selecting for IQ )
I trained as an academic psychologist at excellent undergraduate and graduate programs receiving my PhD in 1990 and I was unaware that there was any persuasive evidence about black-white differences in the US on *unbiased* tests of intelligence. I was profoundly shocked and very angry when some 30 years later I decided to "do the research" and googled the issue. I found a strong Brookings Institution paper reviewing the issue with many citations from before 1990 and careful attention to the standard measurement critiques. I was truly shaken and deeply disappointed.
While I didn't do a lot of work with intelligence myself, the evidence was quite clear even in the 1990s that intelligence is a coherent construct, that individual differences in intelligence matter to other outcomes, and that individual differences in intelligence are highly heritable. And as for everything else, there is little evidence of the power of shared environment to influence intelligence [towards similarity] beyond the similarity already predicted by shared genes.
I still don't know what to make of the silence on the issue. Was there a lightening strike of Freudianism and my teachers repressed it? Did we fail to get them drunk enough at parties and post seminar for them to share the grievous news? I know that many of them did work that nibbled around the edges of the phenomena and so I doubt they could have been entirely ignorant. This realization and sense of loosing faith with the world is right up there for me with the Santa Claus betrayal and realizing my parents weren't infallible.
"I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of
professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more
of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also
overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people
experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones.
You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very
different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living
in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such
questions."
I think that is fair if it means things like appreciating individuals on their own merits in everyday life and avoiding prying into personal details of genetics and phenotypes and ancestry in inappropriate ways. For example, 23 and Me tells me that somehow my genes make it harder for me to gain strength in the gym than for others. I'd certainly not like people sniggering about me as I strain to lift the same weight stack month after month saying something about it and hoping that I hadn't passed it on. (It also really ticks me off when my family bring up some of my great great great ancestors who did some really heinous things.) However, for professional scientists whose interests are not gossipy prurience to be taboo-ed out of such an interesting area is indefensible. Who knows what we might learn that could improve human lives? And I think that other similarities and differences among humans are similarly interesting and worthy of study.
Matt's post is good, but he neglects the fact that the woke people started it. Hard to bash white people as oppressive colonizers, and then complain about ethnic stereotyping when they bash you back. Back in the 90s, we kept the peace with a social contract that made all statements of this type taboo in any direction.
It always surprises me that people will accept the truth of the fundamental unfairness of the hand evolution death out to animals - parasitic flesh-eating wasps, insects that live only long to breed and then die, mass death with almost no chance at life for the typical r reproductive strategy creatures, obligate carnivores that can only survive by killing and eating other organisms in painful ways, but are deeply shocked to find evolution is just as unfair with what it did with humans.
Seriously, wtf. I find the attitudes of many of the men commenting here completely bizarre. Of course evolution does all kinds of insane shit, often for crap and overtly evil/horrible outcomes. And things change fast. I swear has no one ever paid attention to plants or animals at all?!? You can change them INCREDIBLY fast, why on earth did anyone used to think evolution was so slow? And has no one watched any nature documentaries? Practically all life on earth has been wiped out several times over now...humans are barely a two-second long blip, and it's very unlikely we will remain as obviously the same species in another few thousand years.
The issue is that, by acknowledging evolution moves quickly, you tacitly admit human races are real. You as well admit that there can never be any such thing as one united human race, as such is not possible under any system with unequal reproductive outcomes between peoples. As long as some people reproduce more and others less, as long as some groups reproduce more and others less, and as long as some racial pairings happen at unequal rates, there could never even in principle be such a thing as one human race.
That's the whole point of punctuated equilibrium: A way to deracinate hereditarianism from evolution.
I wonder if David Reich has a duty to be Straussian about these sort of things, not just to protect himself but also because I'm not sure if the masses are able to process "there are group-average genetic differences in IQ and behavior but that does not mean we should reinstate racial segregation."
I just want to point out that before the second world war, the idea of innate cognitive and behavioral differences across races was the majority opinion in the West. It was seen as obvious for most intellectuals at the time. Actually, that's why democratic countries like England and France were so comfortable with colonialism, a deeply undemocratic system: civilized (=smarter) nations had the right to govern uncivilized (=stupider) one.
It's only after the second World War that innate difference between races became repugnant because of nazism. As the second World War fades from memory, this idea could become less repugnant again, especially if it has some support from science (even though, as pointed elsewhere, Reich's lab research does not directly support race difference in intelligence). Ideas can change faster than you think.
Moreover, Asian people are usually much more comfortable with the idea of innate racial difference. As they become more numerous and more influential in the US, those ideas may become more popular and acceptable within the elite.
Why so ? do just accept it so ? Seems like has to do with unique Mexican history ? How Mexico deals with political entrepreneurs who raise these issues ?
I think the reason we refuse to acknowledge this piblicly is that it makes society worse. It makes people feel really bad to hear that they are on average dumber than others. I, a black guy, feel bad despite my best efforts because of reading this article. I am a rationalist and feel like I should just be able to get over this feeling but I wish I hadn't read about this because now I have this subconcious voice in the back of my mind telling me that I might be dumb despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Our current policy of holding everyone to the same standard and then telling them it's a personal failure when they don't succeed is much more harmful.
So what do you suggest? Having separate but slightly unequal school systems that have slightly lower standards for black people? Isn't this just basically affirmative action (which I think is bad)? I think that having different standards creates the victim mindset that you see with many black people today. As I'm sure you know, IQs have been going up consistently since the metric was created due to a number of environmental factors. If I, as a black person, am of average intelligence for a black person, I am essentially the same average intelligence as a white person that recieved slightly worse nutrition growing up than I growing up. I don't think either of us should be treated any differently just because of our race, we dumb dumbs just need a little extra push in school to get us up to speed. I don't think it matters if black people have lower intelligence on average (which I don't know if I even accept) because we live in a society where we regularly extend a helping hand to those less fortunate than us because its the morally right thing to do. Lend me a hand would ya?
I sympathize with you, and it makes me happy to see you genuinely engaging with the issue. Massive respect man. Yes, separate schools would be my suggestion. I think this feeling you have is not because of the reality, but because of the mismatched expectation. You were lied to, and that hurts. I think if we mercifully spoke the truth from day 1 you wouldn't feel this pain. You being on substack means you're way above your race average. I wish you the best.
I think most normies would find hereditarianism more palatable if they understood that the bell curves overlap. In other words the argument is not "all whites are smarter than all blacks" - and therefore the argument cannot be used to judge an entire race of people. Millions of blacks are smarter than millions of whites or Asians. If anything, the policy implication is to reject the disparate-impact reasoning that assumes equal group outcomes should be the default expectation, while remaining committed to equal treatment at the individual level
This is a good point but i actually think that even bell curve overlap isn't necessary. Assume there was less variance and actually every black person had exactly 85 IQ and every white person had 100. That still doesn't make genocide or slavery or jim crow OK, there is no immediate relationahip between those positive and normative claims.
In fact if you want to be cheeky you could even flip it and tell normies "You are basing not being racist on the shaky idea that blacks are just as good at math as whites are. Thus you're implying that if that wasn't true then racism would be OK. I believe in treating black people decently regardless of what the science shows about their IQ, so my moral anti-racism is actually stronger than yours."
This type of argument relies on a very strange abstraction of moral desert from someone's psychological traits. In this way of thinking, someone can have an IQ of 80, have schizophrenia, and severe anger issues, and yet none of this justifies treating them poorly or discriminating against them unless they do something bad. But in the real world, having a low IQ is correlated with reasoning deficits that lead to decreased impulse control and increased bad behavior. So one of the reasons why this discourse is uncomfortable is because arguing that the races have an IQ gap in the aggregate does imply that they have an ethical gap in the aggregate.
I think plenty of people (probably a majority?) think there is never a justification for treating *anyone* "poorly" for any reason other than that they have first demonstrated that they treat others poorly. So I disagree this is a big issue unless one is already in the minority of people who think it's fine to go around treating random people poorly for no real reason or based on the most sketchy and bare evidence or assumptions. It's not as if we live in a world where one is subject to danger and violence on a regular basis and people need to walk around defensive. Almost everyone lives to old age.
This is another argument someone can make about this, but it is a different argument than the one I was replying to.
In regard to this specific argument, I would say that I think there are three separate questions your argument here is conflating. Question 1 is whether it is okay to ever call people slurs or visibly bully them for no reason (obviously no and this would even apply to someone who looked homeless). Question 2 is whether making general trait-based judgments based on things like race, gender, self-presentation, and accent help people navigate social dynamics better than not doing so (in a way that can sometimes lead to 'mistreatment' in a more abstract mediated sense). Question 3 is whether or not we should have a commitment rooted in liberal principles of not making generalistic judgments even if they help people navigate social dynamics better.
Very thought-provoking.
One issue I have is White neighborhoods, turning into Black neighborhoods, and then becoming abandoned. I know that this causes a lot of human suffering that our society just cannot recognize. The Whites who move away get accused of being racist, when in fact they just accurately saw what was happening, that they could not stop, and got out before the place turned really violent. It makes me so angry. But, could I be in favor of segregation??? That seems just awful. So, I see the problem, and I just do not know what can be done.
I mean it’s true that it would be more difficult not to have heavy discrimination if 90% of a group were insane and violent, although even if that were the case it would be still desirable to try to identify the 10% who aren’t if possible.
In the real world I think every group has a clear majority of people who are functional enough that they don’t need to be involuntarily committed or jailed even if that majority is more overwhelming for some groups than others. Everyone else should then just be encouraged to participate in society on the basis of individualism and meritocracy, and using group averages to argue for special treatment/reparations or for categorical discrimination should be discouraged.
You can make this argument, but it is a different argument than the argument 'it is racist to presume that aggregate intelligence differences assume an aggregate group level difference in ethical character'.
If the point is antisocial behavior then men have lower “aggregate group level ethical character” than women I guess. My point wasn’t to deny statistics, my point is that emphasizing them isn’t necessary to reject BLM and that denying them isn’t necessary to reject racism.
I would agree that men have lower aggregate group level ethical character than women, and the way people treat unkept young men versus unkept young women in public reflects this. But I think that the argument 'it is antiliberal or possibly ineffective socially to apply group level judgments to individuals too much' is a better argument than 'it is bad to assume that intelligence corresponds with virtue'.
Yeah … unfortunately a lot of race science enthusiasts are also enthusiastic about letting people suffer because they’re less smart. It truly makes no sense. What is stopping the race science world from also having a well developed ecosystem of moral reasoning that explained that all people are equally deserving of justice and rights and to be free of tyranny etc?
Also I have a general question about this essay - how is the author making the jump from “certain traits are more prevalent” to “some races are smarter”? “Smart” is like “good at sports”. Smart how? Good at what spot? A marathon runner can’t trade places with a powerlifter. if genetics showed that a population is more likely to have perfect pitch, another is better at arithmetic, another has more people with photographic memories - which of these populations is “smarter”?
Yes, lot of the people who are most enthusiastic about pointing out group differences have bad normative views but there are also a lot of us who just don’t buy the idea that these group differences are 100% environmental and believe that thinking so is harmful in its own way.
Regarding intelligence, it is relatively uncontroversial among psychometricians that different intelligences (verbal, quantitative, working memory etc.) are highly correlated, much more so than different sports. When they analyze results from different cognitive tests and perform factor analysis they detect a general g factor which they take to be the indicator of general intelligence. Stuart Ritchie (basically a mainstream liberal, not really a race science guy) has a really good short book on this called Intelligence: All That Matters which recaps the basics of intelligence research (measurement, importance for social outcomes, g factor and heritability) pretty well.
I really like this retort. Liberals implicitly do think people are their intelligence, but they don't follow it to the logical conclusion -- if someone is smarter, are they more deserving of rights and human dignity?
No, liberalism endows all people with equal rights. That’s the meaning of “all men are created equal … “ it doesn’t mean that literally all men are the same height and weight and have all the same skills. It means that every individual is endowed with dignity and deserves respect- exactly not conditional on whether they’re good at some particular skill or good at anything at all. Just by being alive, by being born, we are each valuable.
that's certainly what I think. so why does it so offend liberals that some people are smarter than others? and the cause of that is genetic, not environmental?
It doesn’t, inherently, which is what Hanania’s post is about. The problem is that unlike the scientist he’s profiling above, most of the people who are enthusiastic about proving that intelligence has a genetic component are using that to justify injustice.
Racism does, in fact, exist. And racism manifestly makes people’s lives worse. Most race scientists aren’t doing race science to say “people are different in predictable ways, so let’s organize ourselves to ensure that success is possible for people with a variety of innate abilities.” Instead the point of that race science is to say, “look at these people who are suffering, it’s not because of anything someone else did to them, but because of their innate inferiority, their suffering is fine, because it’s nature’s punishment for being inferior.” <—- that is what liberals object to.
Hanania actually wrote a much more thoughtful and sophisticated piece in which he argued that even if you could convince liberals to agree that there were inherent intelligence differences between races, they (we) would simply start arguing for equality on a different basis. Egalitarianism is the point.
He puts out so much slop like this, but occasionally he writes something uniquely insightful.
I like it. Lincoln said, "would someone smarter than you have the right to keep you as a slave??"
Also, even if this was true, it would only stay true for about five minutes because of intergroup mating. The parents IQs might be reliably 85 and 100, but the offspring's would not.
Isn't your claim undermined by the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years of mating prior to the last "about five minutes" that got us to this current moment and set of realities? Why would this be true starting now and going forward and now in reverse for every generation that got us here?
Universal literacy, economic mobility, cars, planes, telephones, the internet, Tinder, much more widespread shared language (English), etc. There are almost countless differences between the mating environments of humans thousands of years ago and today/past 100 years.
By assortative mating (smart likes smart, dumb gets stuck with dumb) and the stigma (from both sides) against white men marrying black women, I think that would take a lot longer than 5 minutes to erase. Even white women who marry black men are regarded, even in Canada where we don't have a slavery legacy, as lower caste.
Genocide no, but then African Americans didn't experience genocide. Genocide needs at the very least a demographic proof of collapsing population. Slavery? Sure, but there was also a lot of white people slavery in Eurasia too. Look at the Greeks and Romans, for example. Last - Jim Crow. That's a bit different. Britain had a long history of differential electoral franchise depending on wealth, that was only abolished after WW1, IIRC.
Awareness of distributional differences warrants unequal treatment of strangers, if no worse than what everyone already does instinctively. As Jesse Jackson put it, "There is nothing more painful to me... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
This concern is still more environmentally derived than phenotype derived. I grew up in a small Southern town with an ~30% black population. My high school was around half black. Because the town was so small there was a lot of functional integration - one post office, one grocery store, one movie theatre, etc. I had 0 concerns about black people who I saw around everywhere all the time doing anything to me. There just wasn't hardly any crime. Somebody clutching their purse in my hometown because there was a black guy walking down the sidewalk is being *objectively* irrational. "Rural" trumped everything else. It was one of those cliche places where you could leave your computer in your car or your door unlocked and nothing would happen.
I've also been in some extremely dodgy parts of LA and definitely paid a lot more attention to things like where I parked and what I left in my car. This just didn't matter at home.
Jesse Jackson's problem isn't that there are black people around. It's that he apparently lived in a shit neighborhood. He should move to Atlanta or some such place where there are thriving middle class black neighborhoods.
Yeah, I think that's more about the density of cities than anything. I also grew up in a similar rural population in the south and never felt threatened among a group of back people because I was generally only two degree removed from their parents. Plus, my first grade teacher was a black woman who spent most of her career teaching in segregated schools (I didn't know that at the time) and she was my favorite teacher at any level.
Same. Fond memories of my second-grade teacher who was black. She was the teacher who figured out I needed glasses and told my parents.
No, you could have a heavy density if policing is good enough. See Singapur.
Sure, but Singapore also does things like preventing neighborhoods from becoming ethnic enclaves.
80% of housing there is government owned, and they have strict rules around the density of different ethnic groups allowed to live in that housing. If you brought that policy to America there would not be any majority-black or -latino neighborhoods.
There are simply vanilla policing, chocolate policing and strawberry policing. But all of them are policing.
I have always been fascinated by (mostly) White individuals’ obsessions with IQ measurements as means to demonstrate that Black people are “less intelligent “ than White people. All to point out our unworthiness as citizens of this great nation. Well, who cares what these so-called scientists/scholars think or thought about us. So many of these so-called “race scientists” were Jewish which seems to be ironic considering the Nazi connection to race science/Eugenics. The approximately 50 M Black Americans ( total Black alone and in combination with another race) will continue to strive with varying degrees of individual success.
The painful truth, though, is that the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that the groups really do differ significantly in average intelligence (although we are only in the early stages of figuring out how much of those differences are due to environmental versus genetic causes). Very few of the serious, well-researched hereditarians that I’ve come across are making anything like the argument that you’re describing, that any racial group is collectively unworthy of citizenship (and since the bell curves overlap, anyone who did consider intelligence to be a criterion for citizenship would make far more sense if they argued for citizenship to be granted or denied on the basis of a race-neutral IQ test). Many of them seem to be simply curious about human diversity, and many are others are concerned about the damage done to society when egalitarian ideologues assume, on the basis of no good evidence, that groups _must_ be equal in their average underlying ability, and then demand to tear down crucial functional institutions when those institutions produce results that, at the group level, reflect the actual differences in average ability.
Who did you have in mind?
Nazis's antisemitism didn't grow out of race science. It grew out of conviction that Jews had magical powers, even though they didn't explain it that way or admit it to themselves.
However, it was a modern form of witchdoctory, not race science. The reason Nazi Germany and Wehrmacht did Holocaust was they thought they lost WW1 due to Jews, and would win WW2 if they eliminate them.
The Nazis very much believed in “race science” . They used race science to develop their theory of human hierarchy (aryans at the top) implement the insane Nazi policies
There is "science" and there is real science. Just like we've seen with Wuhan Corona Virus. Or with Dialectic Materialism or with Critical Race Theory or with Lysenkoism. Or with the Geocentric model of the universe.
It doesn't matter if you just call something "science" if in its core it is a belief in magic and noble or not so noble lies. Reality takes a measure of your beliefs and if they are false you fail. Just like Nazis failed even though they had industrial capacity under their control with exceeded that of the US and Soviet Union.
In its core, science is a method. It is a disinterested approach to test out competing theories and see which ones fit. This is what separates it from magical beliefs and witchdoctory.
The painful truth, though, is that the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that the groups really do differ significantly in average intelligence (although we are only in the early stages of figuring out how much of those differences are due to environmental versus genetic causes). Very few of the serious, well-researched hereditarians that I’ve come across are making anything like the argument that you’re describing, that any racial group is collectively unworthy of citizenship (and since the bell curves overlap, anyone who did consider intelligence to be a criterion for citizenship would make far more sense if they argued for citizenship to be granted or denied on the basis of a race-neutral IQ test). Many of them seem to be simply curious about human diversity, and many are others are concerned about the damage done to society when egalitarian ideologues assume, on the basis of no good evidence, that groups _must_ be equal in their average underlying ability, and then demand to tear down crucial functional institutions when those institutions produce results that, at the group level, reflect the actual differences in average ability.
Who did you have in mind?
That is really only true when you have literally no other information about someone, and even in that case it is a very unreliable indicator (given how large the overlap is). As an illustration if two populations have a difference in mean IQ of 10 points, with a 15 pt SD, in 32% of random pairings the person from the lower mean group would have a higher IQ.
From a strictly Bayesian perspective sure you can use race to update your priors when you have no other information, but that is a far cry from how most people read the theory (or how bigots often try to use it!)
"Use [of] race to update your priors" does justify some micro aggressions. You can butter it up, but it's a real implication, and part of what makes it hard to swallow. It's just more pleasant to say "we're all the same" and lock your car door. It's also insulting and it feeds people's insecurities.
edit I think you mean update posteriors
Correct re: posteriors -
I just don't think the practical implication is "treat Black people as less intelligent as a rule." It's "if you know nothing else, race moves your expectation of a person's intelligence a bit." Those are different claims and a lot of people conflate them.
Re: microaggressions, I think we're talking past each other. Its not that it is wrong for priors to affect how people behave under uncertainty, its that the existence of a group mean difference doesn't justify the groyper interpretation of the bell curve, which that by virtue of being white you are smarter than a random Black person.
Alas not only true when you have no other info. Priors influence posteriors.
Really does violate my priors when a black person doesn't have a big juicy posterior.
"I'd like to violate that...." nevermind, please ignore.
Yes, always bothered me that people don't understand that there are plenty of smart black people regardless of the mean.
It's not an accident. It's a deliberate strawman to trigger an emotional reaction that renders discussion impossible. Much like phrases like "X believes black people are genetically dumber".
Echoing my comment below, the fact that the bell curves overlap is much less important than how they overlap. That's why the figure on p 279 of The Bell Curve is so devastating.
Race scientists (race hustlers) like Cofnas have predicted the disappearance of Black people since the 19th century.
I don't think it would help a whole lot honestly. 2 bell curves with a shifted mean will have astronomical differences at the tail end. If one group has mean 100, and the other mean 85 (both with SD of 15), there is 43 times more 145+ IQ individuals in group 1. You will always notice that.
That's why Cofnas said black people would effectively disappear from all public life other than sports and entertainment because that's what the hypothesis implies.
The problem with this is that stratified outcomes in a multi-racial society will inevitably foster bitter resentment, hence why even Cofnas advocated for a quasi-affirmative action policy in a recent interview.
What quasi affirmative action policy did he advocate for?
I think the ever-increasing scientific evidence of biological differences between both individuals and groups over the last 60 years is a key reason for the Woke hysteria of the last 12 years. The Left simply has no logical or scientific argument to fall back on, so they try to shame others from telling the truth.
Unfortunately, it has worked so far, but the increasing importance of biomedical research will ultimately overcome their nonsensical ideology.
Right.
The data has been piling up, especially since DNA scans for measuring racial ancestry emerged in this century. The hereditarian hypothesis for racial differences in IQ twice survived a major challenge in the late 2010s that could have falsified it. For a century, scientists going back to Margaret Mead in 1926 have been talking about seeing if there is a correlation among African Americans between their percentage of white ancestry and their IQ. But, we didn't have a reliable way to measure racial admixture until the 21st Century. Finally, Pesta in 2018 and Fuerst in 2019 measured the correlation between white ancestry (from DNA) and IQ for both the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment cohort and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort, two ultra-high quality databases of 10,000+ young Americans.
The correlation between white admixture and IQ among self-identified African-Americans turned out to be right about what hereditarians had figured.
That doesn't prove that genes cause the racial IQ gaps, but it could have falsified the hereditarian theory in the Popperian mode if the result had found no correlation.
The New York Times responded by ignoring these findings for years, and then finally in 2026 running a front page story about how scandalous it was that scientists were using data to test forbidden ideas.
I think so but not in so direct a fashion: wokes are the ones that are so deep in the epistemic bubble that they don't even consider that they're wrong.
It's more that every center-left solution that assumed either a lack of differences or ones we can overcome has utterly failed. So the center left is intellectually discredited, and the woke have an easy argument for taking over.
Wokeism is like the Antifa movement: mythical except to American Rightists. For most Black people” to be “woke” is to be aware that racism or corruption exists in our society.
there are offensives to shore up various prevailing beliefs against emerging scientific evidence of anomalies. but woke has a more significant and durable social basis than the sum of eroding ideas and those with a vested interest to protect them.
the woke hysteria has significant drivers in social and political dynamics that push expansion of governance stratum and victimology paradigm. as practitioners become more autonomous (due to technology advance) in their fields governance as a mediation method appeals to and absorbs the leaders among them. victimology appeals to the lay governors as a distorted or misdirected empathy and in the condition of technology advance causing industrial obsolescence and impoverishing heartland and precariat, the phony victim praise and coddling gains steam as an alternative to nativist revolt with a means to pacify and reduce expectations of the falling majority, while simultaneously providing more funding and jobs to the tenders of victims, by increasing their clientele. and broadly outside social work fields per se, victimology paradigm spreads a copy of misdirected empathy in many domains that can be exploited by the lay practitioners in various parochial interests.
these broad trends will continue as the chasm between empowered practitioners of automation engineering and operations on the one hand, and the industrial epoch paradigm of liberal neutrality toward ethics on the other, grows and grows and grows. the superstructure lags and becomes more of a fetter on the advancing base. as long as liberalism holds there will be woke 1, 2, 3 and more.
the role of emerging facts, like scientific learning about genetic differences, or say the 20th century social experience that disproved the postulate of an industrial social group replacing the operation of capital by political fiat, are chinks in the logical and political armor of liberal paradigm that force the defenders to adjust their beliefs hence woke views as logical adjustments. e.g. we have other victims to replace industrial workers. but the underlying driver isnt pragmatic logical adjustment, it is automation and the incapacity of liberal paradigm to manage it.
Race averages may differ, but that's utterly unimportant for dealing with individuals. We don't hire or marry races. So...who cares?
Just treat each person as a unique individual and not as a member of a group. Problem solved.
You're pumping gas at night when a black man walks up, reaching for something in the pocket of his baggy pants.
You're pumping gas at night when an asian woman walks up, reaching for something in the pocket of her spring jacket.
Do you treat these people as unique individuals and not as members of groups?
If I was pumping gas into a US Army jeep at night in a village in the Mekong Delta in 1967, and an "Asian" woman appeared, reaching into her jacket, I'd probably shoot her on the spot. In that scenario, the black guy appearing out of nowhere was probably one of my squad mates come to help defend against the imminent mortar attack.
I mean, sure. That's not a problem for the "racist" because you're very unlikely to be pumping gas in the Mekong Delta.
I dunno. In 1967 about a half-million GIs were rubbing shoulders with Asians every day. Black and white they had to back each other up against enemies they couldn't easily tell from friends and civilians, and who were sometimes all the same people. I just used pumping gas to be parallel with Soothsayer's original framing.
How is he dressed? Does he say "excuse me" or yell "yo!" I wouldn't completely discount race but attire and mannerisms are more important.
Attire and manner matter because they tell you which group he's part of.
No that's precisely my point - attire and manner are things chosen by individuals. They tell you something about the individual.
You're correct that knowing *only* race tells you *only* something about base rates, and if the race involved has a higher base rate for crime, you should be cautious accordingly.
The same is true for other characteristics - youth commit more crimes, boys more than girls, people with tattoos, what kind of bumper stickers are on their car, etc.
But once you see attire, manner, other things that distinguish individuals from each other, you adjust. These other things tell you far more than group membership.
Some signals are opt in, others aren’t. Our culture urges us to suggest that we discount involuntary signals. But we still incorporate them into our expectations, instincts and behavior.
C'mon. Limited information environment. In a world where race and IQ is accepted, he obviously means in terms of jobs, promotions and relationships.
Yeah but that's not what the woke crowd is doing. They are saying that disparity implies discrimination and we need massive affirmative action to fix it.
You don’t need to persuade Richard Hanania of that. You need to persuade the progressives who are trying to wreck the institutions and selection processes that society depends on simply because when they are applied neutrally, some groups do better on average than others.
Problem *not* solved.
People have eyes. MLK put it best: "If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas." If all races have on average equal abilities, this should be right. Yet no standardized testing measure in history has ever produced proportional outcomes. Only quota systems or quasi-quota, which in every case do so by lowering standards.
When your treating people as individuals produces unequal outcomes between groups, you can't just not justify why this happens. The resentment it breeds has to go somewhere, and it reliably goes towards blaming any overperforming groups for conspiring against underperformers.
We have to accept that people differ, and there are correlations between genetic background and those differences. This is just reality, and nothing good ever came from ignoring reality.
But they are *only* statistical correlations. They tell us nothing about individuals.
Once we accept that, let the chips fall where they may. Maybe there will be more Jewish physicists and more Black musicians. So what? There will still be *some* black physicists and *some* Jewish musicians. Proportions may differ. Let it be.
Former racist nonscientist blathers about what scientists "know but wont say" but doesn't reach out to any scientists for feedback. Well done.
OK, so Whites and Asians are the smartest and blacks are the dumbest. Yes. We know. I'm happy to be an outlier among my race, but it does hurt to accept group inferiority as a state of being.
What policy prescriptions should we draw from this? I'm a big Transhumanism guy. I want genetic engineering so everyone can have insane IQ. That's long term, medium term if we're lucky.
I like the schooling track systems done Europeans like. The dumb kids get sent to work with their hands, and the smart kids get their college track.
Should we make IQ screening a prerequisite to housing? Should we make it a prerequisite for food aid? Should we allow insurers to price your specific IQ into your insurance? I think yes on all of these, but eventually we're going to screen our way into a cognitive jungle where squalor and misery is the norm.
What are we supposed to do when those places reliably look very black? People will generally not accept permanent underclass status and treatment? Something needs to be done for the bottom quintile. That something can be quite sinister. The resistance to race and IQ talk stems from the natural conclusion that rightists tend to have about these things.
The good (?) news is that the difference in average IQ between whites and blacks will shortly fade into irrelevance next to the difference in IQ between machines and humans.
Hell yeah brother. I'm ready to be assimilated (unironically). I'm very AI-pilled. If medium term Transhumanism fantasies have any hope, AI research is the way. I'm 100% for it.
That plan assumes that the AI doesn't kill or exploit us. What prevents it from developing advanced technology, and colonizing human societies in the same way humans have historically colonized each other?
Alternative suggestion. Are you black? Women are desperate for your sperm. Maybe you can step up for the sake of the ladies: https://www.npr.org/2024/06/13/nx-s1-4987958/the-lack-of-black-sperm-donors-is-a-nationwide-problem
I am. I have a kid on the way, but sure, if I run it by my wife and it works out, I might.
On AI: I'm fully accelerationist about it. If we die, we die, that's out of my hands. Success is our best bet at a way out of the current global crises we're staring down. I have 121 IQ, this is 135+ genius territory. Nothing I or anyone in this comment section says can affect the outcome. I pray for Star Trek, and if it's Terminator then I suspect the end will be quick. The computer would just want us dead, and when it gets the chance it'll snipe us all quickly.
Bleak and fatalistic. We can do better than that
That, or we can finally let go of overthinking everything and just be animals.
A lot of problems get solved when you ask the question "what is abundance/prosperity/progress for?" Isn't the point of it to make life suck less? Like, say, because of AI it becomes possible to cure cancer for $10. Should we exclude some bum with cancer from purchasing the cure because he got the $10 by panhandling? What about someone who got cancer because they are fat and smoke?
Isn't the point to make solutions to problems *so cheap and abundant* that we don't even have to waste time on stupid questions like "who deserves this and who doesn't?"
I am a libertarian, but I very much endorse this prosperity based concept of "Star Trek socialism" as Freddie deBoer called it once. In a world with food replicators, it's very stupid to even ask if people who don't work should get to eat delicious food.
Hah Hah. Use E = mc^2 to calculate the energy (presumably derived from table-top fusion reactors) to "replicate" a cheeseburger or even a breadstick or a single millet seed. That's just the mass equivalence. Now arrange all those quarks and electrons so produced into the macromolecules that make delicious food. Next figure out how to turn those macromolecules into doctors and nurses so there is no queuing or payment for health care.
I think economics will be the study of scarcity (not abundance) for a few millennia yet.
I don't see why any of the far-fetched dystopian outcomes you suggest would follow from accepting this fact. The more obvious implication is simply that we stop crying discrimination for every single state of the world that doesn't match the current population percentages. Whether that's by race, gender, religion, etc. Many other forces at work, including genetics and culture.
As time passes and we understand more about genetics, we'll likely discover genetics trumps all, but for now -- the sinister implication that everything is caused by "the man," a malevolent actor behind the scenes, should be rubbished.
I think there is probably some merit to active slum clearance. A lot of problems are caused by *concentrations* of the lumpenproletariat, not by any specific person's likelihood of being in it. Mayberry can afford to treat Otis (the town drunk in the Andy Griffith show) with lots of patience and tolerance because he's the only town drunk. All you can do with Skid Row is try to avoid it.
At least you can avoid Skid Row. If you disperse it through slum clearance you may not be able to. If if metastasizes, it acts as a magnet for other bums because the users draw the dealers who create more addicted users.
Resistance to group differences was also strong in the 00s, the days of compassionate conservatism, when a republican administration fought for spending on public health in Africa.
I suspect it's driven by the other thing. "It does hurt to accept group inferiority." You may look past that hurt feeling, but others are more sensitive to it and less driven by truth seeking. Our culture also makes it awkward or rude to accept group superiority on the flip side, so whites and asians cringe at group differences too.
I've been thinking about "soft eugenics" which would be designed on the principle that participation is voluntary, and demographic parity should be maintained. This policy is just a shower thought, I'm not officially endorsing it, so don't cancel me.
* For criminals, a year off your sentence if you opt for sterilization.
* Every criminal who gets sterilized triggers a "procreation talent search" for a talented person of that criminal's ethnicity, which we encourage to procreate. This would be in the form of cash bonuses for sperm and egg donation, or cash bonuses for married couples who have babies. The cash bonus is based on the amount of money saved since we don't have to imprison the convict in question for the final year of their sentence. The "procreation talent search" seeks healthy, law-abiding, highly-educated citizens with a history of supporting themselves effectively and paying their taxes. Again, to maintain demographic parity, the winner of the talent search (the person or couple receiving the cash bonus) should have an identical ethnic background to the person who opted for sterilization.
Assuming you're heredity-pilled, this policy should: reduce mass incarceration, reduce crime, improve our long-term national fiscal prospects, increase economic growth, reduce racial inequality and stereotyping, maybe even address the fertility crisis. All for the low, low price of being told that you're Hitler. Sound appealing?
Sounds good. I would imagine that the opt-in would work better than the first read of this felt seeing it. Criminals are dumb with low time preference, so time off a sentence for the end of their contribution to the genetic line might be a strong trade. Messing with the amnesty time might be required, but I could see it.
For the birthrate thing, I'm skeptical of baby bonuses in terms of effectiveness, it's fine but I think I'd go further. Find criminal women, offer them an amnesty and some money to do surrogacy for very high IQ individuals, ethnicity matched if possible (highest IQ available if not), commensurate with the number of kids they agree to crank out. Very high quality genes mixed with very low probably comes out positive.
But if you are smart, then you are not part of an inferior group. It is you who identifies yourself as black, as if that is the most important thing you or everyone else should know about you. If we said you have to have an IQ above 85 to be let out of the pens and allowed to mingle freely in society, you would be among the group granted freedom, not in an inferior group at all. And many white people would be penned up also as being not fully fit to self-govern in open society. The bottom quintile might be heavily black, but not as exclusively black as if we penned up all black people *because they were black*, apartheid-style.
If society knew that people with IQ under 85 had to stay in their place, ankle monitors and all, there would be less stigma against a black person like you moving in the >85 circles because we would know you were probably not criminal, schizophrenic, possessed of poor impulse control, or just too dumb to take on a job we were looking to hire for.
"Those places" already look and act very black. The underclass doesn't seem to mind being rendered permanently so as long as it is anesthetized with money and drugs. And we don't mind as long as the violence stays there and doesn't leak out into the suburbs aboard all those LRT trams that small cities started to build during the Obama years. So the status quo since the Great Society is probably what the bottom quintile gets. "But they've got too much already and besides we've got the cops!" Phil Ochs sang sardonically back in 1967 ("Outside of a Small Circle of Friends") Things seem to be holding up OK.
I think "humans will never accept racial differences in intelligence, regardless of what evidence or data comes forward" is too strong. Americans & Europeans will not accept the idea in the near- to medium-term future, because racial equality has become a sacred value supported by the sacred memory of the Holocaust in Europe & slavery/segregation in the US. (I use 'sacred' here in Durkheim's sense, to mean that these things must not, in many people's view, be profaned by contact with, e.g., counterarguments or mockery.) But this need not be permanent: sacred stories often lose their sacrality over time & thus become acceptable to criticize. For a few US examples: the settling of the West is no longer seen as unambiguously heroic, but rather is commonly criticized for its effects on the Indians & the environment; orderly direct democracy was once fundamental to the idea of American 'liberty', but as it died out (see https://scholars-stage.org/pining-for-democracy-a-few-readings/ ) that has been forgotten, allowing criticism of, e.g., Andrew Jackson to become conventional. Nor is a belief in the equality of abilities of racial groups necessary to the political systems of America & Europe, even assuming no radical revolution: at the beginning of the 20th century, America outside the South & much of Europe were governed under theoretically-egalitarian (as regards political rights) liberalism while most people believed in white superiority & saw no contradiction therein.
(Nor was there a contradiction, as can be seen in one of Lincoln's senate-campaign speeches where he reconciles the two ideas: "I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." From https://mason.gmu.edu/~zschrag/hist120spring05/lincoln_ottawa.htm )
The whole concept of “stereotypes” (a relatively recent coinage) is pretty much junk. It functions mostly to stigmatize the use of generalizations with respect to population groups. But generalizations are a useful intellectual tool in any realm, if you know what purpose they do and don't serve.
IMO it also licenses a lot of left-wing gnostic thinking: the average person is ignorant of the *real* nature of the world because they rely on...observation. True knowledge is found in the depths of left-wing departments where we can replace unreliable sense data with Theory.
It's given all the wrong people a sense of intellectual superiority.
Right. The project to ban stereotypes or the use of stylized examples to understand complex reality is foolish. This is how people naturally understand the world.
Stereotypes are the furthest thing from junk. Their tendency towards accuracy is among the few unambiguous triumphs of the social sciences in recent times:
https://aeon.co/essays/truth-lies-and-stereotypes-when-scientists-ignore-evidence
Though as you mentioned, this is precisely because their generalizations. Generalizations form because their average popular perceptions of the tendencies of reality.
I mean the term "stereotype" is just a pejorative designed to stigmatize a valid exercise.
I don't think race realism entails unlimited Indians. We have genetic interests a la Frank Salter. Preferring your own group over high IQ outsiders is not irrational bias; it's what the whole evolutionary game is about.
Preferring your own extended family is evolutionarily rational; preferring everyone who resembles you in certain parts of their physical appearance is less so.
Oh, it's quantifiable, baby 😎 free .pdf of the book comes up on Google
Is it though? Globalization can't be undone. We have an awareness of the world we did not have for most of human history. There's no going back, there is only preservation and particularism if you don't want developed white countries to get overwhelmed.
There is no reason to slavishly value the replication of one's genes just because that's what evolution accidentally shat out. Evolution is meaningless.
No reason to slavishly nut in prime puss
There's a reason *for the desire to do so* just as there's a reason a rock falls when you drop it.
But "rocks fall" tells you nothing about whether you should invent flight or not.
We do not have to slavishly accept with no resistance whatever tendencies evolution engrained in us simply because evolution engrained them in us.
Genetic interests are a level deeper than evolved tendencies--they're the reason tendencies evolve in the first place.
Take it all the way to the gene level then. A gene is either beneficial in evolutionary terms or it's not (or neutral). And your "genetic interest" at this level is just successful replication. If all you care about is this, *fitness* should be the measure of who you want in your group/to interbreed with because that's more likely to result in successful gene replication over longer periods of time. Gene replication is what evolution "wants."
You are just using the term "genetic interest" to set aside some specific (probably mostly physical) phenotype bundle you want to preserve for aesthetic reasons. Your ability to replicate your genes successfully is not contingent on the preservation of any particular physical phenotype. (Without resorting to the absurd. Obviously, you couldn't kill all females or all males and have a viable species). And gene replication is the only "genetic interest" that you have.
Preferring them how? If you mean caring about the welfare of your own group, unlimited Indians would clearly increase that. Having more Indian doctors to treat illnesses and more Indian entrepreneurs to create jobs will make your group healthier and richer.
Preferring them living in a territory with a given carrying capacity. Some things are zero-sum.
Territories don't have given carrying capacities. Carrying capacities increase with human ingenuity. In fact, unlimited Indians might increase the carrying capacity of your territory by a significant margin by bringing in more Indian scientists and engineers. It might be able to support more members of your group that before, even with the added Indians.w
You haven't even invented the infinite Indian hive yet and my grandchildren are supposed to live in it?
Indian Americans are the most wealthy and productive ethnic group in America. An "infinite Indian hive" full of such people would be a utopia of abundance and excellence. Your and my grandchildren would be angry and disappointed to not live in such a place.
Evolution can't give us an irrational bias?
An irrational bias would be one against your genetic interests
I think it's incredibly irrational to choose to worship and do the bidding of your genes when you (as in the subjective experiencing you) know for a fact that your genes are amoral, unconscious, and don't have any point or purpose other than replication for no reason, til the next giant asteroid comes along. Literally the most irrational thing I can imagine.
There's no reason I have to take "my genetic interests" seriously. Is it irrational to stay faithful to my wife if I get the chance to cheat?
Lot of trade-offs in life. That doesn't make something traded off unreal.
>high IQ outsiders
India doesn't look great in international testing fyi: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-harmonized-learning-outcome-scores
And screening them for high ability hasn't worked super well either: https://cis.org/Siddiqui/H1B-Tsunami-Why-US-Must-Act-Protect-American-Jobs-Security-and-Prosperity
Indian immigration is basically Richard's bugaboo. I assume he's got some Indian friends he's working hard to not offend.
It's a complex issue--they're not all bad and some of the anti-Indian stereotyping is really gross.
“And screening them for high ability hasn't worked super well either”
Yes, which is why Indians are the highest earning group in America
What a failure.
Maybe get news from somewhere other than the websites of racial socialists.
>Yes, which is why Indians are the highest earning group in America
Circular reasoning:
"We hire Indians for high-paying jobs because of their credentials"
"We know Indian credentials are valuable because Indians are smart people"
"We know Indians are smart people because they have high-paying jobs"
In a population of almost 1.5 billion, there will inevitably be some smart Indians. But I'm not persuaded that we should be enthusiastic about *marginal* H-1Bs. See e.g. https://ed.stanford.edu/news/computer-science-college-seniors-us-outperform-peers-china-india-and-russia-new-research-says
More importantly, there is a ton of anti-American sentiment in India, of the most intense third-worldist variety. I don't want immigrants who hate my country.
>Maybe get news from somewhere other than the websites of racial socialists.
Did you notice that the author of the article is an Indian-American who worked in the US consulate?
You said “screening them for ability hasn’t worked out well.”
It clearly has. Even with the poorly designed H1B system, Indian immigration is a major benefit. If you had a good system, it would be even better, which undermines your point.
"Even with the poorly designed H1B system, Indian immigration is a major benefit."
This is basically the streetlight fallacy. You're talking about what you can measure (Indian-American incomes) instead of what we actually want to know (whether Indian immigration is a benefit). You seem to ignore all of the reasons people give to believe Indian immigration hasn't been, or will not be, beneficial in favor of just repeating unrelated talking points about e.g. income. I don't believe you ever responded to this article for instance: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-case-against-indian-immigration
If Indian immigration is something you care about, I suggest you stop with the generic boosterism and actually write a blog post about what a policy improvement on H-1B would look like in your mind. If it's a well-designed policy, perhaps you can kill two birds with one stone, and both address the concerns of critics, and also increase skilled immigration of Indian entrepreneurs and such. Generic boosterism will tend to make critics *more* worried, not less.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-trump-discredited-higher-order
You're the statistician, not me, but it seems you're going WAY beyond what the Reich research established. To the layman (at least this one), the only relevance this has to "HBD" is that it demonstrates that evolution can happen a lot faster than we thought. It doesn't show us what the selection pressures were, much less that such pressures weren't also occuring in sub-saharan Africa. I'm a big fan, but this really makes me sad.
Right, you can posit the exact same selection pressures operating on differing populations in radically different environments over thousands of years, hitting the exact same results. I don't know why you would posit that though, unless one wants it to be true. But perhaps Reich is gathering the data right now to prove this. I'd like to see a prediction market on that.
Reich says genetic data is hard to come by in warm climates due to degradation.
There were sophisticated commercial societies in subsaharan Africa prior to colonialism. So it basically comes down to what you believe was distinctive about the European environment.
Thatcher is right. Reich's lab is doing wonderful research, and it's unsettling to see the results abused in this way.
Agriculture and herding dramatically changed sub-Saharan Africa just as they did West Eurasia and East Asia. You don't need to posit identical selection pressures or identical genetic responses. In his book, Reich mentions that the ability to digest animal milk emerged independently in three different African populations, with a distinct genetic basis in each group.
As Ebenezer comments, it's harder to obtain ancient DNA in Africa because of the climate. IIRC they've made some headway through improvements in extraction methods. The other challenge is Africa's extraordinary genetic diversity and population structure.
It's not a coy pose on the part of Reich and his colleagues. The paper also says nothing about the pace or trajectory of recent human evolution in East Asia.
Came here to say almost exactly this.
Reich was pretty clear that his research tells him Western Europeans got a lot smarter in the last 3000 years. But it has nothing to say about RELATIVE intelligence. He doesn’t have the data (at least not yet) to see what happened to the IQs of people in other parts of the world.
If I remember correctly he said it was likely the same increase happened everywhere in the world.
I think Hanania is arguing that Europeans and Africans were likely the same IQ 3000 years ago but that Europeans got a lot smarter than Africans in the last 3000 years?
But Reich doesn’t say anything about the relative IQ of the two groups were 3000 years ago or what happens to the IQ of Africans in the last 3000 years.
At least that was my understanding.
It's obvious when you look at Africa that they are as smart as the rest of the world.
Not exactly. See e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-harmonized-learning-outcome-scores
However, African-Americans get way higher test scores than Africans. That suggests an environmental component to African underperformance. Also it's good to see e.g. Kenya as a bright spot--they're outscoring Chile for example.
Africa is a more diverse continent and kinda stopped by the artificial borders imposed on them, mostly south of the Sahara.
That said, there is just by numbers a probability of having many tribes just be smarted than the average,some people have pointed towards the Igbo at some point.
I was a graduate student in psychology at Johns Hopkins during the 70s when Lewontin and Gould were making their terrible arguments, so reading the current post was a déjà vu experience. Liberal academics were so frightened by race science that they threw the kitchen sink against it. In addition to Lewontin's fallacious argument, academics also argued that IQ scores are culturally biased and meaningless. Funny how a meaningless construct predicts many important life outcomes. They also argued that race is a purely social construct such that race categories are arbitrary and meaningless. Funny how race can be a meaningless construct in science but a meaningful construct for affirmative action and reparations. There are some half-truths, though, in these fallacious arguments. IQ is not necessarily the most important predictor of all life outcomes, and, per Coleman Hughes, race is a social construct inspired by a biological reality. The race science debates are so fraught with hidden agendas that I have always stayed away from the topic.
I agree with you that public opinion probably doesn't work like Cofnas' mind when he's writing a philosophy article, but I think you greatly underestimate the probability that hereditarianism could gain mainstream acceptance. Consider how many beliefs we now take for granted that in ages past would have been considered absurd or taboo. Hereditarianism is effectively the default worldview for most human cultures throughout most of history, and even today, many of our ordinary stereotypes and folk beliefs are grounded in it ("you two will make such smart babies!").
Perhaps the hereditarian revolution has already begun. Cofnas' exposure of Arday was the catalyst that propelled him into major newspapers, a BBC interview, and at least half a dozen "mainstream" podcasts, where, if he gets the chance, he talks about hereditarianism. In fact, as a direct consequence of the Arday affaire, some substack authors who once exhorted their readers to "shut up about race and IQ" are now... talking about race and IQ.
Well said. People have seen it as a default worldview long before genetics/science was understood as it is today. How can it be denied now, and into the future?...especially while there's simultaneous discussion surrounding genetic screening/fertility tech companies that can select for IQ markers etc.? (I don't know how accurate that truly is though...embryonic selecting for IQ )
I trained as an academic psychologist at excellent undergraduate and graduate programs receiving my PhD in 1990 and I was unaware that there was any persuasive evidence about black-white differences in the US on *unbiased* tests of intelligence. I was profoundly shocked and very angry when some 30 years later I decided to "do the research" and googled the issue. I found a strong Brookings Institution paper reviewing the issue with many citations from before 1990 and careful attention to the standard measurement critiques. I was truly shaken and deeply disappointed.
While I didn't do a lot of work with intelligence myself, the evidence was quite clear even in the 1990s that intelligence is a coherent construct, that individual differences in intelligence matter to other outcomes, and that individual differences in intelligence are highly heritable. And as for everything else, there is little evidence of the power of shared environment to influence intelligence [towards similarity] beyond the similarity already predicted by shared genes.
I still don't know what to make of the silence on the issue. Was there a lightening strike of Freudianism and my teachers repressed it? Did we fail to get them drunk enough at parties and post seminar for them to share the grievous news? I know that many of them did work that nibbled around the edges of the phenomena and so I doubt they could have been entirely ignorant. This realization and sense of loosing faith with the world is right up there for me with the Santa Claus betrayal and realizing my parents weren't infallible.
More recently, Mathew Yglesias, whose work I greatly admire, published a piece entitled "The Troubling Rise of Hitler Revisionism" https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-troubling-rise-of-hitler-revisionism with a section, "Taboos can be good" in which he writes:
"I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of
professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more
of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also
overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people
experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones.
You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very
different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living
in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such
questions."
I think that is fair if it means things like appreciating individuals on their own merits in everyday life and avoiding prying into personal details of genetics and phenotypes and ancestry in inappropriate ways. For example, 23 and Me tells me that somehow my genes make it harder for me to gain strength in the gym than for others. I'd certainly not like people sniggering about me as I strain to lift the same weight stack month after month saying something about it and hoping that I hadn't passed it on. (It also really ticks me off when my family bring up some of my great great great ancestors who did some really heinous things.) However, for professional scientists whose interests are not gossipy prurience to be taboo-ed out of such an interesting area is indefensible. Who knows what we might learn that could improve human lives? And I think that other similarities and differences among humans are similarly interesting and worthy of study.
Matt's post is good, but he neglects the fact that the woke people started it. Hard to bash white people as oppressive colonizers, and then complain about ethnic stereotyping when they bash you back. Back in the 90s, we kept the peace with a social contract that made all statements of this type taboo in any direction.
It always surprises me that people will accept the truth of the fundamental unfairness of the hand evolution death out to animals - parasitic flesh-eating wasps, insects that live only long to breed and then die, mass death with almost no chance at life for the typical r reproductive strategy creatures, obligate carnivores that can only survive by killing and eating other organisms in painful ways, but are deeply shocked to find evolution is just as unfair with what it did with humans.
Seriously, wtf. I find the attitudes of many of the men commenting here completely bizarre. Of course evolution does all kinds of insane shit, often for crap and overtly evil/horrible outcomes. And things change fast. I swear has no one ever paid attention to plants or animals at all?!? You can change them INCREDIBLY fast, why on earth did anyone used to think evolution was so slow? And has no one watched any nature documentaries? Practically all life on earth has been wiped out several times over now...humans are barely a two-second long blip, and it's very unlikely we will remain as obviously the same species in another few thousand years.
The issue is that, by acknowledging evolution moves quickly, you tacitly admit human races are real. You as well admit that there can never be any such thing as one united human race, as such is not possible under any system with unequal reproductive outcomes between peoples. As long as some people reproduce more and others less, as long as some groups reproduce more and others less, and as long as some racial pairings happen at unequal rates, there could never even in principle be such a thing as one human race.
That's the whole point of punctuated equilibrium: A way to deracinate hereditarianism from evolution.
I wonder if David Reich has a duty to be Straussian about these sort of things, not just to protect himself but also because I'm not sure if the masses are able to process "there are group-average genetic differences in IQ and behavior but that does not mean we should reinstate racial segregation."
I just want to point out that before the second world war, the idea of innate cognitive and behavioral differences across races was the majority opinion in the West. It was seen as obvious for most intellectuals at the time. Actually, that's why democratic countries like England and France were so comfortable with colonialism, a deeply undemocratic system: civilized (=smarter) nations had the right to govern uncivilized (=stupider) one.
It's only after the second World War that innate difference between races became repugnant because of nazism. As the second World War fades from memory, this idea could become less repugnant again, especially if it has some support from science (even though, as pointed elsewhere, Reich's lab research does not directly support race difference in intelligence). Ideas can change faster than you think.
Moreover, Asian people are usually much more comfortable with the idea of innate racial difference. As they become more numerous and more influential in the US, those ideas may become more popular and acceptable within the elite.
Race realism is sorta mainstream in places like Mexico. So I think Nathan Cofnes is correct
How it works in Mexico, what is the mechanism and what they do about gross overrepressentation and under representation ?
It is more that people kinda know about it in the daily life discourse, but media does not talk about much in an over manner
Why so ? do just accept it so ? Seems like has to do with unique Mexican history ? How Mexico deals with political entrepreneurs who raise these issues ?
Generally speaking, the classes look different, phenotype wise. It just comes across as preposterous to do some kind of USA thing on the issue
But not on stone, so you still have poor, white passing people and etc.
I think the reason we refuse to acknowledge this piblicly is that it makes society worse. It makes people feel really bad to hear that they are on average dumber than others. I, a black guy, feel bad despite my best efforts because of reading this article. I am a rationalist and feel like I should just be able to get over this feeling but I wish I hadn't read about this because now I have this subconcious voice in the back of my mind telling me that I might be dumb despite ample evidence to the contrary.
It’s refreshing to have an actual black person in these discussions for once.
Our current policy of holding everyone to the same standard and then telling them it's a personal failure when they don't succeed is much more harmful.
So what do you suggest? Having separate but slightly unequal school systems that have slightly lower standards for black people? Isn't this just basically affirmative action (which I think is bad)? I think that having different standards creates the victim mindset that you see with many black people today. As I'm sure you know, IQs have been going up consistently since the metric was created due to a number of environmental factors. If I, as a black person, am of average intelligence for a black person, I am essentially the same average intelligence as a white person that recieved slightly worse nutrition growing up than I growing up. I don't think either of us should be treated any differently just because of our race, we dumb dumbs just need a little extra push in school to get us up to speed. I don't think it matters if black people have lower intelligence on average (which I don't know if I even accept) because we live in a society where we regularly extend a helping hand to those less fortunate than us because its the morally right thing to do. Lend me a hand would ya?
I sympathize with you, and it makes me happy to see you genuinely engaging with the issue. Massive respect man. Yes, separate schools would be my suggestion. I think this feeling you have is not because of the reality, but because of the mismatched expectation. You were lied to, and that hurts. I think if we mercifully spoke the truth from day 1 you wouldn't feel this pain. You being on substack means you're way above your race average. I wish you the best.