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Suppose HBD is True
Suppose, for the purposes of argument, HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.
I seek to ask the more interesting question: Would it matter?
1. Societal Ramifications of HBD: Eugenics
So, we now have some kind of nice, tidy explanation for different characters among different groups of people. Okay. We have a theory. It has explanatory power. What can we do with it?
Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything. And even given you're willing to commit to eugenics, HBD doesn't add anything HBD doesn't actually change any of the arguments for eugenics - below-average people exist in every population group, and insofar as we regard below-average people a problem, the genetic population they happen to belong to doesn't matter. If the point is to raise the average, the population group doesn't matter. If the point is to reduce the number of socially dependent individuals, the population group doesn't matter.
Worse, insofar as we use HBD as a determinant in eugenics, our eugenics are less effective. HBD says your population group has a relationship with intelligence; but if we're interested in intelligence, we have no reason to look at your population group, because we can measure intelligence more directly. There's no reason to use the proxy of population group if we're interested in intelligence, and indeed, every reason not to; it's significantly less accurate and politically and historically problematic.
Yet still worse for our eugenics advocate, insomuch as population groups do have significant genetic diversity, using population groups instead of direct measurements of intelligence is far more likely to cause disease transmission risks. (Genetic diversity is very important for population-level disease resistance. Just look at bananas.)
2. Social Ramifications of HBD: Social Assistance
Let's suppose we're not interested in eugenics. Let's suppose we're interested in maximizing our societal outcomes.
Well, again, HBD doesn't offer us anything new. We can already test intelligence, and insofar as HBD is accurate, intelligence tests are more accurate. So if we aim to streamline society, we don't need HBD to do so. HBD might offer an argument against affirmative action, in that we have different base expectations for different populations, but affirmative action already takes different base expectations into account (if you live in a city of 50% black people and 50% white people, but 10% of local lawyers are black, your local law firm isn't required to have 50% black lawyers, but 10%). We might desire to adjust the way we engage in affirmative action, insofar as affirmative action might not lead to the best results, but if you're interested in the best results, you can argue on the basis of best results without needing HBD.
I have yet to encounter someone who argues HBD who also argues we should do something with regard to HELPING PEOPLE on the basis of this, but that might actually be a more significant argument: If there are populations of people who are going to fall behind, that might be a good argument to provide additional resources to these populations of people, particularly if there are geographic correspondences - that is, if HBD is true, and if population groups are geographically segregated, individuals in these population groups will suffer disproportionately relative to their merits, because they don't have the local geographic social capital that equal-advantage people of other population groups would have. (An average person in a poor region will do worse than an average person in a rich region.) So HBD provides an argument for desegregation.
Curiously, HBD advocates have a tendency to argue that segregation would lead to the best outcome. I'd welcome arguments that concentrating an -absence- of social capital is a good idea.
3. Scientific Ramifications of HBD
Well, if HBD were true, it would mean science is politicized. This might be news to somebody, I guess.
4. Political Ramifications of HBD
We live in a meritocracy. It's actually not an ideal thing, contrary to the views of some people, because it results in a systematic merit segregation that has completely deprived the lower classes of intellectual resources; talk to older people sometime, who remember, when they worked in the coal mines (or whatever), the one guy who you could trust to be able to answer your questions and provide advice. Our meritocracy has advanced to the point where we are systematically stripping everybody of value from the lower classes and redistributing them to the middle and upper classes.
HBD might be meaningful here. Insofar as people take HBD to its absurd extremes, it might actually result in an -improvement- for some lower-class groups, because if we stop taking all the intelligent people out of poor areas, there will still be intelligent people in those poor areas. But racism as a force of utilitarian good isn't something I care to explore in any great detail, mostly because if I'm wrong it would be a very bad thing, and also because none of its advocates actually suggest anything like this, more interesting in promoting segregation than desegregation.
It doesn't change much else, either. With HBD we continually run into the same problem - as a theory, it's the product of measuring individual differences, and as a theory, it doesn't add anything to our information that we don't already have with the individual differences.
5. The Big Problem: Individuality
Which is the crucial fault with HBD, iterated multiple times here, in multiple ways: It literally doesn't matter if HBD is true. All the information it -might- provide us with, we can get with much more accuracy using the same tests we might use to arrive at HBD. Anything we might want to do with the idea, we can do -better- without it.
HBD might predict we get fewer IQ-115, IQ-130, and IQ-145 people from particular population groups, but it doesn't actually rule them out. Insofar as this kind of information is useful, it's -more- useful to have more accurate information. HBD doesn't say "Black people are stupid", instead it says "The average IQ of black people is slightly lower than the average IQ of white people". But since "black people" isn't a thing that exists, but rather an abstract concept referring to a group of "black persons", and HBD doesn't make any predictions at the individual level we couldn't more accurately obtain through listening to a person speak for five seconds, it doesn't actually make any useful predictions. It adds literally nothing to our model of the world.
It's not the most important idea of the century. It's not important at all.
If you think it's true - okay. What does it -add- to your understanding of the world? What useful predictions does it make? How does it permit you to improve society? I've heard people insist it's this majorly important idea that the scientific and political establishment is suppressing. I'd like to introduce you to the aether, another idea that had explanatory power but made no useful predictions, and which was abandoned - not because anybody thought it was wrong, but because it didn't even rise to the level of wrong, because it was useless.
And that's what HBD is. A useless idea.
And even worse, it's a useless idea that's hopelessly politicized.
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Comments (178)
You argue that (conditional on HBD, presumably in a version in which some gross trait like skin colour is informative about interesting things like intelligence) there's no point in anyone using race information, because (even with that hypothesis) there are other more informative ways of judging their intelligence.
But "there are other signals more informative than X" doesn't imply "there's no point looking at X". You may well get more information from someone's dress and accent and two minutes of talking to them than you get from their skin colour; but (at least in our hypothetical HBD-is-right world) you may get more information still by using all of those things.
Whether you should is a separate matter. There are many situations where locally-optimal decisions end up bad globally, and this could well be one, because (even conditional on HBD) a world where everyone is using race to make snap judgements about intelligence is a world where people in whatever racial groups do badly get systematically screwed over, including people who are very intelligent. The same goes with other qualities in the place of "intelligence". This is one reason why I am in favour of anti-discrimination laws even conditional on HBD. (Though some versions of HBD would have implications for what reasonable anti-discrimination laws could look like.)
Further: let's suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that you're very nearly right, that in our hypothetical HBD-is-right world you get scarcely any extra useful information from a person's race once you've looked at a few other equally trivial characteristics. That would mean that racial discrimination is more or less completely pointless, if viewed e.g. as a way of getting the best possible employees. Unfortunately, that's not the only socially relevant question. A world in which HBD is generally agreed to be right would be a world in which racial discrimination (even if actually pointless) would be much more socially acceptable, and many people are inclined towards racial discrimination for reasons other than getting objectively optimal outcomes. Widely-agreed-on HBD would provide a lot of cover for horrible racists, by which I mean people who (whatever fine-sounding reasons they might give) want to discriminate against various outgroups just because they don't like them. I take it this sort of consideration is one reason why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing the possibility that HBD might be right.
The issue isn't that there isn't extra useful information, the issue is that we're pretty terrible at quickly processing variable dependence to arrive at correct answers, where rapid processing is part of the situation in consideration.
In that kind of situation, clothing alone will tell you more than clothing plus race - not because you couldn't arrive at a better answer given more information, but because the additional information is almost certainly going to be overweighted by virtue of the brain not having a good intuitive handle on either dependent variables or small numbers.
I don't know...would clothing alone tell you more than clothing plus race? I think we would need to test this.
Is a poorly-dressed Irish-American (or at least, someone who looks Irish-American with bright red hair and pale white skin) as statistically likely to mug someone, given a certain situation (deserted street at night, etc.) as a poorly-dressed African-American? For reasons of political correctness, I would not like to share my pre-suppositions.
I will say, however, that, in certain historical contexts (1840s, for example), my money would have been on the Irish-American being more likely to mug me, and I would have taken more precautionary measures to avoid those Irish parts of town, whereas I would have expected the neighborhoods inhabited by free blacks to have been relatively safe.
Nowadays, I don't know what the statistics would be if you measured crimes perpetrated by certain races, when adjusted for socio-economic category (in other words, comparing poor to poor, or wealth to wealthy in each group). But many people would probably have their suspicions. So, can we test these intuitions to see if they are just bigoted racism, or if they unfortunately happen to be accurate generalizations?
That's a very horrible reason for deciding to delude oneself about reality.
There's no such thing as a good reason for deciding to delude oneself.
But if investigating something has little apparent upside (e.g., if OrphanWilde is right or nearly right that, conditional on HBD being right, knowing it to be right wouldn't actually be very useful) and a likely outcome is making it easier for unpleasant people to do unpleasant things, that might be quite a good reason for not investigating it.
and
Methinks these two things are very very similar. In almost all cases when one says "I will carefully avert my eyes and not look over there", one is deluding oneself.
But your comment was an... interesting one. I did not expect such a clear case of "Screw the truth if it will offer succor to the enemy".
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
(LW is interestingly opposite to the rest of the world on this stuff. In both cases, not taking an uncompromising position gets you jumped on. It just happens that the uncompromising positions you're expected to take are opposite to one another.)
Of course, that was a patented snarky one-liner interpretation :-) Dialing it down a couple of notches, what you said was that you'd much prefer not to look into a particular corner because what you could find there might be helpful to people you dislike. And hey, there is that guy on teh internets who thinks the corner is empty, anyways!
The issue here, by the way, is not whether your position is uncompromising enough, the issue is whether it's coherent and consistent with other views you've expressed.
Nope, still neither what I said nor what I meant.
Sorry, don't believe you.
Therefore manipulate those loathsome peasants with lies and suppress the truth to keep the peasants in line. The Noble Lie.
Unfortunately:
If the baseline level of noble lies is zero, then it would make sense to keep it there, as a Schelling fence. However, I doubt that any society has a baseline of zero.
Do you have Noble Lies that you approve of?
Or is the whole trick of Noble Lies that you'd never admit that they are lies?
When people say crazy, obviously false things, I more and more wonder how much of what they are saying are things they don't believe themselves, but are just saying to go along with what others say, or manipulate others in Noble Lie fashion.
Noble lies we approve of seem to us to be truths. Noble lies we dont approve approve seem to plain old lies..."crazy, obviously false things". So almost everybody thinks they are living ina Noble Lie free world.
Noble lies of the right include "my tribe is objectively better than everyone else's" and "his majesty was placed on the theone, by God". Obsessing about four point differences in IQ is a version of the former.
Doesn't seem that way to me. If I tell a Noble Lie, I don't believe it (in the epistemic sense), but intend others to do so. If I spread a claim I think is true and it is in fact false, I'm just spreading a falsehood that I'm unaware of.
If what I say is correct, you would not be able to tell, solipsistically, if you believed in any lies that seemed true to you. You need to start with other people's lies, in particular by thinking about how persistent crazy ideas could fulfil an instrumentaal purpose.
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
Yes, I agree, it could do that and that would be bad.
So what did you mean? I thought the clear implication was that you favored suppressing the truth about HBD because you felt it would give bad people breathing room to do bad things. Or you just think that other people favored suppressing the truth about HBD on those grounds?
First: Not "suppressing the truth" but "not expending effort looking into something whose widespread belief would have bad consequences". Second: I said nothing about my own preferences, but about "why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing (etc.)". Third: I do not advocate, neither do I think those opposed to "HBD" generally advocate, telling lies. Fourth: so far as I know, I don't regard anyone as "loathsome peasants"; in my idiolect "peasant" is not an insult, and the racists I know are mostly not peasants either literally or metaphorically.
What you're doing here is taking what I wrote, finding the worst kinda-sorta-semi-defensible interpretation of it you can, and expressing it in ways clearly intended to make me look as bad as possible. Apparently you think that's a reasonable way to treat someone else; to my mind it's an act of hostility as overt as breaking my windows or my nose, though of course much less actually harmful.
When I see what I consider to be intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo, I will often respond with a little hostility (closer to annoyance than the hostility I'd associate with breaking someone's nose) and convert the passive aggressive stance to an overtly aggressive interpretation to hopefully get past the bullshit and see if we can openly discuss the innuendo. It seems not.
That's very curious, because "intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo" is pretty much exactly how I would describe your response to me, and I honestly can't see that I've engaged in anything of the kind. So clearly we have a failure of communication.
I'm not sure what open discussion you want to have that you think I'm avoiding, but let me try making a few things more explicit.
Does any of that help?
[1] I have used this phrase a few times and it occurs to me that it could readily be misconstrued. I refer specifically to "horrible racists" rather than just to "racists" because there are some definitions according to which anyone who accepts any sort of HBD thesis is ipso facto racist, no matter what their motives or attitudes or policies. By "horrible racists" I mean something like: people who denigrate[2] and/or work against the interests of some racial group(s) because they hate or fear them, or because they see the success of that group and the success of their own racial group as opposed to one another, and choose to harm the other guys for their own benefit.
[2] I swear I chose that word before it occurred to me what its etymology is.
I don't know anything to speak of about Al Sharpton. Horrible racism in the sense I describe is certainly not limited to white people. FWIW my guess at its relative prevalence differs from yours, but in any case I would expect HBD theses to be much more popular with white racists than with black racists. (Hi, Eugine.)
You mean like all the Al Sharpton-style black demagogues? There are certainly a lot more of those people than there are white people satisfying your definition of "horrible racist".
I notice you're unusually curt and tetchy.
"Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend."
The key word was "unusually".
And my point is that in this discussion I am being misrepresented and attacked unusually much.
(I also happen to have an unusually strong dislike of the style of debate that proceeds mostly by insinuations, unstated implications and sideswipes, and have had for many years.)
Also, if we can admit HBD is true it will become acceptable to publish social science studies whose conclusions make racial differences in inteligence obvious. Maybe, that will help with the current crisis the social sciences are in.
Imagine trying to do astronomy, or physics, without being able to admit that the Earth goes around the Sun. In fact, I caould imagine a 17th century inquisitor making a similar argument to yours about "supposing heliocentrism is true", and he would have had a much better case than you do.
In both case what both you and the inquisitor fail to realize is that truths are entangled and lies are contagious. Lying about heliocentrism requires one to lie about nearly everything in physics, similarly lying about HBD requires one to lie about nearly everything in the social sciences.
Original thread here.
I've banned sight.
And torch.
You don't actually need to do explicit eugenics to change population patterns. China had the same demographic development as Taiwan did. China's birthrate also rose directly after adopting the one-child-policy. Culture seems to be a much stronger factor then direct policies.
If the birthrate falls drastically for a decade and then there a policy change and the birthrate rises, that's evidence that suggets that it's not clear that the policy change effectively lowers the birthrate. It's not conclusive evience, but it's evidence pointing in a direction.
I think most of the allure of HBD comes from factors which are harder to measure than intelligence, like altruism or stronger bounds to kin and smaller bounds to state / nation / whatever. In general the point that some people are "better suited" for life in clan structure and some for life in other structures. I don't think you adressed any of this.
[Disclaimer: I'm not a proponent of HBD, so I don't guarantee to sum up the position correctly.]
Still plenty of implications for eugenics.
P(Child_IQ | Mommy_Race,Mommy_IQ, Daddy_Race,Daddy_IQ) may still vary by race, so that there are plenty of implications for eugenics.
Such as this being false:
I'd expect some reversion to the mean of the race, where Mommy_Race = Daddy_Race . Anyone got stats on that distribution?
I'd expect a broadening of the distribution where Mommy_Race <> Daddy_Race, and variability by race combination.
HBD isn't predictive; it's a null hypothesis. The predictive claim is the inverse: that there aren't substantial ability differences between racial groups. Unfortunately you do have to mention race because that's the claim that people are making; obviously the group of MIT students has a different mean IQ from the general population. So differences in outcome are because of different starting conditions, racism, or culture.
In particular, a belief in ~HBD means that, when black kids don't get into Harvard at population-representational rates, the system is unfair SOMEWHERE. Maybe it's a problem with lousy schools, maybe there's racism in college admissions, maybe it's generational poverty. But, as a society that values fairness, we have a duty to figure out what's going wrong and try to fix it.
With ~HBD, the system is unfair and we have a duty to fix it. With HBD, the way things are might be fair and something like affirmative action might actually be unjust. That doesn't mean they necessarily are fair--just because groups can be different doesn't preclude racism--just that they aren't automatically unfair.
Why do we have a duty to fix a broken system which we didn't create, but no duty to fix genetic issues which produce the same problems?
That's an odd question to ask, when you're the one who excluded anything to do with eugenics as an implication of HBD...
I would say we have duties to fix the broken system in both cases, but the way to fix it is very different in each case, and so anyone interested in fixing it must care deeply about whether HBD is true. Personally, I really hope that once embryo editing becomes a reality, the government will simply subsidize it for everyone who wants it. It'll be expensive, but the positive externalities will pay for it countless times over, it can be justified economically on narrow individual difference grounds even more easily than on group 'fixing broken system' grounds so HBD's truth is unnecessary, subsidization resolves all the social and political issues, and is the ethical thing to do: no one deserves to be born broken because their parents were too broke or short-sighted to arrange for IVF and editing.
(I assume this is not a controversial position on a transhumanist forum...)
I'll state for the record that I disagree with most of the OP, but I won't go into a detailed discussion because it will take a lot of time and because it's the classic LW minefield a walk through which is likely to generate more heat (typically in the form of explosions) than light.
I think the scientific implications include a chance at a better understanding of the physical basis of intelligence, and hopefully ways of increasing intelligence.
Finding the genetic causation of intelligence would be fantastic.
HBD isn't the idea that there's genetic causation of intelligence, however; it's the idea that the genetic causation factors vary in frequency between population groups (namely, races), and specifically, that certain population groups have lower intelligence as a result in the variance of frequency. To which I must respond that, while it should surprise us if those genetic causation factors don't vary in frequency across population groups, it should also surprise us if the frequency distribution of given genetic factors consistently advantages or disadvantages a single population group. (That is, there should be genetic causal factors which improve intelligence that are more common in black people, as well.)
Which is to say, HBD, as a proper idea rather than racism, suggests we should be mixing races to get the best genetics from every group. Given, as I understand it, that the greatest variance in genetics tends to be in African people, the ideal is probably closer to the African cluster (being larger and thus having more potential for positive factors) than the European cluster.
But that isn't the position HBD advocates generally take, to put it mildly.
Not quite. You are thinking of breeding people to develop a trait (in this case, intelligence) and are correct that you want diversity in your breeding stock. However what that diversity gets you is not just top-end results. It gets you variance -- basically, you'll get a few geniuses and a lot of idiots.
In animal breeding that's not a issue -- you kill off (or prevent from breeding) all the failures and just keep the very few top results. For humans that would be... problematic.
So if you encourage greater variance in outcomes and you keep all of them, the question becomes who breeds faster: idiots or geniuses. Let me point out that I'm not optimistic about that question.
By the way, empirically people with both black and white ancestry have average IQs between the pure blacks and the pure whites. This seems to indicate that you don't get much by cross-breeding.
Sometimes animal breeders find that two different breeds nick meaning their offspring consistently have more desirable traits than either of their parents do. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been observed in humans but then again I don't know if anyone has really investigated the possibility.
My impression is that breeding from diverse backgrounds gets you hardiness-- mutts are less likely to have the specific genetic ailments you get from purebreds. On the other hand, you're less likely to get extraordinary development of particular traits.
On what is possibly the gripping hand, that's dogs who've been selectively bred, which is not the same as people roughly adapted to different environments.
Yes, but I think this works on a different scale. Purebred domestic animals are usually heavily inbred, precisely to push a particular trait to new heights. In the standard textbook manner this makes the chances of the animal getting multiple copies of some recessive gene skyrocket, thus the fragility.
The human equivalent is marrying your cousins (inbred human populations exist, they usually don't look too good) which is different (scale) than marrying someone from a large enough gene pool (e.g. like all Europeans).
Not quite. It depends on who the mother is, and who the father is.
But I'm suggesting something slightly different: To the extent we engage in eugenics to improve our genetic lineage, we should be pulling genetics from every stock.
But we don't and are not very likely to start in the near future.
Genetic modification isn't that far away, and in some respects with regard to some conditions genetic culling of reproductive cells is already here. Both are forms of eugenics.
Direct genetic modification CRISPR-style doesn't require any cross-breeding, you just insert the genes you like and delete the ones you dislike.
In any case, this has little to do with the usefulness of HBD claims.
Now that you mention it, I haven't heard of research on people who have the most varied ancestry.
No. Think about a random walk on a 1D line, or about generating a normal based on the sum of a lot of random variates. If you do 2 random walks A and B, do you think that A and B will wind up in the exact same position because 'there should be steps which increase the position in B as well'? Or, 'A and B should sum to the same, because B will have some variables which were higher than in A'? In expectation, A and B may have the same average value, and may asymptotically converge given enough steps or variates summed but in any particular realization, with a fixed number of steps of summed variates, they can and probably will be quite far apart. Genetic drift is a considerable force, and more still if you invoke any kind of different selection pressures (such as, say, for other expensive phenotyptic traits like infection resistance at the expense of highly expensive brain development).
I disagree. This may not be the position that racists take, but HBDers often suggest outbreeding & hybrid vigor as good things and from Jensen onward have emphasized the problematic effects of inbreeding depression & homozygosity. Razib & Jayman practice it, and HBD Chick, Cochran also come to mind as bringing up these issues fairly regularly, I think Chuck probably has too. More historically, I believe this was one of the disputed topics among early eugenicists; for example, Razib gives a quote from R.A. Fisher from page 238 of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection:
So I'm surprised you have this impression.
There are, last I checked, at least 100 genetic markers associated with intelligence. And convergence, short of genetic drift/selection pressures, should be expected; while it's possible for there to be a difference, given the law of large numbers, we should expect the distribution to be pretty similar.
Selection pressures like plagues that wiped out the majority of the population on more than one occasion?
Why are you surprised?
Many more actually, the upcoming SSGAC paper alone reportedly identifies 80+ hits but even that paper's full polygenic score only explains about a third to a fifth of SNP contributions, so there's going to be many more hits to come and probably thousands of non-zero variants beyond that. But it doesn't make a difference because both group and individual differences are based on the same set. Individual differences arise from very small net differences (due to the CLT), and so you only need small changes in allele frequencies to also produce group differences on the order of individual differences. Take a look at my calculations and simulations in http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection#limits-to-iterated-selection making concrete the issue of how much absolute genetic difference translates to observed relative differences; it's not much, and it would take a very small average difference to produce group differences like we see. Or look at the scale of Piffer's polygenic scores. Also consider 'soft sweeps'.
(I was looking into this because it has some important implications: the small variance means that embryo selection is going to be weak since you don't get embryos with large differences in their polygenic scores, but it also means that there is an enormous amount of potential improvement you could make with direct embryo editing. If the genetics of intelligence were just 50 genes or something small like that, selection would be more profitable since the sum of 50 random binomials is much more spread out than 10,000, but it also means that once you've edited all 50, you've 'run out' of genes to tweak and have topped out at a relatively few SDs of relative intelligence improvement. But with 10,000, you have so many knobs to tweak that you can go straight to whatever the neurophysiological limit of a human brain is.)
'Majority'? I don't think even the Black Plague killed a majority of the European population, if that's what you mean. And no. Only a few occasions doesn't create much of a selection pressure, compared to constant disease and parasite load over deca-millennia. Try the breeder's equation on the impact of a few dozen selection events killing 1/3 of the population versus say 10,000 selection events killing 10% of the population.
'Pretty similar' is not nearly enough, and again, you can't neglect genetic drift and selection pressures. It's a fact that human populations do not experience significant gene flow and so genetic drift will be operating.
Because if you're going to claim that HBD is irrelevant and futile and has no policy or real-world implications, I assume you must have been reading extensively about HBD to understand all the threads that go into it, which will lead you to those writers frequently.
Eh, you are doing the thing where you want trades to be one sided. Like, wouldn't it be cool if bigotry was not only unfair, but also didn't save any time.
"HBD doesn't make any predictions at the individual level we couldn't more accurately obtain through listening to a person speak for five seconds,"
Like, judging folks by whatever apparent trait you prefer is instant. Saying (paraphrased) "But instead we can individually judge them after a short conversation". is cheating. It's like arguing against including auto dial in a phone, because we can do anything it can do by typing the numbers out." We are just looking for filters here.
I'm a hiring manager/detective/prospective house buyer. I don't have time to screen the dudes. So I look through the names and throw out the people whose name isn't some variation of Brad. Telling me that I could get the same benefit by calling them and talking to them and finding out if they deserve to be considered is missing the point. there are already too many Brads to talk to. I'm barely able to keep up with them. I need filters that don't require individual consideration.
Insofar as you can look at somebody, you can look at their clothes, which are far better signals. If you're looking for the guy who might mug you, the black guy with a button-up shirt and tie shouldn't even come up in your radar.
Names contain more information than race, however, they are also strong signals of cultural upbringing, which again, is a far better signal than race. Bradley is more likely to be upper-class than Brad. Phineas is better than either.
Anytime you can use race to make a quick assessment, there's a better signal that you could be using instead, just as quickly and easily. Namely, the signals that people choose for themselves, which will say far, far more about them than the qualities they didn't.
I was kind of simplifying for ease of explanation. Obviously, filtering isn't a one and done. It's a process, yeah?
Like, Michael Vick isn't likely to mug me, for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious is that he isn't here. He's also rich, and surrounded by photographers, but this pales in comparison to the filter of "not present".
The first filter gets rid of the black dude in the suit and tie. He isn't here. He's off somewhere else. The setting of "be mugged" is not an environment where ties are worn. I look around, there are a variety of sketchy folks. The ladies (if there are any) are overwhelmingly the safer choice to ask for help. Sexist? Sure. True. Yep. Should I instead ask each of the rough looking folks a quick survey to figure out whether any of them are explicitly pacifists?
Also...like, race/sex/whatever influence the choices that people make. If you want me to filter (as one of many filters, the first of which was "submitted their resumes to this job) on a choice instead of a category, it's usually going to be a one for one deal. Like, if I toss all the resumes named Jerome, I may not be explicitly racist, but come on.
Estimating a person's capability to do X, Y, or Z (do a job effectively, be a law-abiding citizen, be a consistently productive citizen not dependent on welfare programs, etc.) based on skin color or geographical origin of their ancestry is a heuristic.
HBD argues that it is a relatively accurate heuristic. The anti-HBD crowd argues that it is an inaccurate heuristic.
OrphanWilde seems to be arguing that, even if HBD is correct that these heuristics are relatively accurate, we don't need heuristics like this in the first place because there are even better heuristics or more direct measurements of a person's individual capability to do X, Y, or Z already out there. (IQ, interviews, etc.)
The HBD advocates here seem to be arguing that we do, in fact, need group-based heuristics because individual heuristics:
*1. Are more costly in terms of time, and are thus just not feasible for many applications.
*2. Don't really exist for certain measures, such as in estimating "probable future law-abidingness" or "probable future welfare dependency".
*3. Have political restrictions on being able to apply them. (For example, we COULD use formal IQ tests on job applicants, but such things have been made illegal precisely because they seem to paint a higher proportion of blacks in a bad light).
Perhaps OrphanWilde might like to respond to these objections. Here's how I would respond:
*1. The costliness of individual judgment is warranted because using group-based heuristics has politically-toxic spillovers, and might miss out on important outliers (by settling on local optima at the expense of global optima). We are not trying to screen out defective widgets from an assembly line (in which case a quick but "lossy" sorting heuristic might be justified). We are trying to sort people. The costliness of mis-sorting even a small percentage of individuals (for example, by heuristically rejecting a black man who happens (unbeknowst to us without doing the individual evaluation) to have an IQ of 150 from a certain job) outweighs the cost-saving of using quick group-based heuristics: both because it will inevitably politically anger the black community, with all sorts of politically toxic spillovers, and because we are missing out on a disproportionate goldmine of economic potential by missing these outliers.
*2. If individual tests for probable law-abidingness or probable economic productivity don't currently exist, then maybe we should try to develop them! Is that so impossible? Personally, I find it a bit unbelievable that the U.S. does not currently have tests for certain agreed-upon foundational cultural values as part of its immigration screening process. For example, if applicants had to respond to questions such as, "Explain why impartial fairness towards strangers rather than favoritism towards friends and relatives is an essential aspect of national citizenship and professional behavior" or "Explain the advantages of dis-establishment of religion from the political and legal affairs of the state" then I would sleep much more easily at night about our immigration policy.
*3. Well, perhaps we should campaign to overturn the political restrictions on individual merit-based tests by pointing out that the only de-facto alternative that people will have is to use group-based tests of some sort or another (whether employers or other institutions openly admit to using such group-based heuristics or not, they will find a way to do so), and that group-based heuristics will actually hurt disadvantaged groups even more. In other words, unless you want all appointments in society to be decided by random casting of lots, people need some sort of criteria for judging others. Given this, it would be better to have individual-based tests rather than group-based tests. Even if the individual-based tests will end up showing "disparate impact" on certain groups, it will still be less than if we used group-based tests.
(Edit: formatting improved upon request).
can you put a newline before the 1. to improve the formatting. Thanks.
Are US employers forbidden from setting all meet based tests, or just IQ tests?
Because task-specific tests aren't just an alternative to IQ tests, they're a better alternative in almost every case.
True in many cases, although for some jobs the task might not be well-specified in advance (such as in some cutting-edge tech jobs), and what you need are not necessarily people with any particular domain-specific skills, but rather just people who are good all-around adaptable thinkers and learners.
So you're saying the social sciences are failing because black people are less intelligent than white people and they can't admit it.
Okay. How would one go about falsifying this belief of yours? What evidence would change your mind?
One argument could be that many social scientists are being led down a blind alley of trying to find environmental causes of all sorts of differences and are being erroneously predisposed to find such causes in their data to a stronger extent than is really the case, which then leads to incorrect conclusions and policy recommendations that will not actually change things for the better because the policy recommendations end up not addressing what is the vast majority of the root of the problem (genetics, in this case).
No. Efforts at "diversity in tech" could still lead to a more optimal match of skills to jobs.
HBD does not deny that there may be biases limiting the hiring of quality of applicants, it would just deny that differential outcomes are prima facie evidence of such biases.
I think you have grossly underestimated the importance of HBD and policy implications. If HBD is true, then all the existing correlational and longitudinal evidence immediately implies that group differences are the major reason why per capita income in the USA are 3-190x per capita income in Africa, that group differences are a major driver of history and the future, that intelligence has enormous spillovers totally ignored in all current analyses. This has huge implications for historical research, immigration policy (regression to the mean), dysgenics discussions (minor to irrelevant from just the individual differences perspective but long-term existential threat from HBD), development aid, welfare programs, education, and pretty much every single topic in the culture wars touching on 'sexism' or 'racism' where the supposedly iron-clad evidence is confounded or based on rational priors. (In terms of research, it also means that you can aggregate GWAS results across populations without worrying that population stratification or different linkage disequilibrium patterns are driving your results, which will make it easier to study complex traits like intelligence or violence.)
HBD is a lightning rod because it has so many implications and leads to a radical restructuring of so many premises like the environmental assumption built into society. It's like going from miasmas to germ theory: if the diseases damaging or killing most of your population is just environmental and due to vapors from swamps, then all you can do is try to slowly expensively drain the swamps, and when this fails, oh well - there's always bloodletting of patients. (It didn't cure the patient? Better try some more.) But if diseases are caused by tiny organisms which are communicated from patient to patient where there are carriers and some very poor regions have much higher disease burdens than others, some populations are more inherently more susceptible than others to some diseases, and there are potentially cutting-edge medical treatments which can prevent or ameliorate disease, then you are going to do a lot of things differently. You're going to send fewer white employees to India and Africa to die, you're going to strictly quarantine carriers, you're going to roll out mass population prevention schemes like vaccination, you're going to improve entire regions by spraying the mosquitoes & introducing netting & air conditioning, you're going to invest in sanitation and garbage collection to cut off transmission routes (water and rats don't carry miasmas, but they do carry feces and fleas). And so on.
'Aside from that, Ms Lincoln, how was the play?'
All true. But all the same is true if HBD -isn't- true. It doesn't matter if some of the group differences are genetic in origin, given that others are not, we can still resolve those.
Assume HBD isn't true, and measured intelligence differences are purely the product of cultural and nutritional and parasite load differences. Now assume HBD is true, and measured intelligence differences are the result of the above and also genetics. Do the implications here change?
And here I disagree: Regardless of whether or not HBD is true, we should still be taking steps to increase intelligence, for example by iodine supplement distribution, and reducing parasite loads. The steps we should take don't depend on HBD being true or false.
It matters a lot wrt how much money to spend on fighting parasites.
If the world were in danger of spending more than the optimal amount of money doing so, sure. In the world we live in, not so much.
I disagree. The developed world should prioritise fighting existential risks over fighting parasites.
Those can be resolved but they will not make nearly as large a difference as currently expected, where current ideologies hold that all of that 3-190x per capita difference is due to environmental conditions, history, and racism. HBD implies that, just as with individual differences and the systematic failure of welfare and education randomized experiments to 'close the gap', we can expect this futility to occur on a country-level basis at some level of development. Countries like China (maybe) and North Korea (definitely) will be predicted to escape their current poverty levels with appropriate interventions... and countries like Subsaharan Africa to possibly not escape. (Which countries can be made more concrete in a HBD context by taking Piffer's country/group-level polygenic scores and looking at the residuals of a GDP/score regression for the countries which most over and underperform; the former can be predicted to not grow substantially, and the latter can be predicted to grow substantially.)
Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It's Liebig's barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small.
Yes, because those environmental factors are causally downstream and cannot be improved without the locals. As development aid has discovered again and again, you cannot force improvements on a country. Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
Yes, they do! These causal models are fundamentally different. If genetics is a major limiting factor, iodine and all other environmental factors are not going to help past a certain level of development. (You can feed some Americans or New Zealanders iodine supplements, but it won't give them +10 IQ points even though they are probably somewhat deficient). If genetics is the major limiting factor, then at a certain point, you are basically polishing a turd and this can either be accepted or more radical interventions must be considered.
They're also causally upstream, given that intelligence is the problem. Meaning the problem is one of bootstrapping. This doesn't actually change any implications.
The environmental factors will help -to- that level of development, however, and given that that level of development has not been achieved, they're still the corrective measures necessary.
If genetics isn't a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will improve things. If genetics is a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will still improve things. Given that there's a factor we have no control over, and given factors that we might be able to control although it's a very difficult problem, the factor that we have no control over doesn't matter with respect to the solutions.
Yes, it does, if you cannot bootstrap in the first place because you cannot implement the measures because of a population with low intelligence, high discounting, high crime and corruption rates etc.
You're equivocating and it is not the case that regardless of genetics, all environmental interventions are equally profitable a priori. If genetics is a limiting factor on intelligence and other traits, then an environmental intervention - if you can manage it in the first place - will be restricted to its proximate effects and will not have the huge spillovers which led to the Great Divergence. If a population is at its genetic limit already and you successfully implement, say, iodization, the benefits will be limited to the immediate effects of reducing goiters and low energy, but you will not get the spillovers to homicide, the spillovers to greater education, the spillovers to higher income, the spillovers to lower discount rates and higher capital formation, etc. The cost-benefits for iodization are based on these benefits, not merely eliminating goiters! Likewise, if you cure malaria and a population is at the limit, you'll reduce how many people die of malaria and that'll be it. Maybe that much lower impact will still be worth it, but given how close to the edge a lot of interventions already are... It is not the case that all environmental interventions are always profitable and should always be done.
To be fair, that's not entirely Pakistanis' fault. Is paranoia about Communist fluoridation plots more or less dysfunctional than paranoia about CIA vaccination plots? Does it make a difference that only the latter has a grain of truth to it?
Less, because in the former case your kids could have a few more cavities and in the latter case your kids could grow up dumb and/or crippled.
Less.
Fluoridation of drinking water has never been shown to be safe or effective in randomized trials and you could never get approval from the FDA today to use it. The claimed benefits are pretty small in both health and monetary terms and would be wiped out by even a fraction of an IQ point loss; the expected benefit is quite small and so conspiracy theorists incorrectly killing fluoridation would not cause much regret.
Polio vaccines on the other hand have been shown to be safe & effective, and even if the CIA were using the polio program to kill dozens of Pakistanis each year (rather than 1 known inconclusive case), that still would be less than the number of polio vaccinators who have been assassinated and the hundreds of polio cases annually which will continue indefinitely and prevent the permanent eradication of polio. In this case, the regret from the conspiracy theories about polio vaccination is real.
...that its population is significantly inbred to the degree of having much higher child mortality due to congenial defects.
I think you overstate the case. HBD being true would mean the differences between human groups are large enough to be important for all kinds of things. But it doesn't have to mean that these differences are so large that they swamp every other difference! There are plenty of other, undisputed differences between human groups, which are either non-biologically heritable, or are part of their geographical environment, that could contribute to or outright cause huge disparities between the US and Africa.
As just one example, if you took the African climate, and the sub-Saharan African prevalence of human disease and parasites, and introduced it to the US in a counterfactual past, I expect US average incomes would be much lower. There are many other examples and arguments I could bring here, but I'm pretty sure you can think of them yourself.
Differences in outcomes between groups in the US, or in the EU, are a much better case than the US vs. Africa or vs. China.
A lot of people forget that malaria used to be endemic in the South, Washington DC struggled with it, and Florida was just considered to be unfit for human habitation.
Don't agree at all. Differences in political culture are probably much more important.
Once the Chinese stopped caring about whether the cat was communist or capitalist, and focused on whether it made money, their per capita income was off to the races.
Interesting graph of the divergence of their per capita GDP from India right around 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China
I think the first thing politicized HBD advocates would say is to restrict immigration, as this is less controversial than eugenics. Of course, (a) there are many other possible reasons to worry about immigration and (b) you can choose to filter only immigrants with good jobs (at the risk of brain draining the origin country if HBD is true).
Firstly, you need more than five seconds to assess someone's intellegence, otherwise job interviews would be over very quickly.
Secondly, it is difficult to assess things like propensity towards criminal behaviour, since anyone can claim not to be a criminal.
Thirdly, and of most generalisable importance, sorry if this sounds insulting, but either you do not understand Baysian probability, or more likely you are ignoring it due to motivated cognition or speaking hyperbolically. If HBD is true, then the group intelligence is your prior, the conversation provides more information and allows you to update to a posterior. I agree that a conversation could provide more information on IQ than HBD (assuming for sake of argument that HBD is true), but just because you have updated does not make your prior useless.
Ok, ignoring HBD for a moment, on a scientific level this is just wrong. To take a less inflammatory example, suppose vitamin B12 increases lifespan, but its a very small effect only apparent over a very large number of people, and you get far more information from diet. Therefore, by your logic, B12 is useless and has the same scientific status as aether.
There are other theories which are certainly useless at our current level of understanding and technology, such as superstrings, or Hawking radiation. These theories are useless, in that we can't extract energy from a black hole using Hawking radiation, and we won't be able to for the forseeable future. This doesn't make Hawking radiation 'not even wrong' because the truth of theories is not determined by whether you think they are useful. The aether theory was abandoned because people thought it was wrong - when it was replaced by relativity, relativity had no use (at least for a few decades). You are comparing the aether, which makes no predictions, with HBD, which does make predictions, although you do not think these predictions are practically useful.
Again, I'm sorry if what I've said seems insulting, but in your haste to take down HBD you are also getting rid of probability theory and the scientific method. You are confusing practicality with truth and 'comparitivly low information' with 'zero information'.
OrphanWilde is claiming not that you get all the information you need in 5 seconds, but that you get as much information in 5 seconds as you do from just knowing the candidate's skin colour[1]. 5 seconds is an awfully short time, but make it a minute and I think he's probably right.
And there is much evidence that the outcome of an interview is often mostly decided very, very early on, the rest of the interview serving mostly as rationalization fuel.
[1] This is, like everything else in this discussion, conditional on "HBD" being correct and skin colour therefore giving useful information (in expectation) about a person's cognitive abilities.
I'd be inclined to agree, but that's not what he said. What he said is that in 5 seconds you can gain not just as much information as from knowing the race, but so much more information that the racial information is rendered completely irrelevant. This is wrong, if HBD is right.
Yes, it is wrong, and I already said so myself. (In fact, as it happens I said it before you did.) I wasn't claiming that everything you said is wrong; only that you misunderstood one claim OrphanWilde made. (You yourself split up your objections into "First", "Second", and "Third"; I was commenting only on the "First".)
I'm not trying to argue with you, sorry if I came across like that. In fact I've already upvoted your comments in this discussion.
It would appear that others have a different opinion of them :-).
Do you also think that "HBD is false" makes no predictions and has no policy implications?
I didn't know this. Could someone please give me a link confirming that affirmative action quotas depend on specific city?
Still, I can imagine a city where most members from some minority live on one side of the city, and your company is on the other side of the city, and you will be called racist simply because people don't like to commute to the opposite side of the city.