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 ...
It doesn't matter if some of the group differences are genetic in origin, given that others are not, we can still resolve those.
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 impro...
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.
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,...
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.
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 think the scientific implications include a chance at a better understanding of the physical basis of intelligence, and hopefully ways of increasing intelligence.
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.)
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...
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.
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).
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.
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 ...
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.
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, be...
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%).
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.
It's further back the pipeline than hiring - there just aren't very many black programmers - so trying to solve the problem at the hiring stage is solving the wrong problem.
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...
Widely-agreed-on HBD would provide a lot of cover for horrible racists
That's a very horrible reason for deciding to delude oneself about reality.
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.
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:
If the point is to raise the average, the population group doesn't matter.
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.
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.]
People seem to focus only on intelligence in these discussions. Does anyone not notice the racial composition of many pro sports teams?
Historically there may be causal reasons for differences in group capabilities. Are there studies, say, of the effects of celibacy in Catholic priests in the middle ages as causes for losing intelligence genes in the affected populations? Could there have been an effect of selecting for less intelligence in capturing slaves in Africa (populations would know there were kidnappers about; not everyone got captured, so why not...
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.)
Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything.
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.
HBD is similar to atheism some years ago, or heliocentrism some centuries ago. The evidence points one way and public opinion points another way. Many people will argue like this:
1) Believing the truth will encourage evil thinking, so we should believe the lie.
2) Believing the truth has no policy implications, so we might as well believe the lie.
3) Believing the truth is too politicized, so I'll claim neutrality and believe the lie.
But some people will reply, with childlike sincerity, that the truth is worth believing in. Otherwise why are we here?
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?
Nope.
But in this case I'm not encouraging people to believe something that is false. I'm discouraging people from having a belief-value in a questionable belief with highly questionable value at all.
If HBD is true then all the "diversity in tech" initiatives (not to mention Affirmative Action, etc.) are not onlt a waste of money but actively counter-productive.
Is something supposed to be negated in that sentence?
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.
That's true, and not news to me, but I still don't see why it makes sense as a reply or comment on what I said. HBD being true and a cause of differences in outcomes does not mean it is the only cause of those differences.
That's true, but I'm not sure what your point is here. How is different selection pressure related to the idea that environmental factors also influence outcomes? It's not as if everyone could evolve to perfectly overcome their local environmental challenges and have the same outcomes as everyone else.
Yes, and that would likely cause American productivity and wealth to be lower than it is in reality.
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...
There are, last I checked, at least 100 genetic markers associated with intelligence.
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.)
Selection pressures like plagues that wiped out the majority of the population on more than one occasion?
'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.
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.
'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.
Why are you surprised?
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.
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
Again, absent ...
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?
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.)
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.
Well, if HBD were true, it would mean science is politicized. This might be news to somebody, I guess.
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.
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.