DanArmak comments on Suppose HBD is True - Less Wrong

-12 Post author: OrphanWilde 21 April 2016 01:34PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (178)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 21 April 2016 04:37:03PM *  21 points [-]

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.

Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything.

'Aside from that, Ms Lincoln, how was the play?'

Comment author: DanArmak 22 April 2016 08:36:15PM *  0 points [-]

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

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2016 12:03:00AM 5 points [-]

the sub-Saharan African prevalence of human disease and parasites, and introduced it to the US in a counterfactual past

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.

Comment deleted 22 April 2016 11:15:44PM [-]