they also claim that people with high IQs are better than people with low IQs.

But they pretty much are by LW standards! It's not just that higher IQs correlate with irreligiosity and liberalism & libertarianism (as one might expect from LW's userbase), but they also correlate with honesty, low discount rates, willingness to cooperate, dislike of coercion, judicious investments, positive externalities (from R&D) and so on and so forth. I've been compiling cites on all of these if you want to read more.

I looked at the above link, and it's actually a fairly heavily referenced book review written by Richard Lynn, a professor of psychology. The subject matter of the book is heavily within Lynn's area of expertise and stays focused on the substance. The guy is both a prominent academic in the psychology of intelligence, and willing to affiliate with publications, organizations, and events associated with nasty and silly ethnocentrism. Some possible heuristics we could apply here:

1) Read everything Lynn writes, both in academic journals and books, and in articles written for non-academic political publications, since he's an academic with relevant expertise.

2) Read everything Lynn writes, both in academic journals and books, and in articles written for non-academic political publications, but exclude things written for political publications where strongly disapproved writings appear (even if the Lynn article itself is unobjectionable).

3) Only read his academic articles and books, and not popularizations or other writings.

4) Don't read anything by this guy, either because his associations indicate his academic work is bad, or accepting any lost opportunities to learn as a legitimate cost of supporting norms of tolerance among majorities.

5) Don't read anything by people with Lynn's associations, but also extend one more level to exclude people who have associated with them, e.g. Arthur Jensen. Only read people who have political associations for which their research is inconvenient.

What are you thinking of?

Remember that too far down the list, one would also wind up excluding many of the arguments in the scientific literature against hereditarianism, at least on race, as the well-known anti-hereditarian authors often have strong Marxist, socialist and related commitments, e.g. Stephen J. Gould. In some cases, such as Gould's, that would be justified: Gould was caught in numerous errors and falsehoods skewed in the direction of his politics. But this would still slice away vast swathes of the relevant literature, if not the raw data.

Most HBD advocates I've encountered don't just claim that the statistical correlation between race and IQ can be explained by genetics; they also claim that people with high IQs are better than people with low IQs.

Actually most of them make a factually true statement that high IQ people are more pleasant to be around than low IQ people. I don't recall them arguing low IQ people have lower moral value. By far the most popular HBDish blog is iSteve by Steve Sailer, who clearly does assign equal value to people of different IQs. Some of the commenter on his blog are clearly racist, but that statement is also true of the comments to many crime stories on any news site.

The only group that really fits your bill are extreme white nationalists, but they basically use the IQ scores as a political bludgeon ignoring the higher Asian and especially Askenazi Jewish scores. They are easy to spot.

I often see HBD presented as a heroic scientific effort, one that is only embraced by those truth-seekers brave enough to swim against the tide of political correctness. But HBD (as presented on the HBD blogs I've encountered, at least) is so fraught with value judgments that I have trouble taking it seriously. I have to wade through all sorts of claims about how awful black people are in order to dig out the bloggers' actual data. Furthermore, I distrust the factual claims of anyone with so obvious an agenda.

I would directly challenge your claim. There are great truth seeking HBD blogs like West Hunter, Gene Expression, Evo and Proud, ect. I would argue that on LW mostly only such blogs ever get linked.

I'm not familiar with vdare.com, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a truth-seeker to reject a source for making blatant value judgments. If the findings reported in that source are in any way scientific, they will be contained in the academic literature, which is presumably more neutral. A truly conscientious truth-seeker might want to completely avoid bloggers with political agendas, and go straight to the scientific journal articles.

Actually the linked article is written by Professor RIchard Lynn a controversial scientist but one that is heavily represented in the academic literature. I doubt his positions in the article depart much from his stance in various papers. Judgement by author rather than by site seems much better suited if the author is notable.

It really depends on which blogs in particular your have in mind, since for some the criticism is unwarranted for others it really isn't mind citing examples?

A truly conscientious truth-seeker might want to completely avoid bloggers with political agendas, and go straight to the scientific journal articles.

Why didn't you take your own advice and just read the scientists who write on HBD rather than people arguing about it on the internet? Though there is overlap between the two groups, see Harpending & Cochran's blog and Peter Frost's blog.

Furthermore, I distrust the factual claims of anyone with so obvious an agenda.

I take it you also distrust the factual claims of mainstream social scientists for the same reason.

I can prefer some weighted mixture of "finding some truth now," and "setting pleasant social norms to make my truth-finding community healthier for the future,"

Given that those "pleasant social norms" seem to consist of declaring investigating certain subjects taboo, this is likely to make truth seeking harder in the future.

As Eliezer said in this post:

Second-order rationality implies that at some point, you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will. You might be able to believe you believed it—though I have just made that more difficult for you by pointing out the difference. (You're welcome!) You might even believe you were happy and self-deceived; but you would not in fact be happy and self-deceived.

For second-order rationality to be genuinely rational, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.

You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.

The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.