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WSLaFleur's avatar

It has been my experience that HBD is almost always simplistic tribalism masquerading as data-driven scientific inquiry. You cannot get anybody to shut up about it no matter how strongly you affirm the potential validity of their hypothesis unless you are willing to sign off on some flavor of regressive ethnocentrism, eugenics, etc. as an inevitable corollary.

No Mott-and-Bailey has ever had quite so much success as this one at making me angry enough to chuck a hair dryer into a public swimming pool.

"Oh, so what you really meant by human biodiversity is the idea that different tribes are essentially and indelibly incompatible, and you're only willing to entertain solutions that accept these presuppositions as true."

Thanks.

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Trembling Mad's avatar

In general, it feels like HBD proponents are just another manifestation of a sort of "pop psychology enthusiast", who thinks that a few studies showing an effect of one variable on another is THE explanation for disparate outcomes.

Anyone who's done actual research in social sciences knows that any complex phenomenon like "poverty", "intelligence", or "clam fishing" is multiply determined, with a billion tiny predictive factors all wrapped up in a huge convoluted circular network of causation. It's very rare to find One Thing That Explains [abstract noun]. But for the casual reader, they see some paper that says "power posing before interviews makes you better at negotiating" and thinks this means that One Weird Trick can reduce the male/female wage gap or similar.

Most intelligence researchers accept that intelligence is highly heritable, but all get pretty squeamish about between-group differences. To HBDers this seems like a failure to acknowledge the big effect sizes of IQ differences, but it seems more downstream of methodological limitations in intelligence research. A lot of the early studies estimating heritability of intelligence were twin and adoption studies, which only really get you within-family effects, not between-group effects. It's super difficult to identify the *cause* of between-group differences when those groups are very different in a billion other ways.

The problem is that there may be future studies that find some small between-group effects after rigorously controlling for confounders and the like, and HBDers will claim these studies validate their beliefs. But their beliefs are so "big" -- they think between group differences in intelligence explain *a lot* about other disparate incomes in stuff like poverty or criminality -- so big that a potential future finding of a couple IQ points difference isn't nearly big enough to warrant them.

The gulf between the Motte ("I think humans are diverse!") and the Bailey ("immigration has poisoned The West's genetic heritage and causing the collapse of society") is so immense

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