7 ms·

HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

by jasonhansel 4y ago

garbagetime 4y ago
[flagged]
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I think it would be kind of weird if we could correlate race with intelligence, if only because race doesn’t really exist biologically. Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity within themselves than every other race.
  - garbagetime 4y ago
    > Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity within themselves than every other race. Would you mind explaining this in more detail?
    - orthoxerox 4y ago
      Black people are the "original" humans, all other races descend from much smaller groups of humans that moved out of Africa and colonized the rest of the globe (plus some admixture from extant Homo species). So a bunch of alleles have never left Africa in sufficient quantities to persist in non-Black populations. And this probably applies to ADoS Blacks, too, since their Black ancestors were bought from the same entrepots in Western Africa.
      - garbagetime 4y ago
        I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race". Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, you're presenting the case that there are significant genetic differences between black races and other races, in which case: why can't some of those alleles code for intelligence, and why can't that result in a difference in average intelligence?
        orthoxerox 4y ago
        There's no reason they can't. People that want to taboo HBD are afraid that the slope from "some difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" to "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" is too slippery, and the only safe way to ensure that the policy changes they want ever happen is to stabilize the consensus around "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is due to systemic racism".
        zozbot234 4y ago
        > I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race". Except that HBDers are doing exactly that. Last I checked, Igbo immigrants from Nigeria were doing very well in the British and European education systems. And there's other subcultures in Africa with a historical focus on education, like the Ashanti of Ghana, etc. It's not racial genetics; it's all about culture, norm-setting and equitable access to the education system.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Ghana is also one of the most stable and democratic African nations today, and the Ashanti Empire was renowned for its advanced political administration, so there's that.
        SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        What do you consider a “serious racist”?
        calrissian 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - prawn 4y ago
        For anyone else unfamiliar with the term: ADoS appears to be "American Descendants of Slavery".
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      It's trivial to find an African person with more genetic similarity to an Irish person than he has in common with a different African person. Genetic diversity in Africa is massive. Think of the various Pygmy people as just one example.
  - airgapstopgap 4y ago
    This "Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity" is a technically correct but entirely irrelevant fact, a staple of popular disinformation on this topic. It is trotted out to lead laymen to a number of incorrect assumptions: a) that it's meaningless to speak of Africans (or specifically of members of the largest African populations) as belonging to a race; b) that raw Fst measures suggest some tribe X is "genetically more similar" to Europeans than it is to tribe Y and therefore is expected to be more phenotypically similar and c) that it's unproductive to discuss those Africans as having some specific average for some trait. It relies on equally irrelevant examples, like the difference in height between Pygmies and the Tutsi (although both sides of the debate are aware that Pygmies belong to a wholly separate "race"; the point of this maneuver is to make laymen assume that "racists" do not recognize this trite fact, and laugh at their lack of nuance). Genetic diversity is not the measure of non-belonging to a race, nor some quotient by which variance of every phenotypic trait is multiplied or something, and in this context it refers to neutral genetic variation, which is higher in Sub-Saharan Africans (and very high in a tiny, unrepresentative subgroup – Khoisan, not Bantu) than in other continental groups, due to their ancestors not having gone through some ancient bottlenecks. Interesting for anthropology and history – tracing of migrations and such; not very interesting for purposes of differential psychology, "scientific racism", quantifying effects of nature and nurture, whatever you call it. A group can be very genetically diverse but near-identical in all traits, or arbitrarily diverse in phenotypes yet highly inbred; and Khoisan from different tribes will still cluster together despite having "more diversity". It's neither here nor there. Most HBDers, including Scott, are not racists in the old-timey sense of normative preference for discrimination against some race or races. But sometimes, it's really hard to remain polite to people who know better yet knowingly spread disinformation to get laymen on their side. I fear that this rank dishonesty is enough to push some all the way over, beyond HBD and into the racist camp. We don't know nuthin' about these topics any more, we know a great deal. And it's not a coincidence that the anti-hereditarian camp trades in vague generalities and factoids, and has to block access to databases. Decades of enthusiastic, well-incentivized search have not yielded any evidence in favor of the blank slate view, of the "it's all culture and schooling" view, the optimistic view. Some related notes: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/african-variation/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/african-variation/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/economists-and-biology/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/economists-and-bio... > The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans. > Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little).
- tchaffee 4y ago
  The problem is trying to attribute that to race. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. Meaning there are a LOT of Africans who are average or below average at running. Race is far far too broad to attribute to much of anything. It's easy to find an African person more genetically similar to an Irish person than he is to another African person. Race doesn't even have a scientific definition.
  - garbagetime 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      Define race. You seem to be using a definition of race that the vast majority of people don't use.
      - garbagetime 4y ago
        A race: a people who have been largely or totally isolated (in terms of procreation) from other peoples for a very great number of generations.
        tchaffee 4y ago
        Source? The vast majority of people do not use that definition. Ask the average person for a list of races and they will easily answer with something like: African, Asian, European, etc. And by your definition, many humans don't even have a race.
        garbagetime 4y ago
        If you asked them to list races, they might give those out of some habit, though I doubt anybody seriously considers those to be races. I mean, do people really think that the Han Chinese, the Persians, the Hindu Indians, etc., are all of the same race? No. People are aware there are various African, European, Asian, etc. races. Why do you want a source? Just think about it. How could race be anything else? Yes, many humans cannot be sorted into any one race. They have ancestors of various races.
akomtu 4y ago
In the framework of materialism the above is a trivial conclusion: mind is a function of neurons that are a function of DNA.
- tptacek 4y ago
  That would be true if HBD people came to random, or even just varied, conclusions about gene/intelligence determinism, but of course, they come to a consistent and specific conclusion about it: a hierarchy of race-determined intelligence that goes Asians, Europeans, Everything Else, and then people of African ancestry.
  - akomtu 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 4y ago
      That's not responsive to anything I just said.
      - akomtu 4y ago
        [flagged]
        tptacek 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but I've lost track of what you're trying to argue about with me. I think it's fine to just disengage! We're not going to persuade each other.
  - garbagetime 4y ago
    Are you saying that the simple fact that many people have come to the same conclusion disconfirms that conclusion?
    - 4y ago
janalsncm 4y ago
Between populations there are bound to be differences, but there are a bunch of issues with trying to map that basic fact on to racial IQ rankings: 1) Race isn’t a well-defined variable. It’s socially-constructed. Example: Italian-Americans have not always been considered white. And many people are mixed race. 2) Intelligence isn’t a great metric either. I’m not even convinced it’s a single number. There are people who are great at maintaining dozens of relationships, and can remember things about each person. There are people who are killer at problem solving. And there are people who have uncanny kinesthetic coordination. Which one is more fundamental to human cognitive tasks? 3) Distributions. What do we care about within a population? Is it the mean? That tells us nothing about how skewed the population is. Is it the median? There are problems with that as well. The population could have a bimodal or multimodal distribution. Then what? 4) Confounding variables. You know what’s a lot easier to measure than IQ? Money. Unfortunately a person’s quality of education is highly correlated to the wealth of their parents. And so is stress, which knocks down IQ as well. And there are a ton of other confounding variables too that I don’t know about because I’m not a social scientist. If you do a straight-up tally of IQ you’re not necessarily even measuring anything cognitive at all.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  There have been a few adoption based studies that work to correct for confounders. Nothing conclusive obviously, but it's not like no one has thought of that stuff.

HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

garbagetime 4y ago

[flagged]

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I think it would be kind of weird if we could correlate race with intelligence, if only because race doesn’t really exist biologically. Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity within themselves than every other race.
- garbagetime 4y ago
  > Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity within themselves than every other race. Would you mind explaining this in more detail?
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    Black people are the "original" humans, all other races descend from much smaller groups of humans that moved out of Africa and colonized the rest of the globe (plus some admixture from extant Homo species). So a bunch of alleles have never left Africa in sufficient quantities to persist in non-Black populations. And this probably applies to ADoS Blacks, too, since their Black ancestors were bought from the same entrepots in Western Africa.
    - garbagetime 4y ago
      I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race". Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, you're presenting the case that there are significant genetic differences between black races and other races, in which case: why can't some of those alleles code for intelligence, and why can't that result in a difference in average intelligence?
      - orthoxerox 4y ago
        There's no reason they can't. People that want to taboo HBD are afraid that the slope from "some difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" to "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" is too slippery, and the only safe way to ensure that the policy changes they want ever happen is to stabilize the consensus around "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is due to systemic racism".
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        > I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race". Except that HBDers are doing exactly that. Last I checked, Igbo immigrants from Nigeria were doing very well in the British and European education systems. And there's other subcultures in Africa with a historical focus on education, like the Ashanti of Ghana, etc. It's not racial genetics; it's all about culture, norm-setting and equitable access to the education system.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Ghana is also one of the most stable and democratic African nations today, and the Ashanti Empire was renowned for its advanced political administration, so there's that.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        What do you consider a “serious racist”?
        calrissian 4y ago
        [flagged]
    - prawn 4y ago
      For anyone else unfamiliar with the term: ADoS appears to be "American Descendants of Slavery".
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    It's trivial to find an African person with more genetic similarity to an Irish person than he has in common with a different African person. Genetic diversity in Africa is massive. Think of the various Pygmy people as just one example.
- airgapstopgap 4y ago
  This "Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity" is a technically correct but entirely irrelevant fact, a staple of popular disinformation on this topic. It is trotted out to lead laymen to a number of incorrect assumptions: a) that it's meaningless to speak of Africans (or specifically of members of the largest African populations) as belonging to a race; b) that raw Fst measures suggest some tribe X is "genetically more similar" to Europeans than it is to tribe Y and therefore is expected to be more phenotypically similar and c) that it's unproductive to discuss those Africans as having some specific average for some trait. It relies on equally irrelevant examples, like the difference in height between Pygmies and the Tutsi (although both sides of the debate are aware that Pygmies belong to a wholly separate "race"; the point of this maneuver is to make laymen assume that "racists" do not recognize this trite fact, and laugh at their lack of nuance). Genetic diversity is not the measure of non-belonging to a race, nor some quotient by which variance of every phenotypic trait is multiplied or something, and in this context it refers to neutral genetic variation, which is higher in Sub-Saharan Africans (and very high in a tiny, unrepresentative subgroup – Khoisan, not Bantu) than in other continental groups, due to their ancestors not having gone through some ancient bottlenecks. Interesting for anthropology and history – tracing of migrations and such; not very interesting for purposes of differential psychology, "scientific racism", quantifying effects of nature and nurture, whatever you call it. A group can be very genetically diverse but near-identical in all traits, or arbitrarily diverse in phenotypes yet highly inbred; and Khoisan from different tribes will still cluster together despite having "more diversity". It's neither here nor there. Most HBDers, including Scott, are not racists in the old-timey sense of normative preference for discrimination against some race or races. But sometimes, it's really hard to remain polite to people who know better yet knowingly spread disinformation to get laymen on their side. I fear that this rank dishonesty is enough to push some all the way over, beyond HBD and into the racist camp. We don't know nuthin' about these topics any more, we know a great deal. And it's not a coincidence that the anti-hereditarian camp trades in vague generalities and factoids, and has to block access to databases. Decades of enthusiastic, well-incentivized search have not yielded any evidence in favor of the blank slate view, of the "it's all culture and schooling" view, the optimistic view. Some related notes: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/african-variation/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/african-variation/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/economists-and-biology/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/economists-and-bio... > The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans. > Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little).
tchaffee 4y ago
The problem is trying to attribute that to race. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. Meaning there are a LOT of Africans who are average or below average at running. Race is far far too broad to attribute to much of anything. It's easy to find an African person more genetically similar to an Irish person than he is to another African person. Race doesn't even have a scientific definition.
- garbagetime 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Define race. You seem to be using a definition of race that the vast majority of people don't use.
    - garbagetime 4y ago
      A race: a people who have been largely or totally isolated (in terms of procreation) from other peoples for a very great number of generations.
      - tchaffee 4y ago
        Source? The vast majority of people do not use that definition. Ask the average person for a list of races and they will easily answer with something like: African, Asian, European, etc. And by your definition, many humans don't even have a race.
        garbagetime 4y ago
        If you asked them to list races, they might give those out of some habit, though I doubt anybody seriously considers those to be races. I mean, do people really think that the Han Chinese, the Persians, the Hindu Indians, etc., are all of the same race? No. People are aware there are various African, European, Asian, etc. races. Why do you want a source? Just think about it. How could race be anything else? Yes, many humans cannot be sorted into any one race. They have ancestors of various races.

akomtu 4y ago

In the framework of materialism the above is a trivial conclusion: mind is a function of neurons that are a function of DNA.

tptacek 4y ago
That would be true if HBD people came to random, or even just varied, conclusions about gene/intelligence determinism, but of course, they come to a consistent and specific conclusion about it: a hierarchy of race-determined intelligence that goes Asians, Europeans, Everything Else, and then people of African ancestry.
- akomtu 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 4y ago
    That's not responsive to anything I just said.
    - akomtu 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but I've lost track of what you're trying to argue about with me. I think it's fine to just disengage! We're not going to persuade each other.
- garbagetime 4y ago
  Are you saying that the simple fact that many people have come to the same conclusion disconfirms that conclusion?
  - 4y ago

janalsncm 4y ago

Between populations there are bound to be differences, but there are a bunch of issues with trying to map that basic fact on to racial IQ rankings: 1) Race isn’t a well-defined variable. It’s socially-constructed. Example: Italian-Americans have not always been considered white. And many people are mixed race. 2) Intelligence isn’t a great metric either. I’m not even convinced it’s a single number. There are people who are great at maintaining dozens of relationships, and can remember things about each person. There are people who are killer at problem solving. And there are people who have uncanny kinesthetic coordination. Which one is more fundamental to human cognitive tasks? 3) Distributions. What do we care about within a population? Is it the mean? That tells us nothing about how skewed the population is. Is it the median? There are problems with that as well. The population could have a bimodal or multimodal distribution. Then what? 4) Confounding variables. You know what’s a lot easier to measure than IQ? Money. Unfortunately a person’s quality of education is highly correlated to the wealth of their parents. And so is stress, which knocks down IQ as well. And there are a ton of other confounding variables too that I don’t know about because I’m not a social scientist. If you do a straight-up tally of IQ you’re not necessarily even measuring anything cognitive at all.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
There have been a few adoption based studies that work to correct for confounders. Nothing conclusive obviously, but it's not like no one has thought of that stuff.