Comments at Steve Sailer:
* Steve once wrote that, if success in life is partly or mostly due to intelligence, and intelligence dependent on genes, then there is very little an individual can do to change those facts. A society that accepted these facts would stop trying to force square pegs into round holes, and stop trying to make everyone go to college and pile up debt. Instead, it would have to acknowledge that most people had little to do with the circumstances of their birth and actually embrace the needs of those people as they are.
It wouldn’t direct so much monetary and intellectual effort into creating robots to take away low-skill jobs. It wouldn’t disparage honest work towards self-improvement, towards working best within the strictures that nature has erected. It wouldn’t create a race-to-the-top, winner-take-all society that immiserates the vast majority of residents, who don’t have a hope of competing.
* But perhaps the greatest boon of accepting HBD would be not so much in our policies, but in the larger focus of our culture. We are, of course, now utterly obsessed with race. White guilt, black resentment, demands for remedies in representation in all facets of our culture are almost the defining features of modern day America. All of this is rendered unnecessary and irrational in a world that accepts HBD.
No truth of HBD, no peace, no harmony.
* Not being hosed down with industrial grade lies every day, for starters. Not being forced to pay lip service to things that are patently false. Not having to pretend that things that are not true are true. Is that not a thing of value in itself?
* Privately, most everyone lives an HBD aware life, so there would not be much change in that sphere.
In the public sphere, blank-slatism is largely an excuse for extracting and wasting public funds, so I guess we could blow that money somewhere else.
* First, expel all foreign trespassers.
Second, drastically reduce legal immigration.
Next: End affirmative action, have far less transfer-payment underclass welfare, and have no tolerance for thuggery. Clear-eyed society-wide HBD acceptance would result in zero protests against the recent police shooting of Stephon Clark and the police shooting of Alton Sterling, among other bogus cause célèbres in the news right now. And on the individual level, dangerous mental defectives like Nikolas Cruz and Jeffrey Yao would be locked away early on to prevent harm to the general public.
* If we junked affirmative action we’d get better performance from blacks because they would be doing only the kind of jobs they were qualified for which would maximize their value to the economy. Most affirmative action hires have a pernicious effect on decision making and productivity out to at least two degrees of separation in a business organization.
* I’ve been watching episodes of Forensic Files on Netflix. Every third episode features a forensic anthropologist calmly explaining why the skull with the blunt trauma on it belongs to a “Mongoloid” or a “Caucasoid.” Then they talk about cranial capacity varying among racial groups. Then they recreate an accurate facial physiognomy from the skull. They are hilariously oblivious to the current year, and surprisingly, a non-trivial number of them are young and/or female.
* Years ago, on a radio sports talk show, the host asked his producer, a young black man, what one thing he would want on a deserted island. Without hesitation the producer said…”A white girl.” The startled host asked why? The young man replied…”A white girl will always find a job and provide for me.”
* In practical terms, the only group who’s presently benefiting from race science is Jews. You have Pinker, CH Sommers and Jordan Peterson all endorsing a race-realist paper by Cofnas, who bases his claim that Jews are over-represented in left-wing intellectual movements** on the hypothesis of Jewish genetic IQ supremacy.
Where is the public endorsement by mainstream public intellectuals, like these, justifying the over-representation of whites in any prestigious field relative to Blacks or Hispanics? Virtually, nowhere to be found.
* It is now generally accepted in the field of labor economics that black-white differences in cognitive ability do more to explain black-white differences in earnings than lax policy (or lax policy enforcement) regarding “equal opportunity” or affirmative action. That is why, James Heckman has continually argued in favor of greater access to pre-school education. Unfortunately, the most common research finding with respect to pre-school education is that it does not permanently increase a student’s IQ.
* In the long run (but perhaps not the long, long run), Ezra Klein wins this debate by his refusal to engage in it. In the end, the science does not matter as this is framed fundamentally as a political and moral question. Ezra Klein’s politics and morality, like much of the West, is prefaced on a morality that society must embrace in reaction to the Holocaust.
We are always one minute from Midnight and the ultimate morality is making sure that “Never Again” does in fact, never again happen. This is an axiomatic position and it is simply not up for debate. The conversation of Sam Harris and Charles Murray had more than a whiff of eugenics about it and thus is morally unacceptable in the shadow of Auschwitz. Klein focuses on American racial history, but the morality fundamentally comes out of the post-Holocaust world. The Harris/ Murray discussion is so impossibly immoral that it cannot be allowed to take place. From a perspective of realpolitik,the milquetoast progressive, such as Ezra Klein, and Far Left Antifa equally believe that discussion of genetic differences in racial groups must be “de-platformed” from polite society because it calls into question post-WWII Western societies foundational and deeply held moral values.
Ezra Klein’s verbose and slightly flustered reaction to Sam Harris reveals that Ezra Klein is simply flabbergasted that a Jewish intellectual like Sam Harris fails to endorse the post-Auschwitz morality. Sam Harris’ cold and politically obtuse rejection of accepted moral dogma is so egregious because Harris is empowering the mindset that Ezra Klein truly believes allowed the Holocaust to happen.
Sam Harris is attempting to argue the science, but in the end, this is not a scientific debate. It is a statement of morality and power. Klein wins until another morality and power system arises.
* I found Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett “debunking” of Charles Murray to be a pretty hilarious (should be embarrassing) example of confusing academic moral preening. They call his work junk science and then go on to agree with almost everything he claims. It seems the main point of distinction is that direct genetic evidence has not been uncovered, so junk science. No wonder journalists like Sam Harris get confused. He is right that there is little scholarly debate on most of Murray’s claims, IQ is heritable, it is genetic, IQ tests are a useful indicator of cognition, and high IQs are good indicators of success, also black people generally have lower IQs. Few scholars in the field of intelligence disagree with any of this, and those who do don’t really have much in the way of evidence. The logical inference to make here is that part of the reason Blacks have lower IQs is genetic, but some scholars want to be shown the genes before they believe. I wonder what they’ll argue after they’re shown the genes.
