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.
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
Don’t agree at all. Differences in political culture are probably much more important.
Once the Chinese stopped caring about whether the cat was communist or capitalist, and focused on whether it made money, their per capita income was off to the races.
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.
All true. But all the same is true if HBD -isn’t- true. It doesn’t matter if some of the group differences are genetic in origin, given that others are not, we can still resolve those.
that intelligence has enormous spillovers totally ignored in all current analyses
Assume HBD isn’t true, and measured intelligence differences are purely the product of cultural and nutritional and parasite load differences. Now assume HBD is true, and measured intelligence differences are the result of the above and also genetics. Do the implications here change?
This has huge implications for historical research, immigration policy, dysgenics discussions, 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.
And here I disagree: Regardless of whether or not HBD is true, we should still be taking steps to increase intelligence, for example by iodine supplement distribution, and reducing parasite loads. The steps we should take don’t depend on HBD being true or false.
It doesn’t matter if some of the group differences are genetic in origin, given that others are not, we can still resolve those.
Those can be resolved but they will not make nearly as large a difference as currently expected, where current ideologies hold that all of that 3-190x per capita difference is due to environmental conditions, history, and racism. HBD implies that, just as with individual differences and the systematic failure of welfare and education randomized experiments to ‘close the gap’, we can expect this futility to occur on a country-level basis at some level of development. Countries like China (maybe) and North Korea (definitely) will be predicted to escape their current poverty levels with appropriate interventions… and countries like Subsaharan Africa to possibly not escape. (Which countries can be made more concrete in a HBD context by taking Piffer’s country/group-level polygenic scores and looking at the residuals of a GDP/score regression for the countries which most over and underperform; the former can be predicted to not grow substantially, and the latter can be predicted to grow substantially.)
Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It’s Liebig’s barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small.
Do the implications here change?
Yes, because those environmental factors are causally downstream and cannot be improved without the locals. As development aid has discovered again and again, you cannot force improvements on a country. Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
The steps we should take don’t depend on HBD being true or false.
Yes, they do! These causal models are fundamentally different. If genetics is a major limiting factor, iodine and all other environmental factors are not going to help past a certain level of development. (You can feed some Americans or New Zealanders iodine supplements, but it won’t give them +10 IQ points even though they are probably somewhat deficient). If genetics is the major limiting factor, then at a certain point, you are basically polishing a turd and this can either be accepted or more radical interventions must be considered.
“Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It’s Liebig’s barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small.”
I’m not sure that this can be assumed true (and forgive me if the point is addressed elsewhere. I have mostly only read this comment). If someone is phenylketoneuric, improved environment will eliminate what would otherwise be a profound difference between them and their cohort.
Harsh environments tend to accentuate differences, including genetic differences. There’s been some push to put lab animals through more rigorous trials to better observe subtle differences between them.
If genetic susceptibilities to environmental insult explains many differences between populations then it’s entirely possible for environments which address those susceptibilities to reduce the apparent portion of differences which are viewed as “genetic.”
We can’t begin to predict whether improved environment will increase or decrease the differences due to genetic variance until we address the specific mechanisms underlying that variance. (And, in a kind of Catch-22 once we understand the underlying mechanisms we’re very close to addressing the issue through some kind of direct intervention (like genetic editing of embryos.) )
This makes prediction even harder, since self-modifying systems are hell to reliably forecast till they reach some kind of equilibrium.
Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
To be fair, that’s not entirely Pakistanis’ fault. Is paranoia about Communist fluoridation plots more or less dysfunctional than paranoia about CIA vaccination plots? Does it make a difference that only the latter has a grain of truth to it?
Fluoridation of drinking water has never been shown to be safe or effective in randomized trials and you could never get approval from the FDA today to use it. The claimed benefits are pretty small in both health and monetary terms and would be wiped out by even a fraction of an IQ point loss; the expected benefit is quite small and so conspiracy theorists incorrectly killing fluoridation would not cause much regret.
Polio vaccines on the other hand have been shown to be safe & effective, and even if the CIA were using the polio program to kill dozens of Pakistanis each year (rather than 1 known inconclusive case), that still would be less than the number of polio vaccinators who have been assassinated and the hundreds of polio cases annually which will continue indefinitely and prevent the permanent eradication of polio. In this case, the regret from the conspiracy theories about polio vaccination is real.
Yes, because those environmental factors are causally downstream and cannot be improved without the locals. As development aid has discovered again and again, you cannot force improvements on a country. Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
They’re also causally upstream, given that intelligence is the problem. Meaning the problem is one of bootstrapping. This doesn’t actually change any implications.
Yes, they do! These causal models are fundamentally different. If genetics is a major limiting factor, iodine and all other environmental factors are not going to help past a certain level of development.
The environmental factors will help -to- that level of development, however, and given that that level of development has not been achieved, they’re still the corrective measures necessary.
If genetics isn’t a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will improve things. If genetics is a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will still improve things. Given that there’s a factor we have no control over, and given factors that we might be able to control although it’s a very difficult problem, the factor that we have no control over doesn’t matter with respect to the solutions.
They’re also causally upstream, given that intelligence is the problem. Meaning the problem is one of bootstrapping. This doesn’t actually change any implications.
Yes, it does, if you cannot bootstrap in the first place because you cannot implement the measures because of a population with low intelligence, high discounting, high crime and corruption rates etc.
If genetics is a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will still improve things.
You’re equivocating and it is not the case that regardless of genetics, all environmental interventions are equally profitable a priori. If genetics is a limiting factor on intelligence and other traits, then an environmental intervention—if you can manage it in the first place—will be restricted to its proximate effects and will not have the huge spillovers which led to the Great Divergence. If a population is at its genetic limit already and you successfully implement, say, iodization, the benefits will be limited to the immediate effects of reducing goiters and low energy, but you will not get the spillovers to homicide, the spillovers to greater education, the spillovers to higher income, the spillovers to lower discount rates and higher capital formation, etc. The cost-benefits for iodization are based on these benefits, not merely eliminating goiters! Likewise, if you cure malaria and a population is at the limit, you’ll reduce how many people die of malaria and that’ll be it. Maybe that much lower impact will still be worth it, but given how close to the edge a lot of interventions already are… It is not the case that all environmental interventions are always profitable and should always be done.
Yes, it does, if you cannot bootstrap in the first place because you cannot implement the measures because of a population with low intelligence, high discounting, high crime and corruption rates etc.
The intelligence levels are roughly analogous to 1930′s America. The issue isn’t intelligence.
You’re equivocating
No, I’m assuming everything you say is true, and telling you your conclusions are still wrong.
it is not the case that regardless of genetics, all environmental interventions are equally profitable a priori. If genetics is a limiting factor on intelligence and other traits, then an environmental intervention—if you can manage it in the first place—will be restricted to its proximate effects and will not have the huge spillovers which led to the Great Divergence. If a population is at its genetic limit already and you successfully implement, say, iodization, the benefits will be limited to the immediate effects of reducing goiters and low energy, but you will not get the spillovers to homicide, the spillovers to greater education, the spillovers to higher income, the spillovers to lower discount rates and higher capital formation, etc. The cost-benefits for iodization are based on these benefits, not merely eliminating goiters! Likewise, if you cure malaria and a population is at the limit, you’ll reduce how many people die of malaria and that’ll be it. Maybe that much lower impact will still be worth it, but given how close to the edge a lot of interventions already are… It is not the case that all environmental interventions are always profitable and should always be done.
Except that we know that intelligence benefits -can- still be achieved, because we are still seeing improvements. The Flynn effect is still being observed in lower-than-average IQ populations in the US, although it appears to have tapered off if not ended for populations already at or above average.
The intelligence levels are roughly analogous to 1930′s America. The issue isn’t intelligence...Except that we know that intelligence benefits -can- still be achieved, because we are still seeing improvements. The Flynn effect is still being observed in lower-than-average IQ populations in the SU
Only if you believe in the Flynn effect and you are willing to extrapolate backwards and infer that Western populations were border-line retarded then and were of comparable levels to other populations now.
No, I’m assuming everything you say is true, and telling you your conclusions are still wrong.
This does not address the point I made about proximate versus indirect effects of interventions.
Only if you believe in the Flynn effect and you are willing to extrapolate backwards and infer that Western populations were border-line retarded then and were of comparable levels to other populations now.
The Flynn Effect is borne out by data. Are you saying you -don’t- believe in it, and if not, on what grounds?
(Note that an average IQ of 80 doesn’t imply borderline-retarded people, provided, as suggested by the correlation between improving literacy and improving IQ, that IQ is partially some form of trainable skill.)
Assume HBD isn’t true, and measured intelligence differences are purely the product of cultural and nutritional and parasite load differences. Now assume HBD is true, and measured intelligence differences are the result of the above and also genetics. Do the implications here change?
It matters a lot wrt how much money to spend on fighting parasites.
Because historically we did not have the technology to kill everyone, or to kill most people, or to stop asteroids. Now we do have some of this tech, and are getting close to developing AGI. I’m not saying AGI is going to arrive soon, but we are close enough to start reasoning about friendliness.
Besides, efforts towards malaria eradication, clean water etc are already fairly well funded. Aid to Africa has totalled over 2 trillion, IIRC. FAI research has a minute fraction of that so there are more low-hanging fruit.
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.
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.
That is completely true, and I forgot about it. There are other parasites in Africa, but probably none as important as the mosquito-carried group. Thanks for correcting me.
I still think there are other arguments to be made to the same end. A lot of historical contigency was needed to make this particular world. Even the biggest plausible inter-group variation claimed by HBD isn’t big enough to overcome that and overdetermine outcomes.
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.
‘Aside from that, Ms Lincoln, how was the play?’
Don’t agree at all. Differences in political culture are probably much more important.
Once the Chinese stopped caring about whether the cat was communist or capitalist, and focused on whether it made money, their per capita income was off to the races.
Interesting graph of the divergence of their per capita GDP from India right around 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China
All true. But all the same is true if HBD -isn’t- true. It doesn’t matter if some of the group differences are genetic in origin, given that others are not, we can still resolve those.
Assume HBD isn’t true, and measured intelligence differences are purely the product of cultural and nutritional and parasite load differences. Now assume HBD is true, and measured intelligence differences are the result of the above and also genetics. Do the implications here change?
And here I disagree: Regardless of whether or not HBD is true, we should still be taking steps to increase intelligence, for example by iodine supplement distribution, and reducing parasite loads. The steps we should take don’t depend on HBD being true or false.
Those can be resolved but they will not make nearly as large a difference as currently expected, where current ideologies hold that all of that 3-190x per capita difference is due to environmental conditions, history, and racism. HBD implies that, just as with individual differences and the systematic failure of welfare and education randomized experiments to ‘close the gap’, we can expect this futility to occur on a country-level basis at some level of development. Countries like China (maybe) and North Korea (definitely) will be predicted to escape their current poverty levels with appropriate interventions… and countries like Subsaharan Africa to possibly not escape. (Which countries can be made more concrete in a HBD context by taking Piffer’s country/group-level polygenic scores and looking at the residuals of a GDP/score regression for the countries which most over and underperform; the former can be predicted to not grow substantially, and the latter can be predicted to grow substantially.)
Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It’s Liebig’s barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small.
Yes, because those environmental factors are causally downstream and cannot be improved without the locals. As development aid has discovered again and again, you cannot force improvements on a country. Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.
Yes, they do! These causal models are fundamentally different. If genetics is a major limiting factor, iodine and all other environmental factors are not going to help past a certain level of development. (You can feed some Americans or New Zealanders iodine supplements, but it won’t give them +10 IQ points even though they are probably somewhat deficient). If genetics is the major limiting factor, then at a certain point, you are basically polishing a turd and this can either be accepted or more radical interventions must be considered.
...that its population is significantly inbred to the degree of having much higher child mortality due to congenial defects.
I’m not sure that this can be assumed true (and forgive me if the point is addressed elsewhere. I have mostly only read this comment). If someone is phenylketoneuric, improved environment will eliminate what would otherwise be a profound difference between them and their cohort.
Harsh environments tend to accentuate differences, including genetic differences. There’s been some push to put lab animals through more rigorous trials to better observe subtle differences between them.
If genetic susceptibilities to environmental insult explains many differences between populations then it’s entirely possible for environments which address those susceptibilities to reduce the apparent portion of differences which are viewed as “genetic.”
We can’t begin to predict whether improved environment will increase or decrease the differences due to genetic variance until we address the specific mechanisms underlying that variance. (And, in a kind of Catch-22 once we understand the underlying mechanisms we’re very close to addressing the issue through some kind of direct intervention (like genetic editing of embryos.) )
This makes prediction even harder, since self-modifying systems are hell to reliably forecast till they reach some kind of equilibrium.
To be fair, that’s not entirely Pakistanis’ fault. Is paranoia about Communist fluoridation plots more or less dysfunctional than paranoia about CIA vaccination plots? Does it make a difference that only the latter has a grain of truth to it?
Less.
Fluoridation of drinking water has never been shown to be safe or effective in randomized trials and you could never get approval from the FDA today to use it. The claimed benefits are pretty small in both health and monetary terms and would be wiped out by even a fraction of an IQ point loss; the expected benefit is quite small and so conspiracy theorists incorrectly killing fluoridation would not cause much regret.
Polio vaccines on the other hand have been shown to be safe & effective, and even if the CIA were using the polio program to kill dozens of Pakistanis each year (rather than 1 known inconclusive case), that still would be less than the number of polio vaccinators who have been assassinated and the hundreds of polio cases annually which will continue indefinitely and prevent the permanent eradication of polio. In this case, the regret from the conspiracy theories about polio vaccination is real.
Less, because in the former case your kids could have a few more cavities and in the latter case your kids could grow up dumb and/or crippled.
They’re also causally upstream, given that intelligence is the problem. Meaning the problem is one of bootstrapping. This doesn’t actually change any implications.
The environmental factors will help -to- that level of development, however, and given that that level of development has not been achieved, they’re still the corrective measures necessary.
If genetics isn’t a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will improve things. If genetics is a limiting factor, correcting the environmental factors will still improve things. Given that there’s a factor we have no control over, and given factors that we might be able to control although it’s a very difficult problem, the factor that we have no control over doesn’t matter with respect to the solutions.
Yes, it does, if you cannot bootstrap in the first place because you cannot implement the measures because of a population with low intelligence, high discounting, high crime and corruption rates etc.
You’re equivocating and it is not the case that regardless of genetics, all environmental interventions are equally profitable a priori. If genetics is a limiting factor on intelligence and other traits, then an environmental intervention—if you can manage it in the first place—will be restricted to its proximate effects and will not have the huge spillovers which led to the Great Divergence. If a population is at its genetic limit already and you successfully implement, say, iodization, the benefits will be limited to the immediate effects of reducing goiters and low energy, but you will not get the spillovers to homicide, the spillovers to greater education, the spillovers to higher income, the spillovers to lower discount rates and higher capital formation, etc. The cost-benefits for iodization are based on these benefits, not merely eliminating goiters! Likewise, if you cure malaria and a population is at the limit, you’ll reduce how many people die of malaria and that’ll be it. Maybe that much lower impact will still be worth it, but given how close to the edge a lot of interventions already are… It is not the case that all environmental interventions are always profitable and should always be done.
The intelligence levels are roughly analogous to 1930′s America. The issue isn’t intelligence.
No, I’m assuming everything you say is true, and telling you your conclusions are still wrong.
Except that we know that intelligence benefits -can- still be achieved, because we are still seeing improvements. The Flynn effect is still being observed in lower-than-average IQ populations in the US, although it appears to have tapered off if not ended for populations already at or above average.
Only if you believe in the Flynn effect and you are willing to extrapolate backwards and infer that Western populations were border-line retarded then and were of comparable levels to other populations now.
This does not address the point I made about proximate versus indirect effects of interventions.
The Flynn Effect is borne out by data. Are you saying you -don’t- believe in it, and if not, on what grounds?
(Note that an average IQ of 80 doesn’t imply borderline-retarded people, provided, as suggested by the correlation between improving literacy and improving IQ, that IQ is partially some form of trainable skill.)
It matters a lot wrt how much money to spend on fighting parasites.
If the world were in danger of spending more than the optimal amount of money doing so, sure. In the world we live in, not so much.
I disagree. The developed world should prioritise fighting existential risks over fighting parasites.
That strategy, historically, would have been the entirely incorrect move. What makes you think it is, today, the correct move?
Because historically we did not have the technology to kill everyone, or to kill most people, or to stop asteroids. Now we do have some of this tech, and are getting close to developing AGI. I’m not saying AGI is going to arrive soon, but we are close enough to start reasoning about friendliness.
Besides, efforts towards malaria eradication, clean water etc are already fairly well funded. Aid to Africa has totalled over 2 trillion, IIRC. FAI research has a minute fraction of that so there are more low-hanging fruit.
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.
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.
That is completely true, and I forgot about it. There are other parasites in Africa, but probably none as important as the mosquito-carried group. Thanks for correcting me.
I still think there are other arguments to be made to the same end. A lot of historical contigency was needed to make this particular world. Even the biggest plausible inter-group variation claimed by HBD isn’t big enough to overcome that and overdetermine outcomes.
Yes, and a lot of that contingency led to different populations being selected for different things.