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.
No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.
Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.
The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:
> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.
and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.
No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).
I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.
It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than
jasonhansel has.
jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence
You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.
I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.
This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.
I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.
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.
Race is a social construct in the context of American racial history and politics, where categories were invented long before the concept of genomic ancestry and "Hispanic" counts as a race. In the rest of the world and within the context of this discussion and other discussions of this sort "race" is a noisy proxy for continental-level ancestry, and it so happens that even American "races" correspond decently well to proportions of ancestry traceable to continental-level populations, with their distinct histories and adaptations. Separating unlabeled genomes into N clusters, we predictably arrive at close matches to traditional racial classifications.
The fact that some small (half a million, a few tens of thousands...) populations constitute distinct clusters that pop out at small Ns is a nice gotcha, but entirely beside the point – which is the a priori plausibility of noteworthy and systemic heritable differences between people of major races, irrespective of their belonging to any social constructs.
Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.
If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.
Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.
I agree that a more fine-grained classification is more useful. However, the fact that all the greatest long-distance endurance runners are of Kalenjin descent (Nilotic race) tells us next to nothing about any other trait. All the best sprinters are also Africans – but predominantly of Bantu ancestry, pretty diverse in this case. As are most NBA stars, and the great proportion of other athletes defined by a rather obvious subset of physical excellences linked to fast-twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, somehow no Bantu group excels in swimming.
So using this method of yours, we derive that a great deal of a people belonging to a major race can have a similar ability profile in sports. Not too good for your argument.
If you have to refer to non-central examples, this only shows that your actual case is weak.
It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.
But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.
