Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

You are correct assuming ,that in regular speech one uses racism as set of beliefs that people are divided into races.

However, in normal speech racism is defined as believing that human are separated into different races and that there is a hierarchy of superiority, usually with your own race being on top of it.

There is nothing wrong with helping usual target and/or victims of racial or other hate to offset the potential effects said hate. Unless you of course believe safe shelters for women are inherently sexist. In which case you are just old fashioned rasist slash chauvinist.

View on HN

Assuming that the present hierarchy of society is mainly due to inherent racial characteristics ... you can say "that's not technically racist", but only by twisting English out of shape.

By that definition the "neo-reactionaries" or HBD advocates under discussion are not racist. The understanding that many differences in group outcomes and metrics in varied dimensions and directions are rooted in DNA, well that says nothing about superiority or inferiority. It can be without value judgment and is empirically falsifiable.

Really, I think your definition is in practice useless. The reality of the word is that when identity politics are involved and people hear something they don't like, they scream "racist".

You can say they don't come up with a hierarchy only by ignoring that they're just fine with the present one and use their racism as the explanation for why it's right and natural.

The salient policy question is really whether or not literally hundreds of billions of dollars should be spent trying to change certain things that probably can barely be changed by spending money. It's not so vicious and mean a thing as you seem to imagine. It's about efficiently dealing with reality.

What are we spending "hundreds of billions of dollars" on that we could save under the dictates of HBD theory?

Google "disparate impact".

Here's just one ~$4 billion example of tax payer money spent under the assumption that differences in loan approval rates were racist and not related to other factors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/farm-loan-bias-claims-o...

So your assertion is that (a) hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on antidiscrimination policies or settlement, and (b) that under a HBD regime, we would save this money by simply assuming that disparate outcomes are a result of immutable differences in ability?

Too a large extent they are unfortunately. I think that will be gradually accepted as the costs of genome sequencing fall.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. Pages 517-554 in C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.

www.edge.org/response-detail/10376

Speaking of genome sequencing, if "immutable" and problematic group differences exist, genome sequencing is a crucial step toward making them mutable. (And if they do not exist, genome sequencing will help establish that.)

While many traits are rooted in genetics, the truth is that without enviromental effect genetics differences, probably can't be expressed.

As was evidence by the article on the nature of psychopath psychologist, he didn't commit an act of violence, despite his predisposition of it.

Many, many subtle social effects can contribute to worse performance of subjects.

Likewise I often see 'genetic' argument used to justify the status quo. I.e. the ones in power are in power because they have better genetic material and not just because they are good at exploiting current system or just plain lucky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com