Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com