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Ivan au's avatar

Don't think I fit any of these profiles too well. I'm from a low status ethnicity (Latino) and a normie lib who generally trusts experts, but have always been interested in intelligence (not as obsessively as the "autist") and found my way to HBD that way. I don't make excuses or downplay the importance of intelligence like Taleb and Gladwell, even when the data doesn't turn out in my ethnicity's favor. HBD is an interesting area of study for its own sake and has helped me grow and develop my beliefs in other areas where applying info about racial disparities is particularly illuminating. It is isolating though. Wonder how many other Latinos can say they've done the math to figure out exactly what percent of us would need to be sterilized to bring our average IQ up to the Northwestern European mean lol

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Shade of Achilles's avatar

You forgot to mention the 'world traveller racist' who, having seen a little of the world and noticed a few things, arrives at the opposite conclusion to the received wisdom. It's a case of 'travel around a bit and notice how different everybody is' rather than 'travel around a bit and notice how similar everybody is'.

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

That type does exist.

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Graham Seibert's avatar

Put me in yet another category. I have long written that I want my epitaph to read "Did not take shit well."

My nine decades of life have taken me through lots of nonsense. The Free Speech Movement, Fair Play for Cuba, and of course the civil rights movement. Time spent in the Army, Haiti, on Indian reservations, in the Far East, Latin America and Europe.

I read a lot. You could not then convince me that Sir Arthur Keith, Galton, Darwin, HL Menckin, the Huxleys and even Fredrick Douglass, WEB DuBois and Booker T Washington were wrong in what they wrote. Much less that they wrote in bad faith - intentionally suppressing the truth.

When they were backed up by scholars Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray and others I was ready to have the evidence of my eyes confirmed.

Somewhere in your list you have to include common sense.

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Sectionalism Archive's avatar

Honestly, I considered studies on expert opinion within psychometrics to be one of the first things to swing me strongly in favor of HBD. I didn't view myself as smarter than the experts (I was, like, 14 after all) but I was somewhat skeptical of the "experts on the experts" (i.e. fact-checkers/journos) and wanted to see what actual expert opinion was. As I did more research I realized that expert opinion itself is fairly unreliable and in a lot of fields not that much better than the opinions of educated laypeople. Finally, as I went through college I realized that a lot of "experts" didn't understand the things I suddenly understood, and I began to sort of pity them. I still respect expert opinion on things I don't care enough to throw my hat in the ring over.

In a way I sympathize with the "Nazi". Yeah, he became HBD because of hatred, but a lot of the times this hatred comes from a life-long qualitative observation of HBD in the world. For example, I knew a guy on iFunny who privately talked to me about how terrible life was for him as one of the few White students in an inner city school. How this convinced him to HBD. It's not exactly a rigorous, rational reason to become HBD, but cases like these show how it's not usually just "one" case. It's a lifetime of cases. This is why White people who live around Blacks are more implicitly racist.

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Daniel Ross's avatar

Mostly crap list.

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Blondie's avatar

This list seems to be focusing on a narrow portion, and is missing the large “pattern noticer” profile.

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Kristoffer O’Shaugnessy's avatar

Associating with people of different races in school or work convinced me that races and peoples were innately different in many respects long before reading articles or books by ‘race scientists. I do think there are too many Jewish autists in HBD but some do valuable work in spite of their flaws and generally obnoxious behavior online.

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Commandant Rhodes's avatar

I didn’t have bad experiences with Bantus themselves, I did however have a constant experience of being the wrong end of affirmative action throughout my adolescence. Saying that this makes me a loser feels off - actual losers are unaffected by AA as they were never in the running in the first place. Anti-AA sentiment is very much an upwardly mobile middle class thing

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AGI_singularity's avatar

i'm an indian and i'm quite obsessed with IQ differences within races what would you say about me?

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Reinformer's avatar

I think I'm an iconoclast and nazi (not an actual ns or Hitler-lover, more like someone who loves to piss off feminists, progresives, reds, enviromentalists, tradcucks, theists, expert consense-tards, climate alarmists and adjacents, yes I'm very hateful and annoying)

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Sectionalism Archive's avatar

Not quite sure if races with a recent history of eminence and importance can be called ethno-narcissistic in the same way races with a recent history of failure and inadequacy can. White people do sometimes become "Nazis" as a cope for their own inadequacies, but seldom are these racial inadequacies. Asians get insecure, for example, about women not liking Asians. Blacks get insecure about their race being poor and criminal-infested and not inventing anything. White people only get insecure about Whites being "libtards" after they get redpilled.

With concepts like ethnic narcissism or "victim complexes", I am reminded of a question I was once asked. Is someone who is mourning the loss of a loved one "meaningfully depressed"? I mean, yeah, they're depressed, but they have a good reason to be depressed. It is healthy that they are depressed. When we use the term "depression" we tend to think of it as a disorder, something unnatural, someone who is chronically sad but has no good reason to be.

The conclusion to HBD is that White people are being treated most unfairly, and that White people are justified in viewing history with their race in the center, so I would consider White ethnic chauvinism different from ethnic narcissism in the effects regard too.

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PatrickB's avatar

What is “hereditarian leftism/centrism”?

I used to be woke, before it was cool, because it seemed to me that, from the interpersonal interactions I observed in school and social settings, that blacks usually weren’t taken seriously intellectually or were otherwise patronized. Asians weren’t taken seriously socially. Or maybe that racially subaltern people had to be inarguably better than whites, whenever subjective judgment was involved.

All this seemed very unfair and personally disadvantageous. I was also annoyed that most people (except wokes) bent over backwards to deny (and gaslight over) what seemed obvious to me. Like, the apparent hypocrisy was galling. You know how people say, southerners don’t want to work with blacks, but northerners don’t want to live with them.

But idk I never bought the more exotic woke theories of bias, like integenerational trauma or structural racism. Like, to me, people just treat others differently on account of race, simple as. And Anti-(Structural racism) seemed to boil down to socialism, but people can be just as racist in non-market economies. Something was off. And BLM was just embarrassing in terms of noise vs policy results.

I first got curious about HBD when my friend told me to read Enigma of Clarence Thomas, which is critical of Thomas, but represents Afro-pessimism fairly. Basically, as portrayed, the view is that racism is a human universal, a “social fact.” Everyone is racist. Racism is from a kind of group-based prestige or reputation. Like, smart people go to state school and dumb kids occasionally go to Harvard but Harvard is more prestigious than state school because the group is on average smarter and better. Racism is like the “oooh” from being affiliated with Harvard, but from the group reputation of whites. So, you can’t fix racism without addressing what drives the black-white prestige gap. Like, people are anti-black because, on average, blacks are worse, and we’re all prestige whores, at least a little. Sure, individuals don’t represent their race, but visible gross signals hit you over the head and you can trust that others also get them in a way that you can’t for individualized cues. (Of course, HBD isn’t the only reason for a white-black prestige gap, even if it’s a necessary ingredient.)

Maybe I should have intuited this earlier. But idk I guess I thought that contemporary racism was more of an “us vs them” kind of thing, which it often is in other and historical circumstances. The whole thing was kind of a blackpill for me.

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