When will the race taboo disappear?

Somebody needs to write the Magnum Opus

There have been two events in which race, genes, and intelligence have became a pressing issue in academia and media. The first was the publication of Jensen’s 1969 article How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?, where he argued that differences between individuals and races in intelligence were largely due to hereditary mechanisms, based on classical twin models and how family similarity in intelligence scales with relatedness.

The second was Murray’s and Herrnstein’s publication of the Bell Curve in 1994, which was so controversial that people wrote people books about the debate: the Bell Curve Debate and The Bell Curve Wars.

These two situations overlap in various ways:

• Both works were very long. Jensen’s piece was 124 pages long, which is extremely long for an academic article, and the Bell Curve was 845 pages.

• Jensen had tenure and Murray was working at the AEI — both stable positions. Herrnstein had already been working for a while at Harvard, and died soon after publishing the book.

• All had success in their careers prior to this: Murray had written Losing Ground before this, Herrnstein was an established psychologist, and Jensen had already written close to a fifth of his 565 papers and books. All had attended Ivy league universities: Murray went to Harvard/MIT, Herrnstein to Harvard, and Jensen to Columbia.

• Jensen and Murray’s views on race, if public at all, were not common knowledge at this point. Only Herrnstein had published on the topic previously.

Articles and blogposts might be, in a general sense, more convenient to write and read than books. And a lot of people online, myself included, were convinced by them. So were a lot of academics, in fact, hereditarianism is now the majority opinion within the experts in intelligence research.

However, books written by people with clout have an advantage: the works go more viral, they’re discussed for more time, and critically, they are able to reach the mainstream media. Reich’s recent paper on evolution within humans might be interesting, but it was ignored by the press; so was another recent paper that found evidence for race differences in intelligence using admixture mapping. Not to say anything of the polygenic score and admixture studies that were released by the core HBD community.

Now, imagine if Gregory Clark and David Reich decided to write the tell-all book on race, genes, and behaviour, citing all the evidence I mentioned earlier. The cathedral would have to go after them — it’s inevitable. If nobody in the media tried to smear or pressure them, that would send a signal to the other hereditarian academics that, if they want to speak out, they could. Which is not acceptable.

Would the dream team’s race science book go over like the previous attempts? Fame, deserved glory, controversy, some converted readers, but no change in the taboo on race? I don’t think so.

The previous arguments made were abstract and indirect: MZ twins are much more similar in intelligence than DZ twins, IQ is more predictive than parental SES, IQ tests are not racially biased… Of course, it’s all true, the picture does fit together nicely. But, at the end of the day, it’s all in the abstract world: it will only make sense to you if you think about it, and rationality has its limits; to this day people will still deny that IQ tests measure intelligence within groups and classes despite what is now over one century of evidence screaming that they can.

Now, it’s different:

from here

It’s much more difficult to rationalize this away with sophistry in comparison to the arguments that were made in the 20th Century. Yes, I know the criticisms of these studies: spatial autocorrelation, causal variants, LD-decay, and predictive validity within siblings. But those criticisms are easier to deal with, and this evidence is, basically, what people were requesting for centuries. And now it’s here. There is no way the evidence for race differences in genetic predispositions to intelligence can get better.

I’m not delusional. I don’t think HBD can ever become a super popular, or maybe even mainstream position. It will morph into the category of perennial questions that nonetheless have right answers, like free will vs determinism. But it’s also irrational to think the taboo can remain forever: entropy applies to societies as well as objects.

My current prediction, in short, is that the release of the theoretical book as well as the passage of time will result in people being able to be open hereditarians without severe financial and career penalties.

When will this happen?

When somebody writes the book. Concretely, when they publish it, causing it to circulate in the press and in social media. More concretely, when the right person writes the book: I, for example, don’t have enough clout in real life or the internet to do it.

How could this be forecasted? Assuming that the book relies on the genetic research that was written in 2015-2024, one could estimate a publication date by examining the average lag from the writing of a book to the publication of the research that it cites.

Jensen’s article is not helpful here: it’s easier to cite recent material for an article than a book because the distance from hand to print is smaller.

The Bell Curve is more informative in this respect, as it is a proper book. So, I fed GPT its entire bibliography and requested the publication years. It didn’t tally them down perfectly, but the results it gave seem fairly believable:

median is 1986

The median work cited in the Bell Curve was published in 1986, 8 years before the publication date. So, a naive model would predict that the race science book would be written around 2030. Add 2-5 more years for cultural diffusion and you have a taboo cutting date by 2030-2035.

There is a problem here: you can’t just look at a body of literature that exists at the moment and predict a book will be written about it. This is biased by selection: imagine if only 10 academic books were written in the whole 20th Century about a given topic. Since there are so few books, it wouldn’t be possible to predict whether a book would be written about a body of literature based on this model: you would be betting, by default, that the book would not be written.

Beyond that, we do not live in the same world that Jensen, Murray, and Herrnstein lived in. There are fewer people alive who can write that book, due to decline in the rate at which people believe in racial hereditarianism and there being fewer right wingers in the academy, which going to be truer at the top of the hierarchy.

from here

The earliest date possible would be a few years after this one: that the book is released soon and that I am wrong about how long cultural and social diffusion takes place. The latest date is hard to predict, but I find it hard to believe that no high status individual will try to write the big book on race, intelligence, and genes by 2070. So, I’m settling with 2075. My median estimate is 2040.

I think a lot of people will be disappointed and discouraged by this piece. That’s fine.

If it has even a 2% chance of inspiring the right person, it was all worth it.