The midwittery of HBD bloggers
I was reading Karlin’s Malthusian Industrialism, and it perfectly embodies the problem with many bloggers in the HBD sphere (especially those with an unhealthy obsession with numbers).
For exemple this idiot has a whole section where he explains that during their demographic transition, the French selected those who did not reproduce, and that now France is, as a consequence, populated by breeders which explains why they have (or had nowadays lol) a higher TFR than Germany.
Too bad his article was published in 2018, just as the French TFR was starting to collapse and is now set to reach 1.5 children per woman (-7% in one year, and that's counting all the mudskins), so much for breeder selection kek.
To make my point clearly : 3/4 of the bloggers/ex-bloggers in the HBD community should be put up against a wall and executed for wasting our time with hypotheses that are elegant but totally crap in reality because they are based on three shitty graphs with dubious correlations. Apart from Spandrell, who has the good sense to have reflections that are less focused on numbers (and therefore more sustainable), and perhaps Arctotherium, the rest is midwit shit.
1 comments
I don't agree on the particular example, the breeder selection theory itself is theoretically sensible (>0% heritability of fertility post industrialization -> selection for fertility -> higher genetic fertility) and France having a fertility that is not much higher than the average European country at the moment aren't contradictory observations, but I do agree that there is a quantcel problem in the HBD community. I have many disagreements with Karlin but he's smarter than people give him credit for.
In my experience many obsessively go over facts or ideas that people have been exposed to hundreds of times, I think this is bad but I'm not sure if it's because HBDers are unoriginal or if it is because the space doesn't have a lot of space for idiosyncratic or original people to grow (or maybe the former causes the latter). I think earlier Bronski was trying to do something like this with the mutational load theory (which is all bunk, but at least I appreciate the attempt) and I also know of Shi Huang who is actively contesting OOA and the principles of population genetics; I've actually met him in person and his English was so-so but he seemed smart and interesting. Because of this and some other things that I have no need to reveal I've gotten disinterested in the topic and started to actively dislike the HBD communitay.