HBD

HBD is the study of how different peoples differ due to genetic reasons. It stand for „human biodiversity“, a term coined by Steve Sailer more than twenty years ago. The HBD sphere is a part of the internet where these kind of topics are discussed in blogs, forums or videos.

It is sad to say it, but the golden age of HBD seems to be over. Partly this is due to the overall decline of the blogosphere and partly it may be the shifting political climate that both makes it risky to discuss politically incorrect topics and also makes it seem futile to try to break into mainstream discourse.

Partly, however, HBD might be the victim of its own success. The idea that different populations differ in IQ and that this explains the varying degree of economic success seems to me to have percolated through the thinking fraction of the population. This is simultaneously the most important and the best proven of all HBD conjectures. At some point it just didn’t make sense to keep piling on with more and more IQ data analyses.

If and when really powerful polygenic scores for other attributes become available other interesting topics might receive attention, but right now most HBD topics beyond IQ are both much more speculative and less relevant, though certainly still interesting.

Below I give a link list of some of the most interesting HBD writers that I could remember offhand.

La Griffe Du Lion wrote maybe the prototypical HBD blog. Reading his analyses had a big impact on me. Not only because of the controversial content, but also it was the first time that I realized that with simple mathematical tools and freely available data it was possible to investigate all kinds of questions successfully.

Greg Cochran’s blog is lazy, but occasionally brilliant. He was much more correct about Covid from early on than most others.

Anatoly Karlin’s effort posts are great. What he published on IQ was so close to my own conclusions and observations that it spurred me on to start this blog.

Emil Kirkegaard does the actual science and his output is pretty crazy. Somehow he doesn’t get tired of scraping together some data to do a third replication of some study.

Steve Sailer’s main occupation seems to be to make fun of the NYT. But very occasionally he also writes some brilliant HBD articles. But just like the overall HBD sphere he probably has the impression that he has already said it all.

Something would be amiss if I would not also mention JayMan, HBDChick and Peter Frost. I never much read JayMan and HBDChick and their blogs are dead. These three are much less quantitative, but nevertheless introduced some key concepts or interesting ideas.

The new guy on the blog and recently the only source of regular and very interesting HBD content has been Crimkadid. He presents his ideas on twitter, which is pretty limiting to say the least. And he is mostly speculating with very little hard data involved. But so much fun …