[tptacek]

No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.

Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.

[garbagetime]

The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:

> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.

No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).

[tptacek]

I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.

[garbagetime]

It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than jasonhansel has.

jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence

You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.

I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.

[tptacek]

This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.

[garbagetime]

I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.