It's more a failure to science in this case since I approach this statement from study design and theory-craft. A lot of people missed the rider I added because it's very important. Race Realism as an explanation for society. That race affects intelligence, that is not in dispute. I grant that it does. What would be in dispute is to what degree it does, to what degree this should determine public policy, and to what degree "race realism" as a term gets to consider itself just that race affects intelligence over more than that. I do not grant that last condition based on my prior interactions with race realists at their height around 2016-2018. It's funny someone else brought up climate science, because race realists, at least the ones I've had exposure too, very often do the same thing. Posit "facts," and then use the guise of it to leave the laboratory and get on the political podium without exactly declaring that they're doing so. That calls into question a litany of other things, eventually I just had to conclude the term was corrupt as a result and should be opposed for the same reason a lot of people started opposing Feminism circa 2014 due to their linguistic BS and inseparable ties to Marxism. For context, I've read The Bell Curve before, they properly understood their role in the discussion, and I'm not averse to science "proving" race is real. What I am averse to is that a car full of clown antics seems to always proceed to follow. When you consistently find so many buried leads in people trying to discuss this, eventually you have to start concluding that the issue is not in fact the issue, and there isn't a valid consensus being offered for me to agree to. When that happens, it's a stillborn theory.
I'd highlight 3 things.
1. Operationally defining race is nowhere near as easy as most people claim. I know science does have standards, and studies that do fairly do this exist. The issue's in step two. When it comes time to do anything with those studies and map them to historical data these definitions seem to fly out of the window in favor of trying political shorthand. Scots, Irish, and Scots-Irish ethnicities don't really match with "white" development, Caucasians in the Canary Islands were still found in the Stone Age, and on the other side of the coin there do appear to be high-performing black populations that warrant further scrutiny. There's also other historical questions such as the ancient Britons being niggers relative to the ancient Romans, the split in achievement between East and West Germany over the Cold War, and the study of "middleman minorities" in Thomas Sowell's work, his term, just raises more and more questions about just what exactly is going on that strict adherence to race doesn't seem to answer well at all. This leads to...
2. A lot of race realism, as it gets applied mind you, commits to a false dichotomy between nature or nurture. The science and studies I'm aware of, not all of them contained in the bubble of capture plus some that are far enough removed from it to where it's not a concern that automatically disqualifies them, conclude that we have a dearth of information on the topic. We do not know to what degree nature and nurture feed into someone's ultimate achievement at the end of the day, and there's a distinct possibility we might have a percentage that ends above 100% for what feeds in, representing places where explicitly nature and nurture need to be present to get that outcome. If anything, this discussion made me consider that there might be a third thing in all this that should be identified separately from nature and nurture representing the culture any given person is raised under. Given this is psychology at the end of the day as we'd need to see the realization of the genetics to get a sample with, it lines up with the proper general standards of psychology to be very uncertain, namely that it's a soft science, humans make for terrible research subjects, and margins of error are going to be high as a necessity. Running controlled for experiments is also going to be quite impossible without a lot of ethics questions that get raised (As in, "So at what point are we torturing people?" grade ethics questions, not the namby-pamby ones.) further degrades the overall quality of experimentation. So the certainty with which a lot of race realists parade around the science is a major red flag that crucial steps were not done in getting to their end conclusions. As before, the tendency to have buried leads has forced me to not consider race realism just a scientific endeavor concerned with genetics over something cross disciplinary that fails to properly follow the rules of all the disciplines at best or a political land-grab in waiting at worst. There's always a shoe waiting to drop it seems, no one points this out so we get better at trivia night, and that means I need to keep my guard up as a rule.
3. While I am sympathetic to the notion that science is captured, I'm a freakin' MRA and never stopped calling myself one, that doesn't justify trying to make another captured castle. Given the tendency for race realism to stray from strict genetic science, I do think it discounts nurture/culture by falling into the same frame trap that the current capture forces and engages in more team-sports mentality than is justified. Feminist capture of academia sucks, but trying to say an equally comical hate of woman needs supporting is also pretty stupid, which makes progressive Islam all the more a cosmic jest that the diametrically opposed idiots have decided to try fusing. Geographical determinism as a theory is also something intimately hostile to the current crop of scientists as it disproves the neo-lib "magic soil" argument they want to use to import migrants like crazy. Integration is possible, but thanks to geographical factors, some random Paki is not going to be coming in with remotely near the understandings of modern society and trying to cram people in also contributes to negative geographic factors. I've also found it comports more to group changes over time and can apply a finer toothed comb than genetics could. I bring up the Scots-Irish for good reason, if you roll back to the 1800's, they were considered nigger-grade, if not lower, and had reputations on par with the young scholars of today. Yet if you say that nowadays, you'd have to be a so-anti-racist-I'm-racist shitlib hating on whitey just to hate on whitey, not anyone trying to appeal to "science" like they did back then. The fact alternate hypotheses to the alternate hypothesis exist with valid explanatory power means a lot of people trotting out that it's successfully won are setting themselves up to fail. Furthermore, this is honestly why I don't care about a battery of citations. The issue isn't the height of the paper stack but that it wasn't filed correctly. Knowing what to count in this instance means needing to answer the observations from economics and history that indicate race is not destiny and addressing the limitations of inquiry from psychology first. I never saw anyone doing that.
The TL;DR of it is that I just see way to many parallels to the same paradigm of shitlibbery and the same worshipping of the science, just with a punk rock flair of being "controversial," in their camp as I do in wider scientific practice. The 2016-2018 era poisoned the idea quite thoroughly since, whatever the scientific merits, none of them wanted to really stay at the science over trying to go beyond it, for all the genetic qualifications, none of them seemed to have any good grounding in the broader operations of psychology or sociology, and when a scientist starts doing political advocacy, that just tells me we should start treating the science like we treat any other policy position. At this point, it's a morass worth denigration and even if I was a hardcore genetics-are-destiny racist, I wouldn't dare identify with the term just because it's a clown show whether it was merited or not. With that said...
They're right that genetics is a noteworthy factor at the very least.
They're right that the scientific community should be more open to talking about it.
They're right that the shitlib dynamic doesn't work and is stifling matters.
And they're right that someone should start trying to answer some of the questions they raise.
The issue is that they're just not the only ones calling this out and not the only ones bringing arguments to the table. Yet in my online escapades, I constantly saw them trying to foist themselves as the one-true-answer to it all despite the fact they weren't. So I started asking myself, "Whose race realism is it anyways?" I did not get a coherent answer back, and that's pretty much when I concluded that the theory's been debunked as there's not really a theory to debunk over a great many ready to get used in a Gish Gallop.
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