Plus, life for an ex-con is pretty hard on the outside.

As long as you're happy pouring carcinogens into the air, sure. Also, compared to oil or coal there's not much energy in wood, so it doesn't scale very well.

In any event, if free will isn't a thing, there's no point in trying to make the world a better place, right, so we should just leave things as they are?

When you set up incentives such that a woman loses money by marrying a guy with a small or nonexistent income, you're going to see fewer marriages in the lowest income bracket. It's rational in the short term, but the long term effects are corrosive.

One thing I've noticed about ex-cons I've actually come in contact with is the people who are least afraid of going to prison are the people who've been there.

Things that are wrong can be obvious to individuals and groups of people. It's certainly not obvious to half the country, and that "endless research" is tainted. How long do you get to keep your job in academia if you point out the primary drivers of black misery in the US (out of wedlock births, drugs, and violence) are self inflicted?

When you say "your assumption seemed to be" aren't you really talking about your own assumptions about what I'm thinking (but didn't write)?

Because there is a direct correlation between observable characteristics like obesity and poverty to health outcomes for people of all races. If a fat, poor white woman in Appalachia has heart problems in her 40s and receives low quality care, is that a result of systemic racism?

And as others have pointed out, we don't know the entire scope of genetic effects, but we know they exist to some degree (which was the whole point of the article).

>I keep asking what views people are so intolerant of. Tend not to get real answers.

Because this is HN and people are less willing to let you derail the conversation with politics.

Which is funny in the specific context of Chinese people, since you essentially have to get an internal visa to move to the city from the countryside, and it's difficult to get.

Which has always bothered me, since there are other explanations (lifestyle habits, genetics, poverty) that would explain the difference, in whole or in part. It's a politically convenient assumption that goes contrary to Occam's Razor.