The Problem of HBD
Human Biodiversity (HBD) is one of the most radioactive concepts in contemporary discourse. At its neutral core, HBD simply observes that human populations, like all populations, are subject to evolutionary pressures, and that these pressures can differ by environment, ecology, and culture. This is uncontroversial when it comes to traits like lactose tolerance, sickle-cell resistance, or skin pigmentation. It becomes explosive when extended to cognitive or behavioral traits.
The infohazard1 emerges here: knowledge that may be technically true, or at least plausible, but is easily misinterpreted or weaponized. A gene variant associated with aggression in one ecological niche becomes a stereotype about entire populations. A hypothesis about selection for verbal reasoning in one historical community becomes fodder for racial hierarchies. What could be scientific inquiry quickly devolves into ideology.
Intelligence as a Game
The antidote is to apply the framework we have already developed: intelligence is the effectiveness at achieving goals within the constraints of a game. Games have rules, goals, strategies, and payoffs. Environments define which games are played. Evolution acts on strategies within those games.
This reframing immediately dissolves the category error at the heart of toxic HBD misuse. Instead of treating intelligence as a universal scalar—where populations are ranked from superior to inferior—we ask: what game was being played, and how did selection pressures shape strategies within it?
Reframing Examples
Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis: not “this group is smarter,” but “this population was historically forced into economic and legal games where certain cognitive strategies were advantageous.”
MAOA “warrior gene”: not “this group is violent,” but “in resource-scarce, clan-based environments, rapid aggression response was an adaptive game strategy.”
Clannishness vs. individualism: not “some peoples are inherently tribal,” but “high kinship intensity worked in small-scale societies, while low kinship intensity worked better in large-scale market states.”
In each case, what looks like an essentialist hierarchy collapses into a context-bound adaptation to a specific game.
Guardrails Against Misuse
Context-dependence: Winning in one game does not imply superiority in all games.
Agency principle: Even if averages shift under selection, individuals can and do play games outside ancestral niches.
No universal scalar: There is no one intelligence number that sums across all contexts. IQ is just one standardized game.
Infohazard Containment
By shifting the frame from hierarchy to strategy-context matching, we defuse the infohazard. HBD then becomes a descriptive account of how human populations adapt to different environments, not a prescriptive ranking of human worth. The poison drains away once you abandon the illusion of a single ladder of intelligence.
Closing
The right question is not: who is more intelligent? The right question is: what game is being played, and which strategies win in that game? Once you adopt that lens, HBD loses its sting. Populations differ because environments differ, games differ, and strategies differ. The infohazard is not in the genetics—it’s in the misframing. By treating intelligence as a game, we turn a dangerous discourse into a manageable one.
Nick Bostrom coined “infohazard” in 2011 to capture how true information can still be dangerous simply by being known. It includes categories like adversarial hazards, which empower bad actors, and ideas that harm unintentionally. What we're doing here is contextual containment—not suppression. By reframing HBD claims through the "intelligence as games" model, we neutralize not the facts, but the interpretive hazard.