I think the critique your leveling seems a bit unfair.
Let's say you "prove" that ethnic group C is X percent better at Y than ethnic group D.
From what I've seen most HBD proponents (aside from explicit racists) don't claim that certain ethnic groups are X% better at things than other ethnic groups. They claim that more of a group are better at a thing than other groups.
Did you raise a control group of members of groups C and D in a secret underground lab? No, you did not, so your result will always be imprecise.
If this is the standard your going to hold HBD too, then we might as well dismiss sociology as a field. After all it cuts both ways. If you want to say that some group is under performing due to socialization or racism or something, I can just say:
Did you raise a control group of members of groups C and D in a secret underground lab?
But obviously we don't. Because you don't need to go that extent. All science is imprecise. What matters is how imprecise.
What do you intend to do with your findings?
Well first, if HBD is false, but we don't do the work to the work to show it then when we engage with people who do believe in HBD, we won't be able to convince them it is false.
If HBD is true, I'm not sure. I guess it would depend on how "its true". But it seems clear to me that in order to help people its easier to do so if we understand the causes.
Like take weight gain. Most of our efforts around obesity atm are focused on social interventions. Sugar taxes. School lunches. Things like that. But suppose there is a genetic component. Like, maybe genetically some people are predisposed to produce more of a certain chemical that makes it hard for them to tolerate being hungry. Maybe a simpler fix would be to give them some chemical that binds to that blocks receptor or something.
But if we don't know that, because we don't do the work to investigate biological differences in human populations, we could miss an easy intervention that could help prevent obesity in some people. Like maybe for most humans this gene isn't important, so we assume thats true of all humans and don't use the chemical intervention, when instead it would be really effective for some groups. Wouldn't that suck?
Honestly your last paragraph makes me think of this from LW:
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
If we live in a world where HBD is true, then we already dealing with the ramifications of that everyday. People won't become genetically simpler, or genetics won't stop being important if we just ignore it. If anything understanding it
I can certainly think of an almost endless number of ways that this science could be problematic.
I can't. What comes to mind? Most things I would see as problems of people rather than problems as science.
HBD doesn't justify racism, unless you believe that our genetic predispositions some how grant us more or less moral value. IMO the problem then isn't the science that justifies a belief in such genetic disparities, but the belief that those differences imply moral value.