Postmodernism doesn’t have to be right to be popular, and right now political power is a matter of popularity. Even if “the smartest people” prefer being right to being powerful, a dubious proposition if you ask me, that just means their less intelligent but more ambitious cousins will be the ones wielding the power instead.
The modern feminist and anti-racist movements have started to learn that their pet pseudo-science sociology is just not credible enough to counter anthropology biology and psychology; they see postmodernism as a way to hit back at “the scientific establishment” which they identify as aligned with their oppressors. At the same time, anti-corporate alternative medicine and animal rights activists (who travel in the same circles) have wanted to discredit the medical industry for decades and are turning to PoMo rhetoric as well. These groups are all at the vanguard of the modern left and all of them have a lot to gain by weakening science.
What’s more, the ideals of reductionism and logic and the correct epistemology have been multiply, independently derived. China, India, and Greece all demonstrably converged upon them, and I’m sure many other unrecorded individuals have as well.
In the bastardized words of Tolstoy: “Good ideas are all alike; every bad idea is bad in its own way.”
An ordered society, like Greece India and China, will tend to look and think very similarly even when direct communication is limited. Their traditions are the results of centuries or millenia of received knowledge which has had to pass the test of each new generation before it was transmitted to the next. In a sense you could say their memes are K-strategists; in a stable environment with limited opportunity to transmit themselves, the high cost of a more correct idea pays for itself by out-competing rivals in the long run.
In the modern world (more-or-less everything after the printing press), where the our technology made data transmission and storage trivial, the new environment put out new pressures. Old ideas were built to last but slow to spread; new ideas could easily afford to be much stupider and more dangerous as long as they reproduced and mutated quickly enough. These r-strategist memes are fads; they flood the field and by the time they’ve burned out there’s a new one ready to go.
I don’t think it’s surprising that science is coming under attack; it is very expensive to produce a proper scientific mindset, while pseudoscientific fads can use aggressive mimicry to cheaply soak up any good reputation we generate.
But ancient India, China, Greece were absolutely over-run by irrationality. The seeds of logic and reason were lying more or less ignored, buried in texts alongside millions of superstitions and bad epistemologies. And our currently fashionable epistemology is superior to theirs. They didn’t have the notion of parsimony.
Why is logic and reason spreading faster today than in the past? Do you think that the rise of post-modernism (Actually, wait.… why are we using the word post-modernism to mean anti-science? That doesn’t make sense...) will somehow eclipse the spread of rationalism?
Your model seems to have anti-science-post-modernism as a successor tor rationalism My model has anti-science as a reaction to the rapid spread of rationalism—a backlash. Whenever something spreads rapidly, there are those who are troubled. Anti-science can only define itself in opposition to science—imagine explaining it to someone who had never heard of science in the first place! Further, anti-science advocates a return to pre-scientific modes of thought. Both of these are the signals of a reactionary school of thought. Cthulhu doesn’t swim that way.
n the modern world (more-or-less everything after the printing press), where the our technology made data transmission and storage trivial, the new environment put out new pressures.
I’m even more confused now. You aren’t saying that Cthlulu’s left-ward swim is powered by technological advance, are you?
Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.
Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.
Wikipedia seems to be pretty unambiguious about Marx being the first notable theorist here. It’s not about “neutrality”, there just isn’t any evidence that this claim is mistaken.
Neither of the above. Your comment’s style was suboptimal, technological determinism is different from economic determinism, and the neo-reactionary position is neither. (This is obvious from the fact that they think that they can reverse the left-ward trend of history, but that it will take a concentrated effort.)
Your comment’s style was suboptimal, technological determinism is different from economic determinism
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
and the neo-reactionary position is neither
Near as I can tell, the point is that Yvain and others (Ishaan specifically) are arguing that the reactionary position is wrong by asserting some form of historical materialism/economic determinism.
i.e. reactionaries cannot reverse the trend of history because the structures of governments are largely an adaptation to the technological world we live in. The reactionaries want to divorce the government/culture from technological progress and assert they can move independently.
The argument against them seems to be that government/culture may well be a response to the technological climate, and as such as technology changes so will the culture and government.
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure. The basic outlines of the US’s economic structure have not changed since at least the 1930′s, and arguably even earlier. The development of TV, the internet, or for that matter the printing press, are all changes in technology, not changes in a society’s economic structure. Marx, for example, was not a technological determinist; Yvain et. al. are not economic determinists. Changing an economic structure is significantly easier than destroying all technology and preventing new developments.
Other stuff
In that case, I switch this critique to ‘sub-optimal style’- i.e. it was difficult for me to tell who Multiheaded was addressing and how his point was relevant.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure.
You missed roughly half of my sentence, and half of Multiheaded’s. The other half was historical materialism- below is a quote from the wikipedia article
[Historical materialism] is a theory of socioeconomic development according to which changes in material conditions (technology and productive capacity) are the primary influence on how society and the economy are organised.
Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded’s comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn’t mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.
Would anyone care to dispute the object-level claim I made, or are people just spree-downvoting?
Assuming the claims are correct (haven’t a clue personally and nearly as little interest) I don’t know why you got downvoted. The style is a little way from optimal but not enough that I’d expect serious penalties to be applied. Have you been pissing people off elsewhere in this thread? Voting tends to build up momentum within threads and the reception of later comments is at least as strongly influenced by earlier comments as it is by individual merit.
Yvain’s argument appears to be an attempt to put a positive spin on one of the neo-reactionary definitions of leftism:
Leftism is would happens when signaling feed back cycles no longer interact with reality, in the sense of the Philip K. Dick quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.
Edit: Yvain tries to be pro-leftist by associating it with technological progress. Except he runs into this problem, i.e., leftism is how people in technological (or merely prosperous) societies like to behave, which is not the same thing as the behaviors that lead to technological progress (or prosperity).
Well, once you’ve got the bottom few tiers of Maslow’s pyramid secured out, shouldn’t you start to think about the upper ones? And is chess evil because the pieces don’t refer to anything outside the game?
The word was secured. And yes, it means that most of your attention no longer needs to go to that area. That’s the entire point of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Once people have satisficed their low level needs they tend to focus more attention on higher, more abstract, goals.
I don’t mean you no longer need to eat, I mean that once you’ve reached a stable income that will allow you to eat as much as you need, you no longer need to worry about eating, and you can spend some of the time left over playing darts or whatever, rather than getting even more food into your fridge. Or why did you take the time to write that comment? Did it help you meet your basic survival needs somehow?
And is chess evil because the pieces don’t refer to anything outside the game?
Chess does a reasonable job of relating to reality in the sense I mean because the rules of the game and the person who wins are objective and (relatively) independent of any false beliefs about strategy the players might have. (If chess ever reaches the point that a player can get away with arguing that the laws of the game are arbitrary and that therefore he should be able to play some illegal move, that will be a sign that chess is becoming corrupted.)
While I’m sure that there are ways in which our society could be much better geared to cultivating technological progress and/or prosperity, looking to the standards of earlier times does not seem like a particularly effective way to do so.
Considerations of how to best cultivate further prosperity aside, I would say that there is a lot to recommend having people in a society behave as they like to behave, rather than ways that they don’t like to behave.
While I’m sure that there are ways in which our society could be much better geared to cultivating technological progress and/or prosperity, looking to the standards of earlier times does not seem like a particularly effective way to do so.
Why not? Look at societies that achieved and/or maintained prosperity and imitate them; look at prosperous societies that collapsed and avoid doing what they did.
What societies maintained prosperity without either collapsing or turning into, well, us?
In any case, we are by many standards the most prosperous civilization ever to exist; by what older prosperity-promoting behaviors do you think our society might be improved?
What societies maintained prosperity without either collapsing or turning into, well, us?
That’s like saying that because everyone has either died or is currently living there is nothing we can learn about health and longevity by looking at other people’s lifestyles.
Not especially, since not only do civilizations not have hard limits on their persistence times like humans do, the very qualities which made certain civilizations particularly stable in their own time periods might cease to be viable in other ones (which is in some cases why they ended.)
Civilizations also tend to change their qualities over time, thus we can see what changes tend to promote increased prosperity (or collapse).
the very qualities which made certain civilizations particularly stable in their own time periods might cease to be viable in other ones
What do you mean by “time periods”? The logic of your argument suggests you mean it as a proxy for some other changes. It would help to thing of those variables explicitly. For example, if you mean different levels of technology, it makes sense to look at qualities that were helpful in societies of different technological level.
Different technology, different memetic environments, different relationships with other nations. Possibly other factors I’m leaving out.
Once a new meme enters the environment, it can be transformative to the political environment the way, say, the evolution of lignin-degrading bacteria, or of angiosperms, were to the ecological. Adaptations which were useful in the prior context can be totally obsoleted, with no backtracking.
I have studied history, and continue to do so, and this is not a helpful comment.
It’s easy to take the tact of “I know stuff you ought to know and would believe differently if you also knew it” without actually raising those matters in the discussion, but a useful dialogue it does not make.
When I asked you before about what specific prosperity-promoting behaviors from the past we ought to emulate, that was also not a rhetorical question.
Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.
You can’t have an Emperor surrounded by legions of Mandarins if everyone is out in the bush looking for acorns; you need agriculture and specialization long before anyone starts talking about the Mandate of Heaven or tracing out dynasties. The same way you couldn’t expect someone to come up with Black Bloc tactics without there already being ubiquitous video recording.
But you could have crop rotation without building the Forbidden City; technology is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. The incentives are no less real and no less perverse if they require a technological substrate to be effective.
Unless you mean that as a synonym for Progressivism
I’m talking about the greater literacy and mathematical proficiency, coupled with a decline in superstition and religious belief among cultures that have had the longest exposure to information technology.
The incentives are no less real and no less perverse if they require a technological substrate to be effective.
I’m talking about the greater literacy and mathematical proficiency, coupled with a decline in superstition and religious belief among cultures that have had the longest exposure to information technology.
I’ll give you the literacy and maths skills but I’m not convinced that superstition or religion are any weaker. After all, if we defined “superstition” in the Roman Empire as animal sacrifices to gain favors and “religion” as the worship of pagan gods, the victory of Christianity there was an unparalleled triumph of reason.
The modern conception of race and gender equality is absolutely superstitious; democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character. I don’t see that we’ve necessarily decreased the abundance of either by removing the competitors to our ruling groups.
After all, if we defined “superstition” in the Roman Empire as animal sacrifices to gain favors and “religion” as the worship of pagan gods, the victory of Christianity there was an unparalleled triumph of reason.
I’ve got two answers to that:
1) I think you’ve got an insufficient understanding of either Christianity as it is practiced or of polytheistic religions, if you think Christianity is a major improvement upon them rationality-wise. An animal sacrifice was the ancient equivalent of modern 4th of July fireworks.
2) Suppose I’m wrong about (1) and you are right that Christianity is in some way less superstitious and more grounded in reality than the pagan religions that it supplanted. Would the spread of Christianity not then constitute a weakening of superstition, in accordance with what we’d expect to pair with technological improvement?
The modern conception of race and gender equality is absolutely superstitious
I think you’re stretching the use of the term “superstition” to encompass things you don’t agree with. In my opinion, the psychology of superstition can be summed up with this paper—it describes a specific subset of beliefs.
1) Most people believe there is evidence that no genetically determined behavioral differences exist between races. That’s not a superstition—they assign a probability to the evidence being out there, just as they assign it to global warming. (For my own view, I would say “racially-correlated genetically determined behavioral differences should be considered considered possible, but there is currently insufficient evidence to make strong claims about the nature or magnitude of any supposed behavioral differences. I think the “race realist” crowd, who thinks that we aught to shape policy around this, is ridiculously overconfident.) You can call them (and me) wrong, but would you call us superstitious?
2) Political race and gender equality would be better termed “race and gender egalitarianism”. It should be thought of as a value, not as a fact. It already is demonstrated that gender-correlated-genetically-determined-behavioral-differences exist, but that doesn’t really destabilize the main point of gender egalitarianism at all.
Race-gender egalitarianism essentially says: Even if there are group behavioral differences, individuals should be judged on their own merit, rather than by the category they might be assigned to. To see why people might think this is a good idea, just think of any trait you have that happens to be correlated with something negative that you don’t have, and then imagine what would happen if people started basing public policy around that trait.
I think what you meant to say by “superstitious” is that people’s beliefs surrounding that topic might be biased by political motivations, and I wouldn’t disagree.
I think there’s a large amount of sufficient evidence to make strong claims about IQ differences.
Genetically based differences, not differences in general. Epigenetics and environmental factors obviously create huge differences.
gender equality is often treated as equality of capability.
Obviously, capability is not equal across all domains. The only thing which remains controversial is which domains the differences exist in, and to what extent these differences are genetic.
Epigenetics and environmental factors obviously create huge differences.
As you well understand, the race-based IQ differences were and are a very unwelcome result. Lots of effort was spent to overturn or debunk these findings. Obvious things like environmental factors and the like were looked at very carefully.
The results still stand.
Obviously, capability is not equal across all domains.
Well, obviously. And yet consider the consequences to Larry Summers of some rather obvious remarks which, arguably, include being kicked out of the running for the Fed chair.
Obvious things like environmental factors and the like were looked at very carefully.
Environmental factors can be very hard to control for. Maternal factors in the womb, DNA Methylation, etc, etc.
There’s stuff for which the ’race-realists” explanations are very shaky. The considerable academic success of African immigrants to the US (even when compared to immigrant groups from other areas) is an example for which the explanations provided (high barriers to entry only let smart people in) is plausible, but it leaves plenty of room for uncertainty.
I dunno, this is a topic that can be debated for a really long time. Suffice it to say that I remain uncertain.
Larry Summers
Yes? I never claimed that political correctness never gets in the way of good decisions. I’m trying to understand reactionary thought, and that naturally causes us to touch upon politics, but I’m not attempting to argue for a political side here. You won’t catch me defending the censorship of Summers.
I agree that Summers should be allowed to air ideas on public forums without fear of personal consequences.
The vitriol directed to Summers was also quite heavily criticized, and by some pretty influential people. The majority of students also supported him.
Just an example to demonstrate that pointing out “obvious” things about gender equality in public can have very unpleasant real-life consequences. Which, in turn, affect future willingness to say such things in public. Which affects the “public consensus”. Which affects the default way the majority of the population thinks about the issue.
I agree with you on that, and that is unfortunate.
I do suspect the degree to which the people perceives that the “PC-police” controls everything is overblown.
I’m using a less-than-anonymous handle here, and I’ve just expressed support of Summers’ right to present his data. I’ve also expressed open-mindedness (though not acceptance) towards the idea that genetically determined behavioral differences could conceivably exist.
I’ve got sufficient faith in the system that it won’t punish me for open-mindedness to un-PC ideas. If I thought that what happened to Summers was a really common thing, I’d be using an anon handle to even discuss reactionary thought.
I’ve also expressed open-mindedness (though not acceptance) towards the idea that genetically determined behavioral differences could conceivably exist.
That amounts to “human group differences are not ruled out a priori”, which is an incredibly low bar. Even SJ Gould, who was enough of a PC policeman to falsify claims of bias against a 19th century biologist who examined cranial capacity, admitted that “equality is not an a priori truth”.
If I thought that what happened to Summers was a really common thing, I’d be using an anon handle to even discuss reactionary thought.
It’s pretty common for public figures. I don’t know who you are, but my guess is you’re not a public figure. Hence, your protection (and mine) largely consists in being small fry.
It’s pretty common for public figures. I don’t know who you are, but my guess is you’re not a public figure. Hence, your protection (and mine) largely consists in being small fry.
Certain right-wing Italian politicians who say things that seem optimized for maximum offensiveness whom I cannot reliably tell apart from their parodies surely should count as public figures too?
While I wouldn’t want to see too many of those good, solid digs on Less Wrong, this comment made my day. I made a special exception ;-) and upvoted it.
IIRC he went farther, suggesting (as one hypothesis among several) that low female representation in STEM fields could be due to lower female IQ variance.
I do suspect the degree to which the people perceives that the “PC-police” controls everything is overblown.
It really depends. If you’re, say, the owner of a small auto repair business in Montana, you can give the PC police the middle finger every day and nothing bad will happen to you. On the other hand, if you’re a school employee in a rich suburb somewhere in the Northeast… well… the situation is different :-/
Would you say my trust is poorly placed?
Yes.
This mostly has to do with using a less-than-anonymous handle. If any lurker who decided to get his jollies by being nasty to you can pierce your veil of anonymity and, say, send a carefully chosen collection of quotes from your posts to a variety of people who have authority over you—well, it could get rather unpleasant.
Such things, unfortunately, are not rare on ’net forums.
Whether “the system” won’t punish you depends on which system. If you’re in academia or paid-by-feds research (e.g. NIH), I would expect the system to punish you (not necessarily in immediately obvious ways).
Whether “the system” won’t punish you depends on which system. If you’re in academia or paid-by-feds research (e.g. NIH), I would expect the system to punish you (not necessarily in immediately obvious ways).
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences. I’ve heard several maths professors often making politically incorrect remarks and jokes in lectures where they couldn’t have known that nobody was recording them. You wouldn’t speak out against Socialism in a similar venue in the Soviet Union. (Or are web forums held to a higher standard than university lectures?)
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences.
That’s probably true. I suspect it also depends on whether you are a tenured professor, rather hard to dislodge, or a mere tenure-track larva terrified of not getting tenure...
It also depends on where you say said things (I see people post race- and gender-essentialist stuff on Facebook with their real name quite often, and nothing bad has happened to any of them as a result AFAIK), and which tone you use (sometimes truth isn’t enough).
(But from what little I’ve read about the Summers incident, I agree the reaction was unfortunate.)
Political race and gender equality would be better termed “race and gender egalitarianism”. It should be thought of as a value, not as a fact.
Speaking as someone who is all in favour of equality, hell no. It should be though of as a strategy. Values are something quite different.
On the other hand, if we found ourselves in, say, the world of Dungeons and Dragons, we would require a different strategy to fulfill our values.
Of course, it’s tempting to praise the Good thing by saying it would be Good in every possible world—there are several posts on the fact floating around LW—but fight it! Declaring your policies terminally valuable is only one step away from concluding everyone who doesn’t hold them must hold different terminal values, and is equivalent to clippy—and that doesn’t turn out well.
Agreed. I can imagine possible worlds in which race and gender egalitarianism would be silly.
What I should have said is that it is a heuristic, which is generally believed to hold in all cases where between group variation is less than within-group variation. (Which is why it’s okay that athletics are gender segregated)
What I should have said is that it is a heuristic, which is generally believed to hold in all cases where between group variation is less than within-group variation. (Which is why it’s okay that athletics are gender segregated)
Well, depending on the metrics you use, within-group variation for men’s and women’s athletic ability is much greater than between-group variation. After all, the difference between the most and least athletic women, or between the most and least athletic men, is much greater than the average difference between men and women, or the difference between the top men and the top women.
Between-group differences can be small relative to within-group differences (certainly significantly smaller than the difference in average athletic ability between men and women,) while still dominating representation of the groups at the tail ends of an activity.
Oh, and, um, I just remembered that I’m supposed to make my comments more valuable because someone is periodically downvoting them in blocks and the ones that don’t get upvoted are, thus, effectively costing me karma to post
Downvoted for off-topic whining. There are places where I’d consider it appropriate to complain about karmassinations (e.g., the open thread), but I can’t see how a reply to Ishaan’s comment would be such a place.
I, um, wasn’t complaining. I just wanted to add a little more content than “excellent”. I guess it’s hard to get tone across in text … anyway, I’m sorry if the digression annoyed you, I’ll bear that in mind next time.
Assuming this is primarily a problem because it makes your comments less likely to be read, why not just change your handle? That’ll throw them off your tail.
Yup. It also gives people a slight impression that the comment was mildly unpopular—not sure what effect that has—and, this is the big one, means that I can’t downvote because of anti-troll measures. Which, of course, I always forget, which is annoying.
OK, so it’s not that bad. Still.
But believe it or not, I actually set up another account under a different name and posted some constructive comments to give it a positive karma score (I had a vague plan to use it for stuff that was more affected than average?) Something I said gave it away, at the same time I discovered this wasn’t a one-off thing on my regular account.
Or, alternatively, I’m so annoying that I was both the first and second people to be karmassasinated (AFAICT). Can’t forget that possibility.
My Roman example was intended as satire; playing with how “superstition” is applied only to the beliefs of the enemies of the faith. In the same way, you can find as many accounts as you care for of Catholic missionaries talking about the “superstitious” animism of native peoples and almost none talking about the superstition inherent in the idea of transubstantiation. It’s pure self-serving hypocrisy.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character. If you throw a finger-pinch of salt over your shoulder to hit the devil in the eye, that is a superstition. If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive. Even when salt was worth more than gold people only threw away a few dozen grains at a time.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character.
You might want to replace “superstitious” with “obviously wrong”, then, to prevent confusion.
Oh, okay. I didn’t catch the satire. Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character.… If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Even if a belief is false, it isn’t superstition. Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Speaking as a Devil’s Advocate … if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example. If your evidence for the existence of racism demons is that black people fail more often, then you will continue to receive said evidence and thus, presumably, continue throwing endless streams of black people.
On the other hand, hey, if spilling salt really was taken as a sign of weakness by salt-vulnerable extradimensional vampires, and they enter our world and sneak up behind you to drain your vitality; then hitting them smack in the eye with some salt should show ’em who’s boss. Right?
EDIT:
Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Under the definition you cited, Santa seems more designed to create superstition—I was good and then I got presents!
Okay, I am now going to give you not my own views, but the views of the average liberal layperson on this matter. This is meant to illustrate why it’s not obvious to laypeople that AA doesn’t work, not a defense of AA.
if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example.
“The point of affirmative action is to uplift the entire group. It doesn’t matter if minority students fail out at higher rates—if the net effect is more minority students with degrees who have come into contact with college culture and gotten education, they will go home and have a positive impact on their families (especially younger siblings) and wider community. Even if they don’t impact anyone else, said minority students can get a higher paying job. They will have left the poverty cycle. If these benefits in any way transmit to their direct progeny, racial inequality will be reduced in the long run. ”
Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
More or less, although I don’t mean it venomously; I am glad to see Christianity and Islam weakening even if I do find I prefer them to their replacements.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
The mean IQ for an American Black adult is 85, and since adult IQ is 60-80% heritable this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause. Attempts to test that have controlled for SES education level and other factors in early childhood, income and education level in adults, even multiple twin adoption studies where one twin was raised by higher-class whites. Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics, but that the degree of the gap can be predicted by knowing the proportions of the individual’s racial admixture.
So, what does that mean in practice?
About 2% of Blacks will have an IQ of 115 or above, which is considered “bright” and about the level of the average undergrad or white-collar worker. Only the top 1% will have an IQ of 120 or above, which is considered “gifted” and about the level of the average college graduate. The very best 0.1% will have an IQ of 130 or above, which is considered “borderline genius” and is both the mean for PhD recipients and is the very lowest IQ Mensa will accept.
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
TL;DR: There are Black Americans who are capable of benefiting from a college education, but they are the exception, and this fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
The heritability of IQ reduces with socioeconomic status. Primary source. So lets go with 60%.
this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Attempts to test that have controlled
Attempts to control for things do generally reduce the gap, but yes, you are right that they do not completely eliminate it. This is the reason why we can’t dismiss the idea that behavioral differences of genetic origin exist, not a reason why we should accept the idea. It isn’t possible to control for all factors. It could easily be something weird and unexpected (say, vitamin D deficiency, or maternal health) that creates the difference.
Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics
No: Consistently, attempts to control for things have not accounted for the entirety of the gap. There is a difference.
fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
I’ve done both. My anecdotal experience disagrees. My glances at statistics haven’t settled anything.
PhD
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement. (I know that the “race realists” will say that this is because only smart people can immigrate. That explanation is not be sufficient to extinguish the doubt the evidence raises, especially since we’re comparing immigrants to immigrants)
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement.
Wat. Citation needed. As a racist, that breaks my model. Please explain.
Note that even though the educational achievement goes African immigrant >Asian immigrant > European immigrant > US-born, most of the metrics of financial and economic success go European immigrant > US-born > Asian Immigrant > African Immigrant.
I’ve seen findings to the effect that with each successive generation after the second, non-white immigrants tend to become poorer and less educated, though i don’t remember which group they were looking at. If this interests you enough for me to go find them, let me know.
There are various possible explanations for this...
1) Self-Selection effects cause immigrants to seek education in greater numbers. interpersonal racism distorts market forces (see: various race-resume and job interview studies) to counteract the benefits of higher education. After the 2nd generations any self selection effect dies out and members of non-white racial groups drift economically downward.
I consider [1] to be the strongest hypothesis for the cause of race-related differences in socio-economics regardless of whether or not race-correlated-genetically-based differences in intelligence exist. I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are not also genetic differences. Just because racism is sufficient to explain socioeconomic disparity doesn’t mean it’s necessary. Furthermore, we can’t just assume that socioeconomic disparities alone can create the observed trends in behavioral intelligence testing. I don’t think it’s silly to have suspicions that genetic differences exist, but I still feel that it is really silly to be confident that they exist and claim high certainty concerning the magnitude, direction, and nature of these differences when we don’t currently have much general insight into the mechanisms behind genetics and intelligence. It’s even more overconfident to be certain that said supposed genetic differences have large-scale economic consequences. In general, one aught to be suspicious of big ideas with no well-understood mechanisms.
I was going to have a 2) and a 3) alternative hypotheses arguing devils advocate for the race realist side (invoking regression to the mean, affirmative action, etc) as well as a non-race-realist but also non-racism side, but as there appear to be a sufficient number of people who disagree with me present maybe I should just wait for someone who actually holds that opinion to supply those arguments.
I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
If racism is sufficient, then we should not see examples of groups who suffered racism but did not have economic disparities (or had economic disparities which favored them). Are there no such examples?
(I think it’s important to separate out sufficiency- an if-then relationship- and a strong direct effect. It seems likely that the direct effect of racism is to lower economic standing, but to claim sufficiency argues that its direct effect is larger than any other possible combination of total effects.)
The cause of this seems highly separated from the topic of discussion (heritable intelligence) though. I think it is more than obvious that the main cause is selection bias; that is in general why immigrants in general often outperform those who already live there. If you have the drive, determination, and consciousness to be able to go through such a major life change, that itself says something about you. So this filter lets in only those who are talented in this regard.
This model makes the prediction that immigrants from countries that are harder to migrate from will be smarter than those who can migrate more freely. This is seen in the real world: As stated here, African immigrants to the US are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US. They beat out, say, Asian immigrants (who also overperform on average.) And Asian immigrants beat out, say, Canadian immigrants, who no one really claims are all that special or particularly distinguished (as migrating from Canada even easier.)
Fascinating. Full marks to the US Human Resources department for their recruitment efforts in this area. The difference in achievement between those various groups of immigrants suggest some powerful selection effects. Simply because that amount of difference in achievement dwarfs the intelligence difference between racial groups no matter which direction that difference goes.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
Why are you so confident that even most racist models would predict this? Prior to acquiring domain specific knowledge about trends or immigration policies in the United States it doesn’t seem especially likely. Until Randaly provided the relevant link I knew next to nothing about the particulars of which racial groups successfully immigrate to the US at which education level. In the absence of such information it seems reasonable to guess that the patterns would tend toward following the trends for IQ among the groups as well as correlating with the distribution of educational qualifications for individuals in the respective countries. ie. I’d guess that East Asian groups would have more educational achievement than African groups.
I’d call the model possessed by myself of the recent past wrong and also ignorant of that and related pieces of trivia but I’d hardly call it “really badly broken”. Perhaps you consider this and related information far more important or fundamental than I do?
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
I don’t usually refer to brain drain in my understanding of things. If this is true, I should. But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia, which is what is necessary to explain this.
But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia
Here is a throwaway guess: because Asia is rapidly developing and Africa is not. If you’re very smart and in (ex-Japan) Asia, you can stay and be successful (make millions / cure cancer / become a pop star / etc.) locally. It’s a fluid growing environment. But if you’re in Africa, your chances of local success are much smaller and, correspondingly, your incentives to emigrate are much higher.
I endorse Lumifer’s reason. Other reasons would include less patriotism (as I understand, loyalties in much of Africa are to tribes/clans/families rather than a nationstate, religion, or ideology, so bringing your family abroad of going abroad to look for money would be less of a shift) and less perceived safety (e.g. apparently 75% of Ethiopia’s skilled laborers moved abroad during its famines).
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
Brain drain is familiar to me… it’s even what I attribute most of the success of the US to, especially when it comes to silicone valley. What I had no information about (and little need to collect information about) was the specific details of which countries the US attracts and permits immigrants from most freely. Without those details knowledge of brain drain is irrelevant, it doesn’t distinguish between drain-sources.
Really? A racist model take the base IQ of africans, compares it to that of eurasions, notices that the latter is ~2 std devs higher, and predicts superior achievement by eurasions. You would only expect such over-achievement if Asian immigrants were average folks and African immigrants were the cream of the intellectual class, but why would I predict that, a priori?
Because the Nigerian “middle class” makes on average about $6,000 a year while the Japanese middle class on average makes $52,000 a year? The average African might very well want to come to the US, but only the very wealthiest (and since g correlates strongly with wealth, brightest) actually can.
In the last half century, as Subsaharan Africa’s population has skyrocketed to nearly a billion people, we’ve had about 900,000 African immigrants come to the US and those immigrants have shown exceptional talent; both are entirely consistent with the numbers we’d expect if we’re taking people with an average IQ of 115-120 (AKA, at or above the Ashkenazi Jewish mean).
Edit: Also, racist is a fairly charged (if hardly inaccurate) word and absolutely adds more heat than light, to use that delightful turn of phrase. Sticking with the generally-preferred term “Racial Realist” or even the milder British epithet “Racialist” might help reduce the reflexive opposition that tends to crop up in these discussions.
Consistent given the base IQ assumptions if the majority of all the most intellectually outstanding Africans are emigrating and coming to America specifically.
(America is not the most common destination for African immigrants, a majority of them go to Europe.)
The numbers are only weird if we assume they all came this year; remember, we’re talking about a period of more than five decades here.
Edit: Also, Continental Europe and the Anglosphere have two entirely disparate experiences with African Immigration these days. It’s hardly fair to focus on the small numbers legal immigrants to the vast numbers of illegal ones given Europe’s current position. It would be like saying that America’s Latin American population was predominantly middle-class or wealthy republicans; from a legal standpoint it’s arguable, but the demographics favor the illegal immigrants.
I’d add that sticking to the term “race realist” is unlikely to moderate responses here, since the majority of Less Wrong is already quite familiar with “race realism,” and speaking for myself at least, that sort of self-promoting name scheme, in the vein of pro-life or pro-choice (implying that those who hold it are the realists and those who do not are thus in some way deluded) serves only to move it from the realms of the empirical into the political.
Edit: If we’re looking at legal immigration to America alone, we were up to about 85,000 a year eight years ago, with trends moving upwards at that point (I haven’t found any more recent data yet,) and while a majority of immigration to America is legal, America doesn’t get a majority of the legal immigration.
That does bring the levels to statistical consistency assuming a sufficiently high level of retreat from Africa among the intellectual elite, but the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
I think you missed my edit, so just a restatement; comparing modern illegal immigrants to Europe with legal immigration is not a useful comparison, as it’s apples to oranges in terms of demography.
Okay, but I hope you don’t mind if I respond to it here for coherency’s sake.
the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
Don’t forget a lot of African immigrants are here mid-term or have a dual citizenship; they come here to get educated and make enough money to set themselves up back home and become millionaires, then bring the kids back to the US for round two. I know a sweet Nigerian girl who came here for exactly that purpose, since a doctor with an American MD can run their own hospital in Africa.
But yes, in any remotely stable country there should be an equilibrium point where permanent immigration lets off entirely. That’s a perfectly reasonable observation.
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Given the way the modern IQ scale is defined, it makes little sense to say that 100 to 85 is “a loss of 15%”. You can only say it’s a loss of one standard deviation.
The leopard’s name is human cognitive biodiversity. While the evidence for human cognitive biodiversity is indeed debatable, what’s not debatable is that it is debatable. Since it’s also the case that everyone who is not a white nationalist has spent the last 50 years informing us that it is not debatable, we have our leopard one way or another.
Your primary source is measuring IQ heritability in children, which is typically held as 20-40% rather than the 60-80% for adults I mentioned. Children are in a constant state of flux, and their IQs hard to norm due to maturation rates, but when they hit the late end of puberty you can see the effect of genes really shake out.
In terms of African immigrants I need to look at the actual data more closely but it sounds like a fairly simple case of Brain Drain. The Bantu mean IQ is typically scored in the 70s range, so if we’re able to skim the top 0.04% that’s a group more than 400,000 strong with a higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews. Normal Distributions + Huge Populations = Lots and lots of outliers.
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
Probably not much, and I’d have the same lack of patience for anyone else doing that whether it’s a Creationist arguing against Evolution or a Whole Foods junkie pushing Vitalist nonsense.
Why does the game completely change when it comes to the intersection of psychometry and biology? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious how unprecedentedly low our priors drop as soon as we hear the word race? Why are the conclusions of more than a century of exhaustive psychometric research, backed up by our recent advances in genetics, still so completely unpersuasive?
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
As far as I can tell, the implied analogy here between Ishaan’s position and climate kookery is an unfair one. I am not aware of a consensus on the aetiology of between-race IQ differences comparable to the consensus on global warming.
Of course, even if there aren’t synthesis reports written by hundreds of scientists, or statements from national scientific societies, there are smaller-scale reports & surveys on the IQ controversy. But what Ishaan wrote turns out to broadly agree with those.
The two obvious examples here are the research summaries published in the wake of the commotion around The Bell Curve. One is “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns”, a report by an 11-member panel approved by the American Psychological Association.
For IQ’s heritability the panel reports values “of the order of .45” in childhood and “around .75″ “by late adolescence” (p. 85). On the possibility of environmental factors entering into the white-black IQ gap it suggests that socioeconomic status “cannot be the whole explanation”, but pays respectful attention to other cultural explanations of the gap (pp. 94-95) while acknowledging that they “have little direct empirical support” (p. 97). As for genetic factors: “There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.” (p. 97); “There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis.” (p. 95). These conclusions are compatible with Ishaan’s, except for the review’s estimate of adult IQ heritability being higher than Ishaan’s 60%.
The other research summary is Linda S. Gottfredson’s “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography”. It goes into less detail on IQ’s heritability, but where it gets quantitative it says “estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8″ (p. 14), which brackets Ishaan’s 60% estimate nicely. As for the cause of lower black IQ, it says:
22. There is no definitive answer to why IQ bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups. The reasons for these IQ differences between groups may be markedly different from the reasons for why individuals differ among themselves within any particular group (whites or blacks or Asians). [...] Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved too.
23. Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families.
This too is consistent with what Ishaan wrote.
(A shorter petition, “Behavior and Heredity”, appeared in American Psychologist in 1972 over the names of 50 researchers. But it doesn’t make any claims specific enough to compare to Ishaan’s.)
I also know of a couple of surveys. The more recent is Charlie Reeve & Jennifer Charles’s “Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views”, but that didn’t ask its respondents about heritability or causes of interracial IQ differences. The older survey is Mark Snyderman & Stanley Rothman’s “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing”, which did ask.
In fact, it broke the heritability question down further, by asking about IQ’s heritability among American whites and American blacks, considered separately:
7. White heritability estimate. Despite a consensus that there is a significant heritability to IQ in the American white population, experts disagree on the issue of whether there is sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of this heritability. Thirty-nine percent feel that there is sufficient evidence, compared to 40% who do not. Twenty-one percent do not feel qualified to answer. Only those respondents who feel there is sufficient evidence were asked to provide a heritability estimate. The mean estimate for the 214 received is 0.596 (SD = 0.166), meaning that these experts believe, on the average, that 60% of the variation in IQ within the American white population is associated with genetic variation.
8. Black heritability estimate. Experts are much less inclined to believe that sufficient evidence exists for an estimate of IQ heritability among the American black population. Twenty percent feel there is sufficient evidence, and 54% feel there is not. The mean heritability estimate for 101 received is 0.571 (SD = 0.178).
Those averages are very close to Ishaan’s. As for the black-white IQ difference:
12. The source of the black-white difference in IQ. [...] Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination.
There was no majority opinion in the survey. Even after cutting out the non-responses, only a bare majority (about 53%) felt confident in saying the IQ difference had a genetic component. Meanwhile, about 45% of those who responded took either the same position as Ishaan (insufficient data) or a more environmentalist one.
All in all, Ishaan’s views are about as hereditarian as the expert consensus, where that consensus exists. I don’t understand which “discipline’s consensus’s” Ishaan’s meant to be ignoring. (I’m leery of the suggestion of “goalpost-moving”, too, since I can’t spot any substantial drift in the claims Ishaan made over time.)
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
My measure is a little crude; it uses IQ scores without dividing them into fluid/crystallized or verbal/nonverbal and that does have a cost in terms of accuracy. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or energy to do much better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not to mention my access to census data blows now that the Federal Government is shut down. This is part of why I didn’t bother looking at Asian-White or Male-Female differences where the numbers are smaller and the breakdown of scores is messier.
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
Sure, I didn’t mean that modern proportions are reasonable; mine was just a nitpick.
democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character
I have 0.75 confidence that you’ve never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different—that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
I’ll cop to not having read much of Sen, but he seems like a clear odd one out in your list. He respectfully tips his hat to a few Marxian ideas in his work (see e.g. pages 14 & 15 of “The Moral Standing of the Market”, and the handful of shoutouts to Marx in On Economic Inequality), but I got the feeling he was more of a centre-left liberal than a hard leftist. See also: an actual commie’s Amazon review complaining that Development and Freedom is too pro-market, centrist, and wishy-washy.
Moss_Piglet claimed democracy and marxism were religious in character. Sen is arguably wishy-washy in his Marxism (though you can be pretty far left and still be very harshly criticized by some communists for not being left enough), but there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Sen’s commitment to democracy.
Yeah, I don’t doubt Sen has a staunch commitment to democracy, and I don’t care much about Moss_Piglet’s claim that democracy & Marxism are religious in character. Taken literally it’s obviously true in some sense. (Both democracy & Marxism are popular ideologies, and popular ideologies, like religions, demand broad normative commitments from adherents while making assorted truth claims, at least some of which are false.) What I’m sceptical of is Multiheaded’s characterization of Sen.
Postmodernism doesn’t have to be right to be popular, and right now political power is a matter of popularity. Even if “the smartest people” prefer being right to being powerful, a dubious proposition if you ask me, that just means their less intelligent but more ambitious cousins will be the ones wielding the power instead.
The modern feminist and anti-racist movements have started to learn that their pet pseudo-science sociology is just not credible enough to counter anthropology biology and psychology; they see postmodernism as a way to hit back at “the scientific establishment” which they identify as aligned with their oppressors. At the same time, anti-corporate alternative medicine and animal rights activists (who travel in the same circles) have wanted to discredit the medical industry for decades and are turning to PoMo rhetoric as well. These groups are all at the vanguard of the modern left and all of them have a lot to gain by weakening science.
In the bastardized words of Tolstoy: “Good ideas are all alike; every bad idea is bad in its own way.”
An ordered society, like Greece India and China, will tend to look and think very similarly even when direct communication is limited. Their traditions are the results of centuries or millenia of received knowledge which has had to pass the test of each new generation before it was transmitted to the next. In a sense you could say their memes are K-strategists; in a stable environment with limited opportunity to transmit themselves, the high cost of a more correct idea pays for itself by out-competing rivals in the long run.
In the modern world (more-or-less everything after the printing press), where the our technology made data transmission and storage trivial, the new environment put out new pressures. Old ideas were built to last but slow to spread; new ideas could easily afford to be much stupider and more dangerous as long as they reproduced and mutated quickly enough. These r-strategist memes are fads; they flood the field and by the time they’ve burned out there’s a new one ready to go.
I don’t think it’s surprising that science is coming under attack; it is very expensive to produce a proper scientific mindset, while pseudoscientific fads can use aggressive mimicry to cheaply soak up any good reputation we generate.
But ancient India, China, Greece were absolutely over-run by irrationality. The seeds of logic and reason were lying more or less ignored, buried in texts alongside millions of superstitions and bad epistemologies. And our currently fashionable epistemology is superior to theirs. They didn’t have the notion of parsimony.
Why is logic and reason spreading faster today than in the past? Do you think that the rise of post-modernism (Actually, wait.… why are we using the word post-modernism to mean anti-science? That doesn’t make sense...) will somehow eclipse the spread of rationalism?
Your model seems to have anti-science-post-modernism as a successor tor rationalism My model has anti-science as a reaction to the rapid spread of rationalism—a backlash. Whenever something spreads rapidly, there are those who are troubled. Anti-science can only define itself in opposition to science—imagine explaining it to someone who had never heard of science in the first place! Further, anti-science advocates a return to pre-scientific modes of thought. Both of these are the signals of a reactionary school of thought. Cthulhu doesn’t swim that way.
I’m even more confused now. You aren’t saying that Cthlulu’s left-ward swim is powered by technological advance, are you?
Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.
Yvain’s too.
HUGE SPOILER: Technically, historical materialism and economic determinism was first… yup, a core Marxist idea.
Would anyone care to dispute the object-level claim I made, or are people just spree-downvoting?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_determinism
Wikipedia seems to be pretty unambiguious about Marx being the first notable theorist here. It’s not about “neutrality”, there just isn’t any evidence that this claim is mistaken.
Neither of the above. Your comment’s style was suboptimal, technological determinism is different from economic determinism, and the neo-reactionary position is neither. (This is obvious from the fact that they think that they can reverse the left-ward trend of history, but that it will take a concentrated effort.)
(I did not downvote.)
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
Near as I can tell, the point is that Yvain and others (Ishaan specifically) are arguing that the reactionary position is wrong by asserting some form of historical materialism/economic determinism.
i.e. reactionaries cannot reverse the trend of history because the structures of governments are largely an adaptation to the technological world we live in. The reactionaries want to divorce the government/culture from technological progress and assert they can move independently.
The argument against them seems to be that government/culture may well be a response to the technological climate, and as such as technology changes so will the culture and government.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure. The basic outlines of the US’s economic structure have not changed since at least the 1930′s, and arguably even earlier. The development of TV, the internet, or for that matter the printing press, are all changes in technology, not changes in a society’s economic structure. Marx, for example, was not a technological determinist; Yvain et. al. are not economic determinists. Changing an economic structure is significantly easier than destroying all technology and preventing new developments.
In that case, I switch this critique to ‘sub-optimal style’- i.e. it was difficult for me to tell who Multiheaded was addressing and how his point was relevant.
You missed roughly half of my sentence, and half of Multiheaded’s. The other half was historical materialism- below is a quote from the wikipedia article
Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded’s comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn’t mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.
Assuming the claims are correct (haven’t a clue personally and nearly as little interest) I don’t know why you got downvoted. The style is a little way from optimal but not enough that I’d expect serious penalties to be applied. Have you been pissing people off elsewhere in this thread? Voting tends to build up momentum within threads and the reception of later comments is at least as strongly influenced by earlier comments as it is by individual merit.
Yvain’s argument appears to be an attempt to put a positive spin on one of the neo-reactionary definitions of leftism:
Leftism is would happens when signaling feed back cycles no longer interact with reality, in the sense of the Philip K. Dick quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.
Edit: Yvain tries to be pro-leftist by associating it with technological progress. Except he runs into this problem, i.e., leftism is how people in technological (or merely prosperous) societies like to behave, which is not the same thing as the behaviors that lead to technological progress (or prosperity).
Well, once you’ve got the bottom few tiers of Maslow’s pyramid secured out, shouldn’t you start to think about the upper ones? And is chess evil because the pieces don’t refer to anything outside the game?
...then you can ignore them, because that’s done?
The word was secured. And yes, it means that most of your attention no longer needs to go to that area. That’s the entire point of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Once people have satisficed their low level needs they tend to focus more attention on higher, more abstract, goals.
I don’t mean you no longer need to eat, I mean that once you’ve reached a stable income that will allow you to eat as much as you need, you no longer need to worry about eating, and you can spend some of the time left over playing darts or whatever, rather than getting even more food into your fridge. Or why did you take the time to write that comment? Did it help you meet your basic survival needs somehow?
Chess does a reasonable job of relating to reality in the sense I mean because the rules of the game and the person who wins are objective and (relatively) independent of any false beliefs about strategy the players might have. (If chess ever reaches the point that a player can get away with arguing that the laws of the game are arbitrary and that therefore he should be able to play some illegal move, that will be a sign that chess is becoming corrupted.)
While I’m sure that there are ways in which our society could be much better geared to cultivating technological progress and/or prosperity, looking to the standards of earlier times does not seem like a particularly effective way to do so.
Considerations of how to best cultivate further prosperity aside, I would say that there is a lot to recommend having people in a society behave as they like to behave, rather than ways that they don’t like to behave.
Why not? Look at societies that achieved and/or maintained prosperity and imitate them; look at prosperous societies that collapsed and avoid doing what they did.
What societies maintained prosperity without either collapsing or turning into, well, us?
In any case, we are by many standards the most prosperous civilization ever to exist; by what older prosperity-promoting behaviors do you think our society might be improved?
That’s like saying that because everyone has either died or is currently living there is nothing we can learn about health and longevity by looking at other people’s lifestyles.
Not especially, since not only do civilizations not have hard limits on their persistence times like humans do, the very qualities which made certain civilizations particularly stable in their own time periods might cease to be viable in other ones (which is in some cases why they ended.)
Civilizations also tend to change their qualities over time, thus we can see what changes tend to promote increased prosperity (or collapse).
What do you mean by “time periods”? The logic of your argument suggests you mean it as a proxy for some other changes. It would help to thing of those variables explicitly. For example, if you mean different levels of technology, it makes sense to look at qualities that were helpful in societies of different technological level.
Different technology, different memetic environments, different relationships with other nations. Possibly other factors I’m leaving out.
Once a new meme enters the environment, it can be transformative to the political environment the way, say, the evolution of lignin-degrading bacteria, or of angiosperms, were to the ecological. Adaptations which were useful in the prior context can be totally obsoleted, with no backtracking.
If you actually study history, you will find that there are a lot more patterns than you seem to be implying.
I have studied history, and continue to do so, and this is not a helpful comment.
It’s easy to take the tact of “I know stuff you ought to know and would believe differently if you also knew it” without actually raising those matters in the discussion, but a useful dialogue it does not make.
When I asked you before about what specific prosperity-promoting behaviors from the past we ought to emulate, that was also not a rhetorical question.
Are they? Unless you mean that as a synonym for Progressivism, I’ve missed that bit.
Postmodernism isn’t just a literary theory.
You can’t have an Emperor surrounded by legions of Mandarins if everyone is out in the bush looking for acorns; you need agriculture and specialization long before anyone starts talking about the Mandate of Heaven or tracing out dynasties. The same way you couldn’t expect someone to come up with Black Bloc tactics without there already being ubiquitous video recording.
But you could have crop rotation without building the Forbidden City; technology is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. The incentives are no less real and no less perverse if they require a technological substrate to be effective.
I’m talking about the greater literacy and mathematical proficiency, coupled with a decline in superstition and religious belief among cultures that have had the longest exposure to information technology.
Oh, ok that makes more sense.
I’ll give you the literacy and maths skills but I’m not convinced that superstition or religion are any weaker. After all, if we defined “superstition” in the Roman Empire as animal sacrifices to gain favors and “religion” as the worship of pagan gods, the victory of Christianity there was an unparalleled triumph of reason.
The modern conception of race and gender equality is absolutely superstitious; democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character. I don’t see that we’ve necessarily decreased the abundance of either by removing the competitors to our ruling groups.
I’ve got two answers to that:
1) I think you’ve got an insufficient understanding of either Christianity as it is practiced or of polytheistic religions, if you think Christianity is a major improvement upon them rationality-wise. An animal sacrifice was the ancient equivalent of modern 4th of July fireworks.
2) Suppose I’m wrong about (1) and you are right that Christianity is in some way less superstitious and more grounded in reality than the pagan religions that it supplanted. Would the spread of Christianity not then constitute a weakening of superstition, in accordance with what we’d expect to pair with technological improvement?
I think you’re stretching the use of the term “superstition” to encompass things you don’t agree with. In my opinion, the psychology of superstition can be summed up with this paper—it describes a specific subset of beliefs.
1) Most people believe there is evidence that no genetically determined behavioral differences exist between races. That’s not a superstition—they assign a probability to the evidence being out there, just as they assign it to global warming. (For my own view, I would say “racially-correlated genetically determined behavioral differences should be considered considered possible, but there is currently insufficient evidence to make strong claims about the nature or magnitude of any supposed behavioral differences. I think the “race realist” crowd, who thinks that we aught to shape policy around this, is ridiculously overconfident.) You can call them (and me) wrong, but would you call us superstitious?
2) Political race and gender equality would be better termed “race and gender egalitarianism”. It should be thought of as a value, not as a fact. It already is demonstrated that gender-correlated-genetically-determined-behavioral-differences exist, but that doesn’t really destabilize the main point of gender egalitarianism at all.
Race-gender egalitarianism essentially says: Even if there are group behavioral differences, individuals should be judged on their own merit, rather than by the category they might be assigned to. To see why people might think this is a good idea, just think of any trait you have that happens to be correlated with something negative that you don’t have, and then imagine what would happen if people started basing public policy around that trait.
I think what you meant to say by “superstitious” is that people’s beliefs surrounding that topic might be biased by political motivations, and I wouldn’t disagree.
I think there’s a large amount of sufficient evidence to make strong claims about IQ differences.
Yes, it should, but in reality gender equality is often treated as equality of capability.
Genetically based differences, not differences in general. Epigenetics and environmental factors obviously create huge differences.
Obviously, capability is not equal across all domains. The only thing which remains controversial is which domains the differences exist in, and to what extent these differences are genetic.
As you well understand, the race-based IQ differences were and are a very unwelcome result. Lots of effort was spent to overturn or debunk these findings. Obvious things like environmental factors and the like were looked at very carefully.
The results still stand.
Well, obviously. And yet consider the consequences to Larry Summers of some rather obvious remarks which, arguably, include being kicked out of the running for the Fed chair.
Environmental factors can be very hard to control for. Maternal factors in the womb, DNA Methylation, etc, etc.
There’s stuff for which the ’race-realists” explanations are very shaky. The considerable academic success of African immigrants to the US (even when compared to immigrant groups from other areas) is an example for which the explanations provided (high barriers to entry only let smart people in) is plausible, but it leaves plenty of room for uncertainty.
I dunno, this is a topic that can be debated for a really long time. Suffice it to say that I remain uncertain.
Yes? I never claimed that political correctness never gets in the way of good decisions. I’m trying to understand reactionary thought, and that naturally causes us to touch upon politics, but I’m not attempting to argue for a political side here. You won’t catch me defending the censorship of Summers.
I agree that Summers should be allowed to air ideas on public forums without fear of personal consequences.
The vitriol directed to Summers was also quite heavily criticized, and by some pretty influential people. The majority of students also supported him.
Just an example to demonstrate that pointing out “obvious” things about gender equality in public can have very unpleasant real-life consequences. Which, in turn, affect future willingness to say such things in public. Which affects the “public consensus”. Which affects the default way the majority of the population thinks about the issue.
I agree with you on that, and that is unfortunate.
I do suspect the degree to which the people perceives that the “PC-police” controls everything is overblown.
I’m using a less-than-anonymous handle here, and I’ve just expressed support of Summers’ right to present his data. I’ve also expressed open-mindedness (though not acceptance) towards the idea that genetically determined behavioral differences could conceivably exist.
I’ve got sufficient faith in the system that it won’t punish me for open-mindedness to un-PC ideas. If I thought that what happened to Summers was a really common thing, I’d be using an anon handle to even discuss reactionary thought.
Would you say my trust is poorly placed?
That amounts to “human group differences are not ruled out a priori”, which is an incredibly low bar. Even SJ Gould, who was enough of a PC policeman to falsify claims of bias against a 19th century biologist who examined cranial capacity, admitted that “equality is not an a priori truth”.
It’s pretty common for public figures. I don’t know who you are, but my guess is you’re not a public figure. Hence, your protection (and mine) largely consists in being small fry.
Certain right-wing Italian politicians who say things that seem optimized for maximum offensiveness whom I cannot reliably tell apart from their parodies surely should count as public figures too?
I’m pretty sure all laws of science and human action contain special exception clauses for Berlusconi.
While I wouldn’t want to see too many of those good, solid digs on Less Wrong, this comment made my day. I made a special exception ;-) and upvoted it.
No, remember reality is normal. If Berlusconi breaks your model of reality, you would do well to update your model.
Isn’t that, in a nutshell, exactly what Summers was saying?
IIRC he went farther, suggesting (as one hypothesis among several) that low female representation in STEM fields could be due to lower female IQ variance.
It really depends. If you’re, say, the owner of a small auto repair business in Montana, you can give the PC police the middle finger every day and nothing bad will happen to you. On the other hand, if you’re a school employee in a rich suburb somewhere in the Northeast… well… the situation is different :-/
Yes.
This mostly has to do with using a less-than-anonymous handle. If any lurker who decided to get his jollies by being nasty to you can pierce your veil of anonymity and, say, send a carefully chosen collection of quotes from your posts to a variety of people who have authority over you—well, it could get rather unpleasant.
Such things, unfortunately, are not rare on ’net forums.
Whether “the system” won’t punish you depends on which system. If you’re in academia or paid-by-feds research (e.g. NIH), I would expect the system to punish you (not necessarily in immediately obvious ways).
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences. I’ve heard several maths professors often making politically incorrect remarks and jokes in lectures where they couldn’t have known that nobody was recording them. You wouldn’t speak out against Socialism in a similar venue in the Soviet Union. (Or are web forums held to a higher standard than university lectures?)
That’s probably true. I suspect it also depends on whether you are a tenured professor, rather hard to dislodge, or a mere tenure-track larva terrified of not getting tenure...
It also depends on where you say said things (I see people post race- and gender-essentialist stuff on Facebook with their real name quite often, and nothing bad has happened to any of them as a result AFAIK), and which tone you use (sometimes truth isn’t enough).
(But from what little I’ve read about the Summers incident, I agree the reaction was unfortunate.)
Speaking as someone who is all in favour of equality, hell no. It should be though of as a strategy. Values are something quite different.
On the other hand, if we found ourselves in, say, the world of Dungeons and Dragons, we would require a different strategy to fulfill our values.
Of course, it’s tempting to praise the Good thing by saying it would be Good in every possible world—there are several posts on the fact floating around LW—but fight it! Declaring your policies terminally valuable is only one step away from concluding everyone who doesn’t hold them must hold different terminal values, and is equivalent to clippy—and that doesn’t turn out well.
Agreed. I can imagine possible worlds in which race and gender egalitarianism would be silly.
What I should have said is that it is a heuristic, which is generally believed to hold in all cases where between group variation is less than within-group variation. (Which is why it’s okay that athletics are gender segregated)
Well, depending on the metrics you use, within-group variation for men’s and women’s athletic ability is much greater than between-group variation. After all, the difference between the most and least athletic women, or between the most and least athletic men, is much greater than the average difference between men and women, or the difference between the top men and the top women.
Between-group differences can be small relative to within-group differences (certainly significantly smaller than the difference in average athletic ability between men and women,) while still dominating representation of the groups at the tail ends of an activity.
Excellent!
Oh, and, um, I just remembered that I’m supposed to make my comments more valuable because someone is periodically downvoting them in blocks and the ones that don’t get upvoted are, thus, effectively costing me karma to post
Um...
What a meta comment this has been! Selfawareness!
Downvoted for off-topic whining. There are places where I’d consider it appropriate to complain about karmassinations (e.g., the open thread), but I can’t see how a reply to Ishaan’s comment would be such a place.
I, um, wasn’t complaining. I just wanted to add a little more content than “excellent”. I guess it’s hard to get tone across in text … anyway, I’m sorry if the digression annoyed you, I’ll bear that in mind next time.
Assuming this is primarily a problem because it makes your comments less likely to be read, why not just change your handle? That’ll throw them off your tail.
Yup. It also gives people a slight impression that the comment was mildly unpopular—not sure what effect that has—and, this is the big one, means that I can’t downvote because of anti-troll measures. Which, of course, I always forget, which is annoying.
OK, so it’s not that bad. Still.
But believe it or not, I actually set up another account under a different name and posted some constructive comments to give it a positive karma score (I had a vague plan to use it for stuff that was more affected than average?) Something I said gave it away, at the same time I discovered this wasn’t a one-off thing on my regular account.
Or, alternatively, I’m so annoying that I was both the first and second people to be karmassasinated (AFAICT). Can’t forget that possibility.
My Roman example was intended as satire; playing with how “superstition” is applied only to the beliefs of the enemies of the faith. In the same way, you can find as many accounts as you care for of Catholic missionaries talking about the “superstitious” animism of native peoples and almost none talking about the superstition inherent in the idea of transubstantiation. It’s pure self-serving hypocrisy.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character. If you throw a finger-pinch of salt over your shoulder to hit the devil in the eye, that is a superstition. If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive. Even when salt was worth more than gold people only threw away a few dozen grains at a time.
You might want to replace “superstitious” with “obviously wrong”, then, to prevent confusion.
Oh, okay. I didn’t catch the satire. Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Even if a belief is false, it isn’t superstition. Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Speaking as a Devil’s Advocate … if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example. If your evidence for the existence of racism demons is that black people fail more often, then you will continue to receive said evidence and thus, presumably, continue throwing endless streams of black people.
On the other hand, hey, if spilling salt really was taken as a sign of weakness by salt-vulnerable extradimensional vampires, and they enter our world and sneak up behind you to drain your vitality; then hitting them smack in the eye with some salt should show ’em who’s boss. Right?
EDIT:
Under the definition you cited, Santa seems more designed to create superstition—I was good and then I got presents!
Okay, I am now going to give you not my own views, but the views of the average liberal layperson on this matter. This is meant to illustrate why it’s not obvious to laypeople that AA doesn’t work, not a defense of AA.
“The point of affirmative action is to uplift the entire group. It doesn’t matter if minority students fail out at higher rates—if the net effect is more minority students with degrees who have come into contact with college culture and gotten education, they will go home and have a positive impact on their families (especially younger siblings) and wider community. Even if they don’t impact anyone else, said minority students can get a higher paying job. They will have left the poverty cycle. If these benefits in any way transmit to their direct progeny, racial inequality will be reduced in the long run. ”
Clearly the racism demons will ensure they still get worse jobs and continue the poverty society regardless.
:P
More or less, although I don’t mean it venomously; I am glad to see Christianity and Islam weakening even if I do find I prefer them to their replacements.
The mean IQ for an American Black adult is 85, and since adult IQ is 60-80% heritable this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause. Attempts to test that have controlled for SES education level and other factors in early childhood, income and education level in adults, even multiple twin adoption studies where one twin was raised by higher-class whites. Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics, but that the degree of the gap can be predicted by knowing the proportions of the individual’s racial admixture.
So, what does that mean in practice?
About 2% of Blacks will have an IQ of 115 or above, which is considered “bright” and about the level of the average undergrad or white-collar worker. Only the top 1% will have an IQ of 120 or above, which is considered “gifted” and about the level of the average college graduate. The very best 0.1% will have an IQ of 130 or above, which is considered “borderline genius” and is both the mean for PhD recipients and is the very lowest IQ Mensa will accept.
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
TL;DR: There are Black Americans who are capable of benefiting from a college education, but they are the exception, and this fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
But this is modulated by SES.
The heritability of IQ reduces with socioeconomic status. Primary source. So lets go with 60%.
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Attempts to control for things do generally reduce the gap, but yes, you are right that they do not completely eliminate it. This is the reason why we can’t dismiss the idea that behavioral differences of genetic origin exist, not a reason why we should accept the idea. It isn’t possible to control for all factors. It could easily be something weird and unexpected (say, vitamin D deficiency, or maternal health) that creates the difference.
No: Consistently, attempts to control for things have not accounted for the entirety of the gap. There is a difference.
I’ve done both. My anecdotal experience disagrees. My glances at statistics haven’t settled anything.
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement. (I know that the “race realists” will say that this is because only smart people can immigrate. That explanation is not be sufficient to extinguish the doubt the evidence raises, especially since we’re comparing immigrants to immigrants)
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Wat. Citation needed. As a racist, that breaks my model. Please explain.
(La Wik says brain drain)
Here is one source which lays them out cleanly. Click on the first table.
http://www.asian-nation.org/immigrant-stats.shtml
Note that even though the educational achievement goes African immigrant >Asian immigrant > European immigrant > US-born, most of the metrics of financial and economic success go European immigrant > US-born > Asian Immigrant > African Immigrant.
I’ve seen findings to the effect that with each successive generation after the second, non-white immigrants tend to become poorer and less educated, though i don’t remember which group they were looking at. If this interests you enough for me to go find them, let me know.
There are various possible explanations for this...
1) Self-Selection effects cause immigrants to seek education in greater numbers. interpersonal racism distorts market forces (see: various race-resume and job interview studies) to counteract the benefits of higher education. After the 2nd generations any self selection effect dies out and members of non-white racial groups drift economically downward.
I consider [1] to be the strongest hypothesis for the cause of race-related differences in socio-economics regardless of whether or not race-correlated-genetically-based differences in intelligence exist. I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are not also genetic differences. Just because racism is sufficient to explain socioeconomic disparity doesn’t mean it’s necessary. Furthermore, we can’t just assume that socioeconomic disparities alone can create the observed trends in behavioral intelligence testing. I don’t think it’s silly to have suspicions that genetic differences exist, but I still feel that it is really silly to be confident that they exist and claim high certainty concerning the magnitude, direction, and nature of these differences when we don’t currently have much general insight into the mechanisms behind genetics and intelligence. It’s even more overconfident to be certain that said supposed genetic differences have large-scale economic consequences. In general, one aught to be suspicious of big ideas with no well-understood mechanisms.
I was going to have a 2) and a 3) alternative hypotheses arguing devils advocate for the race realist side (invoking regression to the mean, affirmative action, etc) as well as a non-race-realist but also non-racism side, but as there appear to be a sufficient number of people who disagree with me present maybe I should just wait for someone who actually holds that opinion to supply those arguments.
If racism is sufficient, then we should not see examples of groups who suffered racism but did not have economic disparities (or had economic disparities which favored them). Are there no such examples?
(I think it’s important to separate out sufficiency- an if-then relationship- and a strong direct effect. It seems likely that the direct effect of racism is to lower economic standing, but to claim sufficiency argues that its direct effect is larger than any other possible combination of total effects.)
Very well.
Racism is sufficient to lower SES, but if other factors are involved it may be insufficient to induce a negative disparity.
The cause of this seems highly separated from the topic of discussion (heritable intelligence) though. I think it is more than obvious that the main cause is selection bias; that is in general why immigrants in general often outperform those who already live there. If you have the drive, determination, and consciousness to be able to go through such a major life change, that itself says something about you. So this filter lets in only those who are talented in this regard.
This model makes the prediction that immigrants from countries that are harder to migrate from will be smarter than those who can migrate more freely. This is seen in the real world: As stated here, African immigrants to the US are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US. They beat out, say, Asian immigrants (who also overperform on average.) And Asian immigrants beat out, say, Canadian immigrants, who no one really claims are all that special or particularly distinguished (as migrating from Canada even easier.)
See here.
Fascinating. Full marks to the US Human Resources department for their recruitment efforts in this area. The difference in achievement between those various groups of immigrants suggest some powerful selection effects. Simply because that amount of difference in achievement dwarfs the intelligence difference between racial groups no matter which direction that difference goes.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
Are you sure you could have correctly predicted beforehand whether African immigrants would outperform other immigrants?
Why are you so confident that even most racist models would predict this? Prior to acquiring domain specific knowledge about trends or immigration policies in the United States it doesn’t seem especially likely. Until Randaly provided the relevant link I knew next to nothing about the particulars of which racial groups successfully immigrate to the US at which education level. In the absence of such information it seems reasonable to guess that the patterns would tend toward following the trends for IQ among the groups as well as correlating with the distribution of educational qualifications for individuals in the respective countries. ie. I’d guess that East Asian groups would have more educational achievement than African groups.
I’d call the model possessed by myself of the recent past wrong and also ignorant of that and related pieces of trivia but I’d hardly call it “really badly broken”. Perhaps you consider this and related information far more important or fundamental than I do?
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
I don’t usually refer to brain drain in my understanding of things. If this is true, I should. But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia, which is what is necessary to explain this.
Here is a throwaway guess: because Asia is rapidly developing and Africa is not. If you’re very smart and in (ex-Japan) Asia, you can stay and be successful (make millions / cure cancer / become a pop star / etc.) locally. It’s a fluid growing environment. But if you’re in Africa, your chances of local success are much smaller and, correspondingly, your incentives to emigrate are much higher.
I endorse Lumifer’s reason. Other reasons would include less patriotism (as I understand, loyalties in much of Africa are to tribes/clans/families rather than a nationstate, religion, or ideology, so bringing your family abroad of going abroad to look for money would be less of a shift) and less perceived safety (e.g. apparently 75% of Ethiopia’s skilled laborers moved abroad during its famines).
Brain drain is familiar to me… it’s even what I attribute most of the success of the US to, especially when it comes to silicone valley. What I had no information about (and little need to collect information about) was the specific details of which countries the US attracts and permits immigrants from most freely. Without those details knowledge of brain drain is irrelevant, it doesn’t distinguish between drain-sources.
Really? A racist model take the base IQ of africans, compares it to that of eurasions, notices that the latter is ~2 std devs higher, and predicts superior achievement by eurasions. You would only expect such over-achievement if Asian immigrants were average folks and African immigrants were the cream of the intellectual class, but why would I predict that, a priori?
Because the Nigerian “middle class” makes on average about $6,000 a year while the Japanese middle class on average makes $52,000 a year? The average African might very well want to come to the US, but only the very wealthiest (and since g correlates strongly with wealth, brightest) actually can.
In the last half century, as Subsaharan Africa’s population has skyrocketed to nearly a billion people, we’ve had about 900,000 African immigrants come to the US and those immigrants have shown exceptional talent; both are entirely consistent with the numbers we’d expect if we’re taking people with an average IQ of 115-120 (AKA, at or above the Ashkenazi Jewish mean).
Edit: Also, racist is a fairly charged (if hardly inaccurate) word and absolutely adds more heat than light, to use that delightful turn of phrase. Sticking with the generally-preferred term “Racial Realist” or even the milder British epithet “Racialist” might help reduce the reflexive opposition that tends to crop up in these discussions.
Consistent given the base IQ assumptions if the majority of all the most intellectually outstanding Africans are emigrating and coming to America specifically.
(America is not the most common destination for African immigrants, a majority of them go to Europe.)
The numbers are only weird if we assume they all came this year; remember, we’re talking about a period of more than five decades here.
Edit: Also, Continental Europe and the Anglosphere have two entirely disparate experiences with African Immigration these days. It’s hardly fair to focus on the small numbers legal immigrants to the vast numbers of illegal ones given Europe’s current position. It would be like saying that America’s Latin American population was predominantly middle-class or wealthy republicans; from a legal standpoint it’s arguable, but the demographics favor the illegal immigrants.
However, about half that number actually does emigrate from Africa on a yearly basis.
I’d add that sticking to the term “race realist” is unlikely to moderate responses here, since the majority of Less Wrong is already quite familiar with “race realism,” and speaking for myself at least, that sort of self-promoting name scheme, in the vein of pro-life or pro-choice (implying that those who hold it are the realists and those who do not are thus in some way deluded) serves only to move it from the realms of the empirical into the political.
Edit: If we’re looking at legal immigration to America alone, we were up to about 85,000 a year eight years ago, with trends moving upwards at that point (I haven’t found any more recent data yet,) and while a majority of immigration to America is legal, America doesn’t get a majority of the legal immigration.
That does bring the levels to statistical consistency assuming a sufficiently high level of retreat from Africa among the intellectual elite, but the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
I think you missed my edit, so just a restatement; comparing modern illegal immigrants to Europe with legal immigration is not a useful comparison, as it’s apples to oranges in terms of demography.
Your edit came after I wrote up my comment, but I did read it, and edited my own comment in response.
Okay, but I hope you don’t mind if I respond to it here for coherency’s sake.
Don’t forget a lot of African immigrants are here mid-term or have a dual citizenship; they come here to get educated and make enough money to set themselves up back home and become millionaires, then bring the kids back to the US for round two. I know a sweet Nigerian girl who came here for exactly that purpose, since a doctor with an American MD can run their own hospital in Africa.
But yes, in any remotely stable country there should be an equilibrium point where permanent immigration lets off entirely. That’s a perfectly reasonable observation.
To quote moldbug on this issue:
May or may not be relevant.
Your primary source is measuring IQ heritability in children, which is typically held as 20-40% rather than the 60-80% for adults I mentioned. Children are in a constant state of flux, and their IQs hard to norm due to maturation rates, but when they hit the late end of puberty you can see the effect of genes really shake out.
In terms of African immigrants I need to look at the actual data more closely but it sounds like a fairly simple case of Brain Drain. The Bantu mean IQ is typically scored in the 70s range, so if we’re able to skim the top 0.04% that’s a group more than 400,000 strong with a higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews. Normal Distributions + Huge Populations = Lots and lots of outliers.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
Probably not much, and I’d have the same lack of patience for anyone else doing that whether it’s a Creationist arguing against Evolution or a Whole Foods junkie pushing Vitalist nonsense.
Why does the game completely change when it comes to the intersection of psychometry and biology? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious how unprecedentedly low our priors drop as soon as we hear the word race? Why are the conclusions of more than a century of exhaustive psychometric research, backed up by our recent advances in genetics, still so completely unpersuasive?
I can guess the answer, and I think you can too.
As far as I can tell, the implied analogy here between Ishaan’s position and climate kookery is an unfair one. I am not aware of a consensus on the aetiology of between-race IQ differences comparable to the consensus on global warming.
Of course, even if there aren’t synthesis reports written by hundreds of scientists, or statements from national scientific societies, there are smaller-scale reports & surveys on the IQ controversy. But what Ishaan wrote turns out to broadly agree with those.
The two obvious examples here are the research summaries published in the wake of the commotion around The Bell Curve. One is “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns”, a report by an 11-member panel approved by the American Psychological Association.
For IQ’s heritability the panel reports values “of the order of .45” in childhood and “around .75″ “by late adolescence” (p. 85). On the possibility of environmental factors entering into the white-black IQ gap it suggests that socioeconomic status “cannot be the whole explanation”, but pays respectful attention to other cultural explanations of the gap (pp. 94-95) while acknowledging that they “have little direct empirical support” (p. 97). As for genetic factors: “There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.” (p. 97); “There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis.” (p. 95). These conclusions are compatible with Ishaan’s, except for the review’s estimate of adult IQ heritability being higher than Ishaan’s 60%.
The other research summary is Linda S. Gottfredson’s “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography”. It goes into less detail on IQ’s heritability, but where it gets quantitative it says “estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8″ (p. 14), which brackets Ishaan’s 60% estimate nicely. As for the cause of lower black IQ, it says:
This too is consistent with what Ishaan wrote.
(A shorter petition, “Behavior and Heredity”, appeared in American Psychologist in 1972 over the names of 50 researchers. But it doesn’t make any claims specific enough to compare to Ishaan’s.)
I also know of a couple of surveys. The more recent is Charlie Reeve & Jennifer Charles’s “Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views”, but that didn’t ask its respondents about heritability or causes of interracial IQ differences. The older survey is Mark Snyderman & Stanley Rothman’s “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing”, which did ask.
In fact, it broke the heritability question down further, by asking about IQ’s heritability among American whites and American blacks, considered separately:
Those averages are very close to Ishaan’s. As for the black-white IQ difference:
There was no majority opinion in the survey. Even after cutting out the non-responses, only a bare majority (about 53%) felt confident in saying the IQ difference had a genetic component. Meanwhile, about 45% of those who responded took either the same position as Ishaan (insufficient data) or a more environmentalist one.
All in all, Ishaan’s views are about as hereditarian as the expert consensus, where that consensus exists. I don’t understand which “discipline’s consensus’s” Ishaan’s meant to be ignoring. (I’m leery of the suggestion of “goalpost-moving”, too, since I can’t spot any substantial drift in the claims Ishaan made over time.)
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
My measure is a little crude; it uses IQ scores without dividing them into fluid/crystallized or verbal/nonverbal and that does have a cost in terms of accuracy. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or energy to do much better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not to mention my access to census data blows now that the Federal Government is shut down. This is part of why I didn’t bother looking at Asian-White or Male-Female differences where the numbers are smaller and the breakdown of scores is messier.
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
Sure, I didn’t mean that modern proportions are reasonable; mine was just a nitpick.
I have 0.75 confidence that you’ve never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different—that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
I’ll cop to not having read much of Sen, but he seems like a clear odd one out in your list. He respectfully tips his hat to a few Marxian ideas in his work (see e.g. pages 14 & 15 of “The Moral Standing of the Market”, and the handful of shoutouts to Marx in On Economic Inequality), but I got the feeling he was more of a centre-left liberal than a hard leftist. See also: an actual commie’s Amazon review complaining that Development and Freedom is too pro-market, centrist, and wishy-washy.
Moss_Piglet claimed democracy and marxism were religious in character. Sen is arguably wishy-washy in his Marxism (though you can be pretty far left and still be very harshly criticized by some communists for not being left enough), but there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Sen’s commitment to democracy.
Yeah, I don’t doubt Sen has a staunch commitment to democracy, and I don’t care much about Moss_Piglet’s claim that democracy & Marxism are religious in character. Taken literally it’s obviously true in some sense. (Both democracy & Marxism are popular ideologies, and popular ideologies, like religions, demand broad normative commitments from adherents while making assorted truth claims, at least some of which are false.) What I’m sceptical of is Multiheaded’s characterization of Sen.