I can’t even imagine what sort of hell would break loose in my Politics class if I were to profess a belief merely in the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence between races. Any logic would be ignored, immediately branded as justification for a bigoted agenda. Politics truly is the mindkiller.
Same way that some people can talk about the statistical correlations between e.g. IQ and race, most other people nowadays have learned to correlate instead those people who so correlate these things with evil people who want to oppress other races.
And certainly that’s actually the rational thing to do. If you hear someone seek to correlate races with IQ, you ought adjust upwards the probabilty of them wanting to oppress other races. Because there is a positive correlation between people who speak about lower intelligence of blacks and evil people who so want to oppress other races.
Is there any research on whether people can achieve evidence-based prejudice, or if (as I’m inclined to suspect) they overshoot and overestimate the effects of differences?
Interesting question. I’ve generally assumed that this was basically just belief in belief and that people’s actions already basically take into account the data (since it is ridiculusly hard to not notice it poping up everywhere if you have even a bit of pattern recognition capability).
This is a good point. Though what CJ says about actions already reflecting the data seems to be a pretty reasonable observation. Perhaps people don’t notice the data, perhaps their actions and behaviours arise purley through social mobility and memetic evolution.
Take for example the upper middle class and compare their stated ideals with their actual lifestyles on say divorce and other issues. It is hard to miss that they often behave as if they only had belief in belief but organized their actual lives by a different model. Someone being slightly cynical migh call this class warfare or perhaps handicap signaling.
But there might be a different better explanation. If say a society promotes ideals that make it harder for people to stay in a certain socioeconomic neiche, the behaviour of people that remain in that neiche will still on average be pretty decently adapted to it (or at least more dapted to it than anyone else) even if they state, belive and truly aren’t using the now low status principles to organize their lives. You don’t always need the human brain to come up with rationalizations, Azathoth can do it for you!
This is where I do think something like the handicap principle comes back into play. Evolution’s beneficiaries
are perhaps the people who in far mode most distain the rational self interested reasons or the easiest to grok rationalizations which recommend the course of action that actually keeps them in their neiche. Everyone notices what kind of people tend to have what kind of beliefs. Stabilising competence signaling ensues.
I can’t even imagine what sort of hell would break loose in my Politics class if I were to profess a belief merely in the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence between races. Any logic would be ignored, immediately branded as justification for a bigoted agenda. Politics truly is the mindkiller.
That’s a powerful one. Several of the Rationalist Bootcampers had similar reactions.
One of the interlocutors feels it’s important to take civil rights away from people.
EDIT: To be absolutely clear, I’m certain the second thing is not true of any of the bootcampers, and I’m almost certain that racial IQ differences came up in conversation only as an example of something people don’t consider rationally, not as a subject of interest in its own right.
Group differences in average IQ are relevant in discussions regarding whether or not policies and institutions that were successful in some jurisdictions should be recommended in other jurisdictions where the people have different genetic backgrounds. They can also legitimately arise in discussions about the evolution of intelligence.
How well the relevant groups in those discussions match folk notions of race, is another question. Some aspects of our folk racial categories seem obviously silly in this regard—like how children of one white parent and one black parent are considered black.
How did the subject come up? I have never ever heard this subject discussed outside of two contexts:
The question under discussion is “What can’t we say?”; or
One of the interlocutors feels it’s important to take civil rights away from people.
Well, since this is the first reference in this thread to “What can’t we say?”, which of the commenters would you say “feels it’s important to take civil rights away from people”?
Ummm, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post, on which this discussion is based, is about “What can’t we say?” ie. why can’t we say there are racial differences in IQ.
So this thread doesn’t seem to be evidence against Nisan’s statement.
Was anyone’s mind destroyed, or did people get over it?
Might want to do an intro to statistics at the end if day one, where the mass of each soda bottle ever produced by Pepsi and Coke is calculated. Then find the average bottle mass for each company.
It’s a test of the universal law that two random different things are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason. This applies even when there is a spectacularly good reason to think that they would be roughly equal, and also when summing and taking averages.
As a close analogy, consider the mass of each bottle to be the IQ of each person in a group, and the bottle types produced by each company to each comprise a group.
It’s a test of the universal law that two random different things are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason.
That’s not a universal law. A random partition of a large set of objects may well produce two sets in which the distribution of all properties is the same as in the original set. The same is true if the set is partitioned according to some property that doesn’t correlate with anything else.
The controversies on this issue are about whether certain properties that can be used to partition human populations do have correlations with various other relevant properties, what is the reason for these correlations if they do exist, and what should be their wider implications.
What I believe you meant to say is that the results of two different processes “are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason.”
If I wanted to raise this possibility for discussion, I would likely leave “race” out of the discussion.
I’d probably start out by raising the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence among individuals; if that were successful I’d move on to the notion that there might be other shared differential characteristics among high-intelligence and low-intelligence communities; if that were successful I’d move on to the question of what those other characteristics might be… for example, age, or childhood nutritional regimens, or geographic region of birth, or various other things.
If, instead of doing that, somebody starts out by privileging a hypothesis that “race” correlates with intelligence for some particular definition of “race” and framing the conversation in those terms, I’d want to know what leads them to privilege that hypothesis before I was willing to invest much in that discussion, in much the same way that if someone starts out by privileging a hypothesis that the Old Testament God created the world in seven days I’d be inclined to reject their conversational framing.
Part of the problem is that “race” isn’t really a biological classification, although people pretend it is. It is a folk taxonomy that appears to be based partly on phenotype (e.g. skin color) but also partly on socially constructed facts such as language, socioeconomic status, and religion. So if you want to talk about phenotype or ancestral origin, talk about these; race is at best a biased label for a disguised query.
In say the American context race does basically match ancestral origin in the first approximation. Say
African Americans are a hybrid population of West Africans and North-Western Europeans. Or for example European Americans are mostly North Western Europeans mixed in with a bit of Southern and Eastern European. The Hispanic category (which isn’t even a race) is basically an euphemism for Mexican American (who the majority of US Hispanics are) which is because of economic differences between Mexico and the US and the pattern of migration basically a euphemism for Mestizo (which as a European-Native American hybrid population with a relatively uniform amount of admixture does make sense as a biological entity).
Not only that, those who have older roots on the continent may have gone through common selective pressures. To quote Gregory Cochran
Amish in Lancaster County, Ashkenazi Jews as a merchant/scribe caste, Tibetans & altitude, pastoralists and lactase tolerance, hunter-gatherers → peasants : every significant, lasting ecological change creates an altered human population, different in both body and mind.
I can’t even imagine what sort of hell would break loose in my Politics class if I were to profess a belief merely in the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence between races. Any logic would be ignored, immediately branded as justification for a bigoted agenda. Politics truly is the mindkiller.
Same way that some people can talk about the statistical correlations between e.g. IQ and race, most other people nowadays have learned to correlate instead those people who so correlate these things with evil people who want to oppress other races.
And certainly that’s actually the rational thing to do. If you hear someone seek to correlate races with IQ, you ought adjust upwards the probabilty of them wanting to oppress other races. Because there is a positive correlation between people who speak about lower intelligence of blacks and evil people who so want to oppress other races.
No, it is a rationalization of what they happened to do.
I would think it’s usually both.
By a small amount I think it is.
Is there any research on whether people can achieve evidence-based prejudice, or if (as I’m inclined to suspect) they overshoot and overestimate the effects of differences?
Interesting question. I’ve generally assumed that this was basically just belief in belief and that people’s actions already basically take into account the data (since it is ridiculusly hard to not notice it poping up everywhere if you have even a bit of pattern recognition capability).
I think people are remarkably good at ignoring data in favor of socially reinforced ideas.
This is a good point. Though what CJ says about actions already reflecting the data seems to be a pretty reasonable observation. Perhaps people don’t notice the data, perhaps their actions and behaviours arise purley through social mobility and memetic evolution.
Take for example the upper middle class and compare their stated ideals with their actual lifestyles on say divorce and other issues. It is hard to miss that they often behave as if they only had belief in belief but organized their actual lives by a different model. Someone being slightly cynical migh call this class warfare or perhaps handicap signaling.
But there might be a different better explanation. If say a society promotes ideals that make it harder for people to stay in a certain socioeconomic neiche, the behaviour of people that remain in that neiche will still on average be pretty decently adapted to it (or at least more dapted to it than anyone else) even if they state, belive and truly aren’t using the now low status principles to organize their lives. You don’t always need the human brain to come up with rationalizations, Azathoth can do it for you!
This is where I do think something like the handicap principle comes back into play. Evolution’s beneficiaries are perhaps the people who in far mode most distain the rational self interested reasons or the easiest to grok rationalizations which recommend the course of action that actually keeps them in their neiche. Everyone notices what kind of people tend to have what kind of beliefs. Stabilising competence signaling ensues.
There’s research to suggest people are racist to begin with, so giving them evidence may not affect their predictions or expectations at all!
That’s a powerful one. Several of the Rationalist Bootcampers had similar reactions.
Was this part of a “lets try to kill the minds of the bootcampers and see how they handle it” or did the subject just come up?
Subject came up.
How did the subject come up? I have never ever heard this subject discussed outside of two contexts:
The question under discussion is “What can’t we say?”; or
One of the interlocutors feels it’s important to take civil rights away from people.
EDIT: To be absolutely clear, I’m certain the second thing is not true of any of the bootcampers, and I’m almost certain that racial IQ differences came up in conversation only as an example of something people don’t consider rationally, not as a subject of interest in its own right.
Group differences in average IQ are relevant in discussions regarding whether or not policies and institutions that were successful in some jurisdictions should be recommended in other jurisdictions where the people have different genetic backgrounds. They can also legitimately arise in discussions about the evolution of intelligence.
How well the relevant groups in those discussions match folk notions of race, is another question. Some aspects of our folk racial categories seem obviously silly in this regard—like how children of one white parent and one black parent are considered black.
I have never seen that happen ever.
Well, since this is the first reference in this thread to “What can’t we say?”, which of the commenters would you say “feels it’s important to take civil rights away from people”?
But seriously, you should get out of the habit of assuming sinister motives of people who disagree with you.
Ummm, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post, on which this discussion is based, is about “What can’t we say?” ie. why can’t we say there are racial differences in IQ.
So this thread doesn’t seem to be evidence against Nisan’s statement.
I feel like I’ve been misunderstood somehow.
It comes up for people considering adopting kids.
Was anyone’s mind destroyed, or did people get over it?
Might want to do an intro to statistics at the end if day one, where the mass of each soda bottle ever produced by Pepsi and Coke is calculated. Then find the average bottle mass for each company.
Then wait.
I don’t see what you’re getting at with the Pepsi and Coke bottle thing—could you explain a bit?
It’s a test of the universal law that two random different things are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason. This applies even when there is a spectacularly good reason to think that they would be roughly equal, and also when summing and taking averages.
As a close analogy, consider the mass of each bottle to be the IQ of each person in a group, and the bottle types produced by each company to each comprise a group.
That’s not a universal law. A random partition of a large set of objects may well produce two sets in which the distribution of all properties is the same as in the original set. The same is true if the set is partitioned according to some property that doesn’t correlate with anything else.
The controversies on this issue are about whether certain properties that can be used to partition human populations do have correlations with various other relevant properties, what is the reason for these correlations if they do exist, and what should be their wider implications.
What I believe you meant to say is that the results of two different processes “are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason.”
If I wanted to raise this possibility for discussion, I would likely leave “race” out of the discussion.
I’d probably start out by raising the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence among individuals; if that were successful I’d move on to the notion that there might be other shared differential characteristics among high-intelligence and low-intelligence communities; if that were successful I’d move on to the question of what those other characteristics might be… for example, age, or childhood nutritional regimens, or geographic region of birth, or various other things.
If, instead of doing that, somebody starts out by privileging a hypothesis that “race” correlates with intelligence for some particular definition of “race” and framing the conversation in those terms, I’d want to know what leads them to privilege that hypothesis before I was willing to invest much in that discussion, in much the same way that if someone starts out by privileging a hypothesis that the Old Testament God created the world in seven days I’d be inclined to reject their conversational framing.
Part of the problem is that “race” isn’t really a biological classification, although people pretend it is. It is a folk taxonomy that appears to be based partly on phenotype (e.g. skin color) but also partly on socially constructed facts such as language, socioeconomic status, and religion. So if you want to talk about phenotype or ancestral origin, talk about these; race is at best a biased label for a disguised query.
In say the American context race does basically match ancestral origin in the first approximation. Say African Americans are a hybrid population of West Africans and North-Western Europeans. Or for example European Americans are mostly North Western Europeans mixed in with a bit of Southern and Eastern European. The Hispanic category (which isn’t even a race) is basically an euphemism for Mexican American (who the majority of US Hispanics are) which is because of economic differences between Mexico and the US and the pattern of migration basically a euphemism for Mestizo (which as a European-Native American hybrid population with a relatively uniform amount of admixture does make sense as a biological entity).
Not only that, those who have older roots on the continent may have gone through common selective pressures. To quote Gregory Cochran
Absolutely agreed, which is why I put the word in scare quotes in the first place.
Sure you can, just call them blondes or gingers, instead of that other explosive thing. You can reveal the truth at the end of the discussion.