Sorry if I missed this in the coments already here, but BOTH of these statements are true:
1) White people are smarter than black people
2) Black people are smarter than white people.
In The Bell Curve there are reams of data on these questions leading to the conclusion that there is a difference in the mean intelligence of black and white Americans that is not accounted for by differences in education, income, or a variety of other things. But the other overwhelming fact is that the distributions of intelligence (measured by IQ in that book) were highly overlapping. So for the vast bulk of us, we could find people who were smarter than us be they white or black and be we white or black.
I think the provocation of the statement comes from our bias against thinking in terms of distributions. Who cares if women are smarter than men on average as long as I am smarter than my wife. Who cares if white people are smarter than black people if the black guy down the hall is kicking my butt at analyzing things at work.
Another remarkable component of the original EY post is the equation of genetic intelligence among humans with “fairness” or “justice” to the point that EY asserts god is a criminal if she has created us ith different intelligences. (Presumably a hypothetical as presumably EY doesn’t believe god created us at all anymore?)
What a narrow view of fairness! I suspect the richest people in the world have small overlap with the most intelligent. I suspect the most popular people in the world have small overlap with the most intelligent. I am virtually positive that the most laid (sexually) people in the world have little overlap with the most intelligent. As far as concerns along the “problem of evil” dimension are used to convert people to atheism, we might want to stick with the problems of young children treated absolutely horribly by sadistic perverts rather than much narrower injustice of being born to get a B in history and have to attend a public college.
Downvoted: You seem rather confused in your thinking—and you seem to be projecting some confusion to the rest of us as well. I don’t think anyone here has confused the meanings of the sentence “Group A has lower average intelligence than Group B” and the sentence “All members of group A have lower intelligence than any member of Group B”—that’s a confusion which you spend the three first paragraphs needlessly disentangling for the rest of us.
As for your last two paragraph, you seem to be thinking that for Eliezer to mention one example of the universe’s unfairness, means that he necessarily considers it the prime example of said unfairness. Hardly. It just came up, because another person mentioned differences in intelligence as a sign of an unjust God—but they limited said thinking to only racial differences, not individual differences.
Sorry if I missed this in the coments already here, but BOTH of these statements are true: 1) White people are smarter than black people 2) Black people are smarter than white people.
In The Bell Curve there are reams of data on these questions leading to the conclusion that there is a difference in the mean intelligence of black and white Americans that is not accounted for by differences in education, income, or a variety of other things. But the other overwhelming fact is that the distributions of intelligence (measured by IQ in that book) were highly overlapping. So for the vast bulk of us, we could find people who were smarter than us be they white or black and be we white or black.
I think the provocation of the statement comes from our bias against thinking in terms of distributions. Who cares if women are smarter than men on average as long as I am smarter than my wife. Who cares if white people are smarter than black people if the black guy down the hall is kicking my butt at analyzing things at work.
Another remarkable component of the original EY post is the equation of genetic intelligence among humans with “fairness” or “justice” to the point that EY asserts god is a criminal if she has created us ith different intelligences. (Presumably a hypothetical as presumably EY doesn’t believe god created us at all anymore?)
What a narrow view of fairness! I suspect the richest people in the world have small overlap with the most intelligent. I suspect the most popular people in the world have small overlap with the most intelligent. I am virtually positive that the most laid (sexually) people in the world have little overlap with the most intelligent. As far as concerns along the “problem of evil” dimension are used to convert people to atheism, we might want to stick with the problems of young children treated absolutely horribly by sadistic perverts rather than much narrower injustice of being born to get a B in history and have to attend a public college.
Downvoted: You seem rather confused in your thinking—and you seem to be projecting some confusion to the rest of us as well. I don’t think anyone here has confused the meanings of the sentence “Group A has lower average intelligence than Group B” and the sentence “All members of group A have lower intelligence than any member of Group B”—that’s a confusion which you spend the three first paragraphs needlessly disentangling for the rest of us.
As for your last two paragraph, you seem to be thinking that for Eliezer to mention one example of the universe’s unfairness, means that he necessarily considers it the prime example of said unfairness. Hardly. It just came up, because another person mentioned differences in intelligence as a sign of an unjust God—but they limited said thinking to only racial differences, not individual differences.