I regard many of the beliefs popular here—cyronics, libertarianism, human biodiversity, pickup artistry—with extreme skepticism. (As if in compensation, I have my own unpopular frameworks for understanding the world.)
I’d love to hear more about this: I also like exposing myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way, and I’m interested in your unpopular frameworks.
Specifically: cryonics is highly speculative, but do you think there’s a small chance it might work? When you say you don’t believe in human biodiversity, what does that mean? And when you say you don’t believe in pickup artistry, you don’t think that dating and relationships skills exist?
“I’d love to hear more about this: I also like exposing myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way, and I’m interested in your unpopular frameworks.”
Specifically, I’ve become increasingly interested in Marxism, especially the varieties of Anglo post-Marxism that emerged from the analytical tradition. I don’t imagine this is any more popular here than it is among normal people, but the general mode of analysis is probably less foreign to libertarian types than they might assume—as implied above, we’re both working from materialist assumptions (beyond what’s implied above, this applies to more than one meaning of “materialist,” at least for certain types of libertarians.)
In general, my bias is to assume that people’s behavior is more rational (I mean this in a utility-maximizing sense, rather than in the “rationalist” sense) than it initially appears. In general, the more we know about the context of a decision, the more rational it usually appears to be; and there may be something beyond vanity for the tendency of people, who are in greatest possession of their own situations, to consider themselves atypically rational. I see this materialist (in the “latter,” economic sense) viewpoint as avoiding unnecessary mulitiplication of entities and (not that it should matter for truth) a basically respectful way of facially analyzing people: “MAYBE they’re just crazy, but until we have more contextual knowledge, let’s take as a working assumption that this is in their self-interest.” This is my general verbal justification for reflexively turning to materialist explanations, although the CAUSE of my doing so is probably just that I studied neoclassical economics for four years.
“Specifically: cryonics is highly speculative, but do you think there’s a small chance it might work?”
Of course. The transparent wish-fulfillment seems inherently suspect, like the immortality claims of religions, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the case; and it doesn’t seem like enthusiasm for cyrogenics seems more harmful than other hobbies. So I wish everyone involved the best of luck.
Of course I can’t how much I’m generalizing from my own lack of enthusiasm. I don’t put a positive value on additional years of my life—I experience some suicidal ideation but don’t act on it because I know it would make people I care about incredibly upset. (This doesn’t mean that I subjectively find my life to be torturous, or that it’s hard not to act on the ideation; I think my life overall averages out to a level of slight annoyance—one can say “cet par, I’d rather not have experienced that span of annoyance” but one can also easily endure such a span if not doing so would cause tremendous outrage in others.)
“When you say you don’t believe in human biodiversity, what does that mean?”
I mean I don’t believe in what the sort of people who say “human biodiversity” refer to when they use that phrase: namely, that non-cosmetic, non-immunity genetic differences between ethnic groups are great enough to be of social importance. (Or to use the sort of moralizing, PC language I’d use in most any social context other than here: I am not a consciously-identified racist, though like anyone I have unconscious racial prejudices.) As above, politico-moral reasons wouldn’t inhabit my verbal justification for this, although they’re probably the efficient cause of my belief.
It’s probably inevitable that racism will be unusually popular among a community devoted to Exploring Brave Edgy Truths No Matter the Cost, but I’m not afraid that actually XBETNMtC will lead me to racism—both because I consider that very unlikely, and because if reason does lead me to racism, then it is proper to be a racist. (This is true of beliefs generally, of course.)
“And when you say you don’t believe in pickup artistry, you don’t think that dating and relationships skills exist?”
Dating and relationship skills exist, but it seems transparent that the meat of PUA is just a magic feather to make dorky young men more confident. (Though one should not dismiss the utility of magic feathers!) I find the “seduction community” repulsively misogynistic, but that’s a separate issue. (Verbal justifications, efficient causes, you know the drill.)
Being easily confident with strangers is by far the most important skill for acquiring a large number of sexual partners—this is of course a truth proclaimed by PUA, one which has been widespread knowledge since the dawn of time—and for the same time that easy confidence with strangers is the most important skill for politicians, sales professionals, &c. I do think it’s here, for game-theoretic reasons, that the idea of “general social skills” can break down: easy confidence with strangers sabotages your ability to send certain social signals that are important to maintaining close relationships. So there are tradeoffs to make, and I think generally speaking people make the tradeoffs that reflect their preferences.
I typically think of Marxists as people who don’t understand economics or human nature and subscribe to the labor theory of value. But you’ve studied economics, so I’m curious exactly what form of Marxism you subscribe to.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said “human biodiversity”, I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don’t all think the same way.
There are different views on PUA, but in my experience the “meat of PUA” is just conversational practice and learning flirtation and comfort. It’s like the magic feather in that believing in your own ability helps, but I don’t see it as fake at all.
I do think it’s here, for game-theoretic reasons, that the idea of “general social skills” can break down: easy confidence with strangers sabotages your ability to send certain social signals that are important to maintaining close relationships.
Please elaborate on this. It sounds interesting but I’m not sure what you mean.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said “human biodiversity”, I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don’t all think the same way.
My impression was that it is popular here, but I may be overgeneralizing from a few examples or other contexts.
The fact that no one else is saying it’s popular suggests but doesn’t prove that I’m mistaken.
IIRC, the last time the subject came up, the racial differences in IQ proponent was swatted down, but it was for not having sound arguments to support his views, not for being wrong.
More exactly, there were a few people who disagreed with the race/IQ connection at some length, but the hard swats were because of the lack of good arguments.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said “human biodiversity”, I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don’t all think the same way.
The psychological diversity article you link to is about Gregory Cochran’s and Henry Harpending’s book, which is all about the thesis of human evolution within the last ten thousand years affecting the societies of different human populations in various ways. It includes a chapter about Ashkenazi Jews seeming to have a higher IQ than their surrounding populations due to genetics. So I’m not really sure what the difference you are going for here is.
I’m afraid you may be a bit confused on this. What are the odds that out of all ethnicities on the planet, only Ashkenazi Jews where the ones to develop a different IQ than the surrounding peoples? And only in the past thousand years or so. What about all those groups that have been isolated or differentiated in very different natural and even social environments for tens of thousands of years?
Unless you are using “the racial gap” to refer to the specific measured IQ differences between people of African, European and East Asian descent, which may indeed be caused by the envrionment, rather than the possibility of differences between human “races” in general. But even in that case the existence of ethnic genetic IQ differences should increase the probability of a genetic explanation somewhat.
Participant here from the beginning and from OB before that, posting under a throwaway account. And this will probably be my only comment on the race-IQ issue here.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap [emphasis mine].
The vast majority of writers here have not given their opinion on the topic. Many people here write under their real name or under a name that can be matched to their real name by spending a half hour with Google. In the U.S. (the only society I really know) this is not the kind of opinion you can put under your real name without significant risk of losing one’s job or losing out to the competition in a job application, dating situation or such.
Second, one of the main reasons Less Wrong was set up is as a recruiting tool for SIAI. (The other is to increase the rationality of the general population.) Most of the people here with a good reputation are either affiliated with SIAI or would like to keep open the option of starting an affiliation some day. (I certainly do.) Since SIAI’s selection process includes looking at the applicant’s posting history here, even writers whose user names cannot be correlated with the name they would put on a job application will tend to avoid taking the unpopular-with-SIAI side in the race-IQ debate.
So, want to start a debate that will leave your side with complete control of the battlefield? Post about the race-IQ issue on Less Wrong rather than one of the web sites set up to discuss the topic!
Downvoted for not even giving your opinion on the issue even with your throwaway account.
Some have pointed out that cultural and environmental explanations can account for significant IQ differences. This is true.
It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.
“It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.”
And what direction they’re in. If social factors are sufficient to explain (e.g.) the black-white IQ gap, and the argument for their being some innate differences is “well, it’s exceedingly unlikely that they’re precisely the same,” we don’t have reason to rate “whites are natively more intelligent than blacks” as more likely than “blacks are natively more intelligent than whites.” (If we know that Smith is wealthier than Jones, and that Smith found a load of Spanish dubloons by chance last year, we can’t make useful conclusions about whose job was more renumerative before Smith found her pirate booty.) Of course, native racial differences might also be such that there are environmental conditions under which blacks are smarter than whites and others in which the reverse applies, or whatever.
In any event I don’t think we need to hypothesize the existence of such entities (substantial racial differences) to explain reality, so the razor applies.
Even if cultural factors are sufficient, in themselves, to explain the black-white IQ difference, it remains more probable that whites tend to have a higher IQ by reason of genetic factors, and East Asians even more so.
This should be obvious: a person’s total IQ is going to be the sum of the effects of cultural factors plus genetic factors. But “the sum is higher for whites” is more likely given the hypothesis “whites have more of an IQ contribution from genetic factors” than given the hypothesis “blacks have more of an IQ contribution from genetic factors”. Therefore, if our priors for the two were equal, which presumably they are, then after updating on the evidence, it is more likely that whites have more of a contribution to IQ from genetic factors.
I’m not sure that this is the case, given that the confound has a known direction and unknown magnitude.
Back to Smith, Jones, and Spanish treasure: let’s assume that we have an uncontroversial measure of their wealth differences just after Smith sold. (Let’s say $50,000.) We have a detailed description of the treasure Smith found, but very little market data on which to base an estimation of what she sold them for. It seems that ceteris paribus, if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is >$50,000, Jones is likelier to have a higher non-pirate gold income, and if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is <$50,000, Smith is likelier to.
Whites and blacks both have a cultural contribution to IQ. So to make your example work, we have to say that Smith and Jones both found treasure, but in unequal amounts. Let’s say that our estimate is that Smith found treasure approximately worth $50,000, and Jones found treasure approximately worth $10,000. If the difference in their wealth is exactly $50,000, then most likely Smith was richer in the first place, by approximately $10,000.
In order to say that Jones was most likely richer, the difference in their wealth would have to be under $40,000, or the difference between our estimates of the treasures found by Smith and Jones.
I agree with this reasoning, although it does not contradict my general reasoning: it is much like the fact that if you find evidence that someone was murdered (as opposed to dying an accidental death), this will increase the chances that Smith is a murderer, but then if you find very specific evidence, the chance that Smith is a murderer may go down below what it was originally.
However, notice that in order to end up saying that blacks and whites are equally likely to have a greater genetic component to their intelligence, you must say that your estimate of the average demographic difference is EXACTLY equal to the difference between your estimates of the cultural components of their average IQs. And if you say this, I will say that you wrote it on the bottom line, before you estimated the cultural components.
And if you don’t say this, you have to assert one or the other: it is more likely that whites have a greater genetic component, or it is more likely that blacks do. It is not equally likely.
And if you don’t say this, you have to assert one or the other: it is more likely that whites have a greater genetic component, or it is more likely that blacks do. It is not equally likely.
Often when people say “equally likely” they mean “I don’t know enough to credibly estimate which one is greater, the probability distributions just overlap too much.” (Yes, the ‘bottom line’ idea is more relevant here. It’s a political minefield.)
But that’s the point of my general argument: if you know that whites average a higher IQ score, but not necessarily by how much (say because you haven’t investigated), and you also know that there is a cultural component for both whites and blacks, but you don’t know how much it is for each, then you should simply say that it is more likely (but not certain) that whites have a higher genetic component.
I mean “equally likely” in wedrifid’s sense: not that, having done a proper Bayesian analysis on all evidence, I may set the probability of p(W>B)=p(B>W}=.5 (assuming intelligence works in such a way that this implied division into genetic and environmental components makes sense), but that 1) I don’t know enough about Spanish gold to make an informed judgement and 2) my rough estimate is that “I could see it going either way”—something inherent in saying that environmental differences are “sufficient to explain” extant differences. So actually forming beliefs about these relative levels is both insufficiently grounded and unnecessary.
I suppose if I had to write some median expectation it’s that they’re equal in the sense that we would regard any other two things in the phenomenal world of everyday experience equal—when you see two jars of peanut butter of the same brand and size next to each other on a shelf in the supermarket, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they have exaaaactly the same amount of peanut butter, but it’s close enough to use the word.
I don’t think this is really a case of writing things down on the bottom line. What reason would there be to suppose ex ante that these arbitrarily constructed groups differ to some more-than-jars-of-peanut-butter degree? Is there some selective pressure for intelligence that exists above the Sahara but not below it (more obvious than counter-just-so-stories we could construct?) Cet par I expect a population of chimpanzees or orangutans in one region to be peanut butter equal in intelligence to those in another region, and we have lower intraspecific SNP variation than other apes.
“I could see it going either way” is consistent with having a best estimate that goes one way rather than another.
Just as you have the Flynn effect with intelligence, so average height has also been increasing. Would you say the same thing about height, that the average height of white people and black people has no significant genetic difference, but it is basically all cultural? If not, what is the difference?
In any case, both height and intelligence are subject to sexual selection, not merely ordinary natural selection. And where you have sexual selection, one would indeed expect to find substantial differences between diverse populations: for example, it would not be at all surprising to find significantly different peacock tails among peacock populations that were separated for thousands of years. You will find these significant differences because there are so many other factors affecting sexual preference; to the degree that you have a sexual preference for smarter people, you are neglecting taller people (unless these are 100% correlated, which they are not), and to the degree that you have a sexual preference for taller people, you are neglecting smarter people. So one just-so-story would be that black people preferred taller people more (note the basketball players) and so preferred more intelligent people less. This just-so-story would be supported even more by the fact that the Japanese are even shorter, and still more intelligent.
Granted, that remains a just-so-story. But yes, I would expect “ex ante” to find significant genetic differences between races in intelligence, along with other factors like height.
The reason I did not even give my opinion on the race-IQ issue is that IMHO the expected damage to the quality of the conversation here exceeds the expected benefit.
It is possible for a writer to share the evidence that brought them to their current position on the issue without stating their position, but I do not want to do that because it is a lot of work and because there are probably already perfectly satisfactory books on the subject.
By the way, the kind of person who will discriminate against me because of my opinion on this issue will almost certainly correctly infer which side I am on from my first comment without really having to think about it.
It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.
That is not the only question. The question that gets people into trouble, is “which groups are favored or disfavored”. You can’t answer that without offending some people, no matter how small you think the genetic component of the difference is, because many of the people who read it will discard or forget the magnitude entirely and look at only the sign. Saying that group X is genetically smarter than group Y by 10^-10 IQ points will, for many listeners, have the same effect as saying that X is 10^1 IQ points smarter. And while the former belief may be true, the latter belief is false, harmful to those who hold it, and harmful to uninvolved third parties. True statements about race, IQ, and genetics are very easy to simplify or round off to false, harmful and disreputable ones.
That’s why comments about race, IQ, and genetics always have to be one level separated from reality, talking about groups X and Y and people with orange eyes rather than real traits and ethnicities. And if they aren’t well-separated from reality, they have to be anonymous, to protect the author from the reputational effects of things others incorrectly believe they’ve said.
(Edited to add: See also this comment I previously wrote on the same topic, which describes a mechanism by which true beliefs about demographic differences in intelligence (not necessarily genetic ones) produce false beliefs about individual intelligence.)
It seems clear to me that much of the time when people mistakenly get offended, they’re mistaken about what sort of claim they should get offended about, not just mistaken about what claim was made.
Since SIAI’s selection process includes looking at the applicant’s posting history here, even writers whose user names cannot be correlated with the name they would put on a job application will tend to avoid taking the unpopular-with-SIAI side in the race-IQ debate.
What makes you think “the unpopular-with-SIAI side” exists? Or that it is what you think it is?
I wouldn’t say I “subscribe” to Marxism, though it seems plausible to me that I might in the near future. I’m still investigating it. While I wouldn’t say that specific Marxist hypothesis have risen to the level of doxastic attitudes, the approach has affected the sort of facial explanations I give for phenomena. But as I said the tradition I’m most interested in is recent, economics-focused English language academic Marxism. (The cultural stuff doesn’t really interest me all that much, and most of it strikes me as nonsense, but I’m not informed enough about it to conclude that “yes, it is nonsense!”) If I could recommend a starting point it would be Harvey’s “Limits to Capital,” although it was Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the 19th century that sparked my interest.
I hope this doesn’t sound evasive! I try to economize on my explicit beliefs while being explicit on my existing biases.
(As a side note, while there are a lot of different LTVs floating around, it’s likely that they’re almost all a bit more trivial and a lot less crazy than what you might be imagining. Most forms don’t contradict neoclassical price theory but do place some additional (idealized, instrumental) constaints in order to explain additional phenomena.)
By the signaling thing, I mean the following: normal humans (not neurotic screwballs, not sociopath salesmen) show a level of confidence in social situations that corresponds roughly to how confident they themselves feel at the time. Thus, when someone approaches you and tries to sell you on something—a product, an idea, or, most commonly, themselves—their confidence level can serve as a good proxy for whether they think the item under sale is actually worthy of purchase. The extent to which they seem guarded signals that they’re not all that. So for game-theoretic reasons, salesmanship works.
But it’s also the case that normal people become more confident and willing to let their guards down when they’re around people they trust, for obvious reasons. Thus, lowering of guards can signal “I trust you; indeed, trust you significantly more than most people” if you showed some guardedness when you first met them. There are other signals you can send, but these are among those whose absence will leave people suspicious, if you want to take your relationships in a more serious direction.
So there are tradeoffs in where you choose to place yourself on the easy-confidence spectrum. Moving to the left makes it easier to make casual friends, and lots of them; to the right makes it easier to make good friends. I suspect that most people slide around until they get the goods bundle that they want—I’ve even noticed how I’ve slid around throughout time, in reaction to being placed in new social environments—although there are obvious dysfunctional cases.
Sorry for implying that racism is common here if it isn’t! Seeing Saileresque shibboleths thrown around here a few times and, indeed, the nearbyness of blogs like Roissy probably colored my perceptions. (Perhaps the impression I have of PUA from the Game and Roissy is similarly inaccurate.)
I used to be interested in Marxism, but not so much anymore.
However, I’m still interested in theories of value. The labour theory of value is not just a Marxist thing; it was widely accepted in the 19th century, and there are still non-Marxists who use it.
I have a hard time deciding if the debate is anything more than a matter of definition. Perhaps one ought to have multiple theories of value for different purposes?
Anyway, I want to ask if you have any recommendations for reading on this subject.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap.
I was wondering about that too, it’s not really a a major topic here, though maybe the fact that it’s been recently discussed on Overcoming Bias and that Roissy in DC is a “nearby” blog gave him this impression?
Welcome to Less Wrong!
I’d love to hear more about this: I also like exposing myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way, and I’m interested in your unpopular frameworks.
Specifically: cryonics is highly speculative, but do you think there’s a small chance it might work? When you say you don’t believe in human biodiversity, what does that mean? And when you say you don’t believe in pickup artistry, you don’t think that dating and relationships skills exist?
Thanks for the friendly welcome!
“I’d love to hear more about this: I also like exposing myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way, and I’m interested in your unpopular frameworks.”
Specifically, I’ve become increasingly interested in Marxism, especially the varieties of Anglo post-Marxism that emerged from the analytical tradition. I don’t imagine this is any more popular here than it is among normal people, but the general mode of analysis is probably less foreign to libertarian types than they might assume—as implied above, we’re both working from materialist assumptions (beyond what’s implied above, this applies to more than one meaning of “materialist,” at least for certain types of libertarians.)
In general, my bias is to assume that people’s behavior is more rational (I mean this in a utility-maximizing sense, rather than in the “rationalist” sense) than it initially appears. In general, the more we know about the context of a decision, the more rational it usually appears to be; and there may be something beyond vanity for the tendency of people, who are in greatest possession of their own situations, to consider themselves atypically rational. I see this materialist (in the “latter,” economic sense) viewpoint as avoiding unnecessary mulitiplication of entities and (not that it should matter for truth) a basically respectful way of facially analyzing people: “MAYBE they’re just crazy, but until we have more contextual knowledge, let’s take as a working assumption that this is in their self-interest.” This is my general verbal justification for reflexively turning to materialist explanations, although the CAUSE of my doing so is probably just that I studied neoclassical economics for four years.
“Specifically: cryonics is highly speculative, but do you think there’s a small chance it might work?”
Of course. The transparent wish-fulfillment seems inherently suspect, like the immortality claims of religions, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the case; and it doesn’t seem like enthusiasm for cyrogenics seems more harmful than other hobbies. So I wish everyone involved the best of luck.
Of course I can’t how much I’m generalizing from my own lack of enthusiasm. I don’t put a positive value on additional years of my life—I experience some suicidal ideation but don’t act on it because I know it would make people I care about incredibly upset. (This doesn’t mean that I subjectively find my life to be torturous, or that it’s hard not to act on the ideation; I think my life overall averages out to a level of slight annoyance—one can say “cet par, I’d rather not have experienced that span of annoyance” but one can also easily endure such a span if not doing so would cause tremendous outrage in others.)
“When you say you don’t believe in human biodiversity, what does that mean?”
I mean I don’t believe in what the sort of people who say “human biodiversity” refer to when they use that phrase: namely, that non-cosmetic, non-immunity genetic differences between ethnic groups are great enough to be of social importance. (Or to use the sort of moralizing, PC language I’d use in most any social context other than here: I am not a consciously-identified racist, though like anyone I have unconscious racial prejudices.) As above, politico-moral reasons wouldn’t inhabit my verbal justification for this, although they’re probably the efficient cause of my belief.
It’s probably inevitable that racism will be unusually popular among a community devoted to Exploring Brave Edgy Truths No Matter the Cost, but I’m not afraid that actually XBETNMtC will lead me to racism—both because I consider that very unlikely, and because if reason does lead me to racism, then it is proper to be a racist. (This is true of beliefs generally, of course.)
“And when you say you don’t believe in pickup artistry, you don’t think that dating and relationships skills exist?”
Dating and relationship skills exist, but it seems transparent that the meat of PUA is just a magic feather to make dorky young men more confident. (Though one should not dismiss the utility of magic feathers!) I find the “seduction community” repulsively misogynistic, but that’s a separate issue. (Verbal justifications, efficient causes, you know the drill.)
Being easily confident with strangers is by far the most important skill for acquiring a large number of sexual partners—this is of course a truth proclaimed by PUA, one which has been widespread knowledge since the dawn of time—and for the same time that easy confidence with strangers is the most important skill for politicians, sales professionals, &c. I do think it’s here, for game-theoretic reasons, that the idea of “general social skills” can break down: easy confidence with strangers sabotages your ability to send certain social signals that are important to maintaining close relationships. So there are tradeoffs to make, and I think generally speaking people make the tradeoffs that reflect their preferences.
I typically think of Marxists as people who don’t understand economics or human nature and subscribe to the labor theory of value. But you’ve studied economics, so I’m curious exactly what form of Marxism you subscribe to.
I don’t think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said “human biodiversity”, I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don’t all think the same way.
There are different views on PUA, but in my experience the “meat of PUA” is just conversational practice and learning flirtation and comfort. It’s like the magic feather in that believing in your own ability helps, but I don’t see it as fake at all.
Please elaborate on this. It sounds interesting but I’m not sure what you mean.
My impression was that it is popular here, but I may be overgeneralizing from a few examples or other contexts.
The fact that no one else is saying it’s popular suggests but doesn’t prove that I’m mistaken.
IIRC, the last time the subject came up, the racial differences in IQ proponent was swatted down, but it was for not having sound arguments to support his views, not for being wrong.
More exactly, there were a few people who disagreed with the race/IQ connection at some length, but the hard swats were because of the lack of good arguments.
The psychological diversity article you link to is about Gregory Cochran’s and Henry Harpending’s book, which is all about the thesis of human evolution within the last ten thousand years affecting the societies of different human populations in various ways. It includes a chapter about Ashkenazi Jews seeming to have a higher IQ than their surrounding populations due to genetics. So I’m not really sure what the difference you are going for here is.
That the evidence suggests there may be a genetic explanation for the higher IQ of Ashkenazim but not for the racial IQ gap.
I’m afraid you may be a bit confused on this. What are the odds that out of all ethnicities on the planet, only Ashkenazi Jews where the ones to develop a different IQ than the surrounding peoples? And only in the past thousand years or so. What about all those groups that have been isolated or differentiated in very different natural and even social environments for tens of thousands of years?
Unless you are using “the racial gap” to refer to the specific measured IQ differences between people of African, European and East Asian descent, which may indeed be caused by the envrionment, rather than the possibility of differences between human “races” in general. But even in that case the existence of ethnic genetic IQ differences should increase the probability of a genetic explanation somewhat.
Participant here from the beginning and from OB before that, posting under a throwaway account. And this will probably be my only comment on the race-IQ issue here.
The vast majority of writers here have not given their opinion on the topic. Many people here write under their real name or under a name that can be matched to their real name by spending a half hour with Google. In the U.S. (the only society I really know) this is not the kind of opinion you can put under your real name without significant risk of losing one’s job or losing out to the competition in a job application, dating situation or such.
Second, one of the main reasons Less Wrong was set up is as a recruiting tool for SIAI. (The other is to increase the rationality of the general population.) Most of the people here with a good reputation are either affiliated with SIAI or would like to keep open the option of starting an affiliation some day. (I certainly do.) Since SIAI’s selection process includes looking at the applicant’s posting history here, even writers whose user names cannot be correlated with the name they would put on a job application will tend to avoid taking the unpopular-with-SIAI side in the race-IQ debate.
So, want to start a debate that will leave your side with complete control of the battlefield? Post about the race-IQ issue on Less Wrong rather than one of the web sites set up to discuss the topic!
Downvoted for not even giving your opinion on the issue even with your throwaway account.
Some have pointed out that cultural and environmental explanations can account for significant IQ differences. This is true.
It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.
“It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.”
And what direction they’re in. If social factors are sufficient to explain (e.g.) the black-white IQ gap, and the argument for their being some innate differences is “well, it’s exceedingly unlikely that they’re precisely the same,” we don’t have reason to rate “whites are natively more intelligent than blacks” as more likely than “blacks are natively more intelligent than whites.” (If we know that Smith is wealthier than Jones, and that Smith found a load of Spanish dubloons by chance last year, we can’t make useful conclusions about whose job was more renumerative before Smith found her pirate booty.) Of course, native racial differences might also be such that there are environmental conditions under which blacks are smarter than whites and others in which the reverse applies, or whatever.
In any event I don’t think we need to hypothesize the existence of such entities (substantial racial differences) to explain reality, so the razor applies.
Even if cultural factors are sufficient, in themselves, to explain the black-white IQ difference, it remains more probable that whites tend to have a higher IQ by reason of genetic factors, and East Asians even more so.
This should be obvious: a person’s total IQ is going to be the sum of the effects of cultural factors plus genetic factors. But “the sum is higher for whites” is more likely given the hypothesis “whites have more of an IQ contribution from genetic factors” than given the hypothesis “blacks have more of an IQ contribution from genetic factors”. Therefore, if our priors for the two were equal, which presumably they are, then after updating on the evidence, it is more likely that whites have more of a contribution to IQ from genetic factors.
I’m not sure that this is the case, given that the confound has a known direction and unknown magnitude.
Back to Smith, Jones, and Spanish treasure: let’s assume that we have an uncontroversial measure of their wealth differences just after Smith sold. (Let’s say $50,000.) We have a detailed description of the treasure Smith found, but very little market data on which to base an estimation of what she sold them for. It seems that ceteris paribus, if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is >$50,000, Jones is likelier to have a higher non-pirate gold income, and if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is <$50,000, Smith is likelier to.
Whites and blacks both have a cultural contribution to IQ. So to make your example work, we have to say that Smith and Jones both found treasure, but in unequal amounts. Let’s say that our estimate is that Smith found treasure approximately worth $50,000, and Jones found treasure approximately worth $10,000. If the difference in their wealth is exactly $50,000, then most likely Smith was richer in the first place, by approximately $10,000.
In order to say that Jones was most likely richer, the difference in their wealth would have to be under $40,000, or the difference between our estimates of the treasures found by Smith and Jones.
I agree with this reasoning, although it does not contradict my general reasoning: it is much like the fact that if you find evidence that someone was murdered (as opposed to dying an accidental death), this will increase the chances that Smith is a murderer, but then if you find very specific evidence, the chance that Smith is a murderer may go down below what it was originally.
However, notice that in order to end up saying that blacks and whites are equally likely to have a greater genetic component to their intelligence, you must say that your estimate of the average demographic difference is EXACTLY equal to the difference between your estimates of the cultural components of their average IQs. And if you say this, I will say that you wrote it on the bottom line, before you estimated the cultural components.
And if you don’t say this, you have to assert one or the other: it is more likely that whites have a greater genetic component, or it is more likely that blacks do. It is not equally likely.
Often when people say “equally likely” they mean “I don’t know enough to credibly estimate which one is greater, the probability distributions just overlap too much.” (Yes, the ‘bottom line’ idea is more relevant here. It’s a political minefield.)
But that’s the point of my general argument: if you know that whites average a higher IQ score, but not necessarily by how much (say because you haven’t investigated), and you also know that there is a cultural component for both whites and blacks, but you don’t know how much it is for each, then you should simply say that it is more likely (but not certain) that whites have a higher genetic component.
I agree.
I mean “equally likely” in wedrifid’s sense: not that, having done a proper Bayesian analysis on all evidence, I may set the probability of p(W>B)=p(B>W}=.5 (assuming intelligence works in such a way that this implied division into genetic and environmental components makes sense), but that 1) I don’t know enough about Spanish gold to make an informed judgement and 2) my rough estimate is that “I could see it going either way”—something inherent in saying that environmental differences are “sufficient to explain” extant differences. So actually forming beliefs about these relative levels is both insufficiently grounded and unnecessary.
I suppose if I had to write some median expectation it’s that they’re equal in the sense that we would regard any other two things in the phenomenal world of everyday experience equal—when you see two jars of peanut butter of the same brand and size next to each other on a shelf in the supermarket, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they have exaaaactly the same amount of peanut butter, but it’s close enough to use the word.
I don’t think this is really a case of writing things down on the bottom line. What reason would there be to suppose ex ante that these arbitrarily constructed groups differ to some more-than-jars-of-peanut-butter degree? Is there some selective pressure for intelligence that exists above the Sahara but not below it (more obvious than counter-just-so-stories we could construct?) Cet par I expect a population of chimpanzees or orangutans in one region to be peanut butter equal in intelligence to those in another region, and we have lower intraspecific SNP variation than other apes.
“I could see it going either way” is consistent with having a best estimate that goes one way rather than another.
Just as you have the Flynn effect with intelligence, so average height has also been increasing. Would you say the same thing about height, that the average height of white people and black people has no significant genetic difference, but it is basically all cultural? If not, what is the difference?
In any case, both height and intelligence are subject to sexual selection, not merely ordinary natural selection. And where you have sexual selection, one would indeed expect to find substantial differences between diverse populations: for example, it would not be at all surprising to find significantly different peacock tails among peacock populations that were separated for thousands of years. You will find these significant differences because there are so many other factors affecting sexual preference; to the degree that you have a sexual preference for smarter people, you are neglecting taller people (unless these are 100% correlated, which they are not), and to the degree that you have a sexual preference for taller people, you are neglecting smarter people. So one just-so-story would be that black people preferred taller people more (note the basketball players) and so preferred more intelligent people less. This just-so-story would be supported even more by the fact that the Japanese are even shorter, and still more intelligent.
Granted, that remains a just-so-story. But yes, I would expect “ex ante” to find significant genetic differences between races in intelligence, along with other factors like height.
The reason I did not even give my opinion on the race-IQ issue is that IMHO the expected damage to the quality of the conversation here exceeds the expected benefit.
It is possible for a writer to share the evidence that brought them to their current position on the issue without stating their position, but I do not want to do that because it is a lot of work and because there are probably already perfectly satisfactory books on the subject.
By the way, the kind of person who will discriminate against me because of my opinion on this issue will almost certainly correctly infer which side I am on from my first comment without really having to think about it.
That is not the only question. The question that gets people into trouble, is “which groups are favored or disfavored”. You can’t answer that without offending some people, no matter how small you think the genetic component of the difference is, because many of the people who read it will discard or forget the magnitude entirely and look at only the sign. Saying that group X is genetically smarter than group Y by 10^-10 IQ points will, for many listeners, have the same effect as saying that X is 10^1 IQ points smarter. And while the former belief may be true, the latter belief is false, harmful to those who hold it, and harmful to uninvolved third parties. True statements about race, IQ, and genetics are very easy to simplify or round off to false, harmful and disreputable ones.
That’s why comments about race, IQ, and genetics always have to be one level separated from reality, talking about groups X and Y and people with orange eyes rather than real traits and ethnicities. And if they aren’t well-separated from reality, they have to be anonymous, to protect the author from the reputational effects of things others incorrectly believe they’ve said.
(Edited to add: See also this comment I previously wrote on the same topic, which describes a mechanism by which true beliefs about demographic differences in intelligence (not necessarily genetic ones) produce false beliefs about individual intelligence.)
It seems clear to me that much of the time when people mistakenly get offended, they’re mistaken about what sort of claim they should get offended about, not just mistaken about what claim was made.
The important thing for me is that the standard deviations swamp the average difference, so the argument against individual prejudice is valid.
What makes you think “the unpopular-with-SIAI side” exists? Or that it is what you think it is?
I wouldn’t say I “subscribe” to Marxism, though it seems plausible to me that I might in the near future. I’m still investigating it. While I wouldn’t say that specific Marxist hypothesis have risen to the level of doxastic attitudes, the approach has affected the sort of facial explanations I give for phenomena. But as I said the tradition I’m most interested in is recent, economics-focused English language academic Marxism. (The cultural stuff doesn’t really interest me all that much, and most of it strikes me as nonsense, but I’m not informed enough about it to conclude that “yes, it is nonsense!”) If I could recommend a starting point it would be Harvey’s “Limits to Capital,” although it was Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the 19th century that sparked my interest.
I hope this doesn’t sound evasive! I try to economize on my explicit beliefs while being explicit on my existing biases.
(As a side note, while there are a lot of different LTVs floating around, it’s likely that they’re almost all a bit more trivial and a lot less crazy than what you might be imagining. Most forms don’t contradict neoclassical price theory but do place some additional (idealized, instrumental) constaints in order to explain additional phenomena.)
By the signaling thing, I mean the following: normal humans (not neurotic screwballs, not sociopath salesmen) show a level of confidence in social situations that corresponds roughly to how confident they themselves feel at the time. Thus, when someone approaches you and tries to sell you on something—a product, an idea, or, most commonly, themselves—their confidence level can serve as a good proxy for whether they think the item under sale is actually worthy of purchase. The extent to which they seem guarded signals that they’re not all that. So for game-theoretic reasons, salesmanship works.
But it’s also the case that normal people become more confident and willing to let their guards down when they’re around people they trust, for obvious reasons. Thus, lowering of guards can signal “I trust you; indeed, trust you significantly more than most people” if you showed some guardedness when you first met them. There are other signals you can send, but these are among those whose absence will leave people suspicious, if you want to take your relationships in a more serious direction.
So there are tradeoffs in where you choose to place yourself on the easy-confidence spectrum. Moving to the left makes it easier to make casual friends, and lots of them; to the right makes it easier to make good friends. I suspect that most people slide around until they get the goods bundle that they want—I’ve even noticed how I’ve slid around throughout time, in reaction to being placed in new social environments—although there are obvious dysfunctional cases.
Sorry for implying that racism is common here if it isn’t! Seeing Saileresque shibboleths thrown around here a few times and, indeed, the nearbyness of blogs like Roissy probably colored my perceptions. (Perhaps the impression I have of PUA from the Game and Roissy is similarly inaccurate.)
I used to be interested in Marxism, but not so much anymore.
However, I’m still interested in theories of value. The labour theory of value is not just a Marxist thing; it was widely accepted in the 19th century, and there are still non-Marxists who use it.
I have a hard time deciding if the debate is anything more than a matter of definition. Perhaps one ought to have multiple theories of value for different purposes?
Anyway, I want to ask if you have any recommendations for reading on this subject.
I was wondering about that too, it’s not really a a major topic here, though maybe the fact that it’s been recently discussed on Overcoming Bias and that Roissy in DC is a “nearby” blog gave him this impression?
The topic kinda-sorta came up in last month’s Open Thread, and WrongBot used it as an example in “Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think”.
Which was controversial.