There are multiple things that could be wrong with your friend’s response.
It could draw a wrong inference given its premises.
It could have wrong premises.
It could, even if its conclusion is technically correct in some sense, be misleading.
It could, even if its conclusion is correct, be a just plain weird response.
As regards the first of these, the three situations are indeed very closely analogous. (Not exactly—you chose different arguments in the different cases. A: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure, within-versus-between. B: ill-defined, ugly-history, within-versus-between. C: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure.)
As regards the second, I think not so closely. For instance, so far as I know the notion of strength doesn’t have at all the sort of ugly history that the notion of race does, nor the (less ugly) sort that the notion of intelligence does. (Maybe it has a different sort of ugly history, something to do with metaphorical use of “strength” by warmongering politicians perhaps.) And I bet you can get something nearer to a usable culture-independent test of strength than to a usable culture-independent test of intelligence. And, as I said earlier, I greatly doubt that there’s more variation in anything anyone expects to be a matter of strength within strong/weak than between those groups. (Incidentally, you wrote “more variation between … than among” which is the wrong way around for that argument.)
I’m not sure how much we should care about the third and fourth of those points since I think we agree that the conclusion is dubious at best in each case. But for sure the context is different (e.g., one reason why people who think there’s no such thing as race or intelligence bother to say so is that there are other people saying: oh yes there are, and look, it turns out that this traditionally disadvantaged race to which I happen not to belong is less intelligent than this traditionally advantaged race to which I happen to belong; nothing like this is true for strength) and it seems like that makes a relevant difference. (E.g., your friend’s response to the comment about strength seems weirdly aggressive for no reason; in the case of a comment about race or intelligence, there’s at least an understandable reason why an otherwise reasonable person might be touchy about them.)
So no, I don’t think the situations are perfectly analogous, though they’re close. If we consider only the first kind of error, then the analogy is pretty good. And if you were making an explicit argument then that would be OK. But you aren’t; you’re presenting your parody arguments, and inviting readers to point and laugh and draw their own conclusions. And if one of the parody arguments is laughable for reasons that don’t correspond to defects in the arguments you’re parodying (e.g., because it depends on saying that there are lots of scientific articles out there saying that strength is purely a cultural construct) then you’re inviting readers to conclude that claims like “race isn’t real” and “intelligence isn’t real” for terrible reasons. It’s like dressing someone up in a clown costume, getting them to present an argument, and saying “wasn’t that silly?”. The argument may well be silly, but it will feel sillier than it is because of the clown suit.
I agree with 99.999% of what you say in this comment. In particular, you are right that the parody only works in the sense of the first of your bulleted points.
My only counterpoint is that I think this is how almost every reader will understand it. My whole post is an invitation to to consider a hypothetical in which people say about strength what they now say about intelligence and race.
Because that’s when something was said to which it was particularly relevant. (It’s not like anyone reading is likely to be unaware of that difference in context.)
There are multiple things that could be wrong with your friend’s response.
It could draw a wrong inference given its premises.
It could have wrong premises.
It could, even if its conclusion is technically correct in some sense, be misleading.
It could, even if its conclusion is correct, be a just plain weird response.
As regards the first of these, the three situations are indeed very closely analogous. (Not exactly—you chose different arguments in the different cases. A: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure, within-versus-between. B: ill-defined, ugly-history, within-versus-between. C: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure.)
As regards the second, I think not so closely. For instance, so far as I know the notion of strength doesn’t have at all the sort of ugly history that the notion of race does, nor the (less ugly) sort that the notion of intelligence does. (Maybe it has a different sort of ugly history, something to do with metaphorical use of “strength” by warmongering politicians perhaps.) And I bet you can get something nearer to a usable culture-independent test of strength than to a usable culture-independent test of intelligence. And, as I said earlier, I greatly doubt that there’s more variation in anything anyone expects to be a matter of strength within strong/weak than between those groups. (Incidentally, you wrote “more variation between … than among” which is the wrong way around for that argument.)
I’m not sure how much we should care about the third and fourth of those points since I think we agree that the conclusion is dubious at best in each case. But for sure the context is different (e.g., one reason why people who think there’s no such thing as race or intelligence bother to say so is that there are other people saying: oh yes there are, and look, it turns out that this traditionally disadvantaged race to which I happen not to belong is less intelligent than this traditionally advantaged race to which I happen to belong; nothing like this is true for strength) and it seems like that makes a relevant difference. (E.g., your friend’s response to the comment about strength seems weirdly aggressive for no reason; in the case of a comment about race or intelligence, there’s at least an understandable reason why an otherwise reasonable person might be touchy about them.)
So no, I don’t think the situations are perfectly analogous, though they’re close. If we consider only the first kind of error, then the analogy is pretty good. And if you were making an explicit argument then that would be OK. But you aren’t; you’re presenting your parody arguments, and inviting readers to point and laugh and draw their own conclusions. And if one of the parody arguments is laughable for reasons that don’t correspond to defects in the arguments you’re parodying (e.g., because it depends on saying that there are lots of scientific articles out there saying that strength is purely a cultural construct) then you’re inviting readers to conclude that claims like “race isn’t real” and “intelligence isn’t real” for terrible reasons. It’s like dressing someone up in a clown costume, getting them to present an argument, and saying “wasn’t that silly?”. The argument may well be silly, but it will feel sillier than it is because of the clown suit.
I agree with 99.999% of what you say in this comment. In particular, you are right that the parody only works in the sense of the first of your bulleted points.
My only counterpoint is that I think this is how almost every reader will understand it. My whole post is an invitation to to consider a hypothetical in which people say about strength what they now say about intelligence and race.
If the context is so important, why did you wait until four comments deep in the nesting to bring it up?
Because that’s when something was said to which it was particularly relevant. (It’s not like anyone reading is likely to be unaware of that difference in context.)