A general comment on discussions of genetic group differences
(content warning: discussion of racially motivated violence and coercion)
I wanted to share that I think it’s not bad to think about the object level question of whether there are group differences in intelligence rooted in genetic differences. This is an empirical claim, and can be true or false.
My moral beliefs are pretty rooted in egalitarianism. I think as a matter of policy, but also as a matter of moral character, it is good and important to treat the experience of strangers as equally valuable, regardless of their class or race. I do not think more intelligent people are more worthy of moral consideration than less intelligent people. I think it can be complicated at the extremes, especially when considering digital people, animals, etc., but that this has little bearing on public policy when concerning existing humans.
I don’t think genetic group differences in intelligence are likely to be that relevant given I have short AI timelines. If we assume longer timelines, I believe the most likely places they would be important in terms of policy would be in education and reproductive technology. Whether or not there are such differences between groups now, there could easily come to be large differences through the application of embryo selection techniques or other intelligence enhancing technologies. From an egalitarian moral framework, I suspect it would be important to subsidize this technology for disadvantaged groups or individuals so that they have the same options and opportunities as everyone else. Even if genes turn out to not be a major cause of inegalitarian outcomes today, they can definitely become a major cause in the future, if we don’t exercise wisdom and thoughtfulness in how we wield these technologies. However, as I said, I don’t expect this to be very significant in practice given short AI timelines.
Most importantly, from my perspective, it’s important to be able to think about questions like this clearly, and so I want to encourage people to not feel constrained to avoid the question because of fear of social censure for merely thinking about them. For a reasonably well researched (not necessarily correct) discussion of the object level, see this post:
[link deleted at the author’s request; see also AnonymousCommentator’s note about the racial IQ gap]
I think it’s important context to keep in view that some of the worst human behaviors have involved the enslavement and subjugation of whole groups of people, or attempts to murder entire groups—racial groups, national groups, cultural groups, religious groups. The eugenics movement in the United States and elsewhere attempted to significantly curtail the reproductive freedom of many people through extremely coercive means in the not-so-distant past. Between 1907 and 1963, over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States, and minority groups were especially targeted. Presently in China, tens of thousands of Uighurs are being sterilized, and while we don’t have a great deal of information about it, I would predict that there is a major element of government coercion in these sterilizations.
Coercive policies like this are extremely wrong, and plainly so. I oppose and condemn them. I am aware that the advocates of these policies sometimes used genetic group differences in abilities as justification for their coercion. This does not cause me to think that I should avoid the whole subject of genetic group differences in ability. Making this subject taboo, and sanctioning anyone who speaks of it, seems like a sure way to prevent people from actually understanding the underlying problems disadvantaged groups or individuals face. This seems likely to inhibit rather than promote good policy-making. I think the best ways to resist reproductive and other forms of coercion go hand in hand with trying to understand the world, do good science, and have serious discussions about hard topics. I think strict taboos around discussing an extremely broad scientific subject matter hurt the ability of people to understand things, especially when the fear of public punishment is enough to prevent people from thinking about a topic entirely.
Another reason people cite for not talking about genetically mediated group differences, even if they exist, is that bringing people’s attention to this kind of inequality could make the disadvantaged feel terrible. I take this cost seriously, and think this is a good reason to be really careful about how we discuss this issue (the exact opposite of Bostrom’s approach in the Extropians email), and a good reason to include content warnings so anyone can easily avoid this topic if they find it upsetting.
But I don’t think forbidding discussion of this topic across the board is the right society-level response.
Imagine a society where knowledge of historical slavery is suppressed, because people worry it would make the descendants of enslaved people sad. I think such a society would be unethical, especially if the information suppression causes society to be unable to recognize and respond to ongoing harms caused by slavery’s legacy.
Still, assuming that we were in a world like that: In that kind of world, we can imagine that the information leaks out and a descendant of slaves finds out about slavery and its legacy, and is (of course) tremendously horrified and saddened to learn about all this.
If someone pointed at this to say, “Behold, this information caused harm, so we were right to suppress it,” I would think they’re making a serious moral mistake.
If the individual themselves didn’t want to personally know about slavery, or about any of the graphic details, that’s fully within their right. This should be comparatively easy to achieve in online discussion, where it’s easier to use content warnings, tags, and web browser apps to control which topics you want to read about.
But society-wide suppression of the information, for the sake of protecting people’s feelings even though those individuals didn’t consent to being protected from the truth this way, is frankly disturbing and wrong. This is not the way to treat peers, colleagues, or friends. It isn’t the way to treat people who you view as full human beings; beyond just being a terrible way to carry out scientific practice, it’s infantilizing and paternalistic in the extreme.
- 's comment on Thread for discussing Bostrom’s email and apology by (EA Forum; 15 Jan 2023 8:06 UTC; 11 points)
- 's comment on Thread for discussing Bostrom’s email and apology by (EA Forum; 14 Jan 2023 2:20 UTC; 6 points)
- 's comment on Wokism, rethinking priorities and the Bostrom case by (14 Jan 2023 6:04 UTC; 2 points)
Unfortunately, there’s no way to publicly examine, measure, or discuss group differences in a way that doesn’t disproportionately attract those who’d misinterpret and misuse this against the group(s) in question, and therefore without those groups legitimately feeling attacked by those giving visibility to the topic.
It’s the core of politics (how to characterize groups and their relation to each other), and therefore rationality in hard-mode. There are very few forums where it won’t cause more harm than good.
In fact, we don’t have good epistemic practices for studying or thinking about groups, as distinct from individuals. I suspect there is a lot of reality in the self-organized sortation by visible traits, and this does cause group-norms to differ by distribution of invisible traits. But I don’t know of many studies that break it down that way.
I feel like this might be downstream of activist-caused evaporative cooling, tho. If you say that anyone who studies group differences must be motivated by animus, people unmotivated by animus will be disproportionately likely to leave the field.
One of the current controversies in medicine is over whether race should be used as a factor in diagnostic decisions (one example). Now, you or I as patients might want our doctors to use all available information to provide us with the best treatment possible, and you or I as people interested in good outcomes for all might be worried that this will lead to people being predictably mistreated (which, if set according to population-level averages, will disproportionately affect minority groups). It seems pretty implausible to me that the people who set up race-sensitive diagnostics and treatments for kidney diseases were motivated by ill will towards individuals or groups, and much more likely that they were motivated by good will.
Similarly, you could imagine people who want to come up with policies and procedures which are motivated by good will towards everyone, and want to use the most effective information available to do so. Is it really productive to militate them out of existence?
I didn’t say nor mean to imply that anyone who studies group differences must be motivated by animus. I do find that public discussions of such research seems to attract amateurs who ARE motivated that way, and activists who assume that others in the discussion are.
To be clear, I’m deeply in favor of careful world-modeling that understands the distribution of traits, and the level of correlation between visible and invisible traits, especially when it allows better individual decisions based on actual observations and measurements. I, however, don’t believe that most people, even on LessWrong, are capable of that level of rigor, and the discussions seem more painful than helpful in non-heavily-moderated-and-focused forums.
Not “this topic is wrong to research and use in individual treatments”, but “this topic doesn’t go well on LessWrong”. And a little bit of “this topic is wrong to use in general non-individual policy”.
To me it seems like the current zeitgeist is just not up to addressing this question without being almost entirely captured by bad faith actors on both sides and therefore causing some non trivial social unrest. There might be some positive gain to be had from changes in policies depending on the reality of genetic differences in IQ, however policy makers would have to be much more nuanced and capable than they appear to be. Even if this were possible it would have to be weighed against the social aspects.
Discussion of this post on the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/frcAPFXwiCpNrECgQ/a-general-comment-on-discussions-of-genetic-group#comments
I think part of the trouble is that “not being a racist” is part of the broadly accepted values, but once you admit to robust race differences in socially valued traits, different notions of “not being a racist” that would be equivalent become distinct.
“Not being a racist” basically means treating people as having equal moral value regardless of race, like equally valuing their perspectives in decisions and equally giving them opportunity for material possessions and life comfort. In utilitarianism, one way we could think of this is as there being no correlation between race and the weight one is given in the utility function/social welfare function. Since utilitarianism is typically egalitarian in weighting everyone equally, utilitarianism is also typically “not racist” in this sense.
If races are equal in socially valued traits, then there’s not much more to say. However, if races are distinct, then things start getting complicated, due to a type of values that almost everyone endorses, which I call “empowerment values”. Basically, due to instrumental convergence, there are some things that are useful to many humans, and empowerment values say to do those things. For instance, police and law create an orderly society which facilitates positive-sum interactions, which is helpful for many different human concerns.
But the trouble with empowerment values in this context is that on their own, they also imply discriminatory values aka meritocracy. That is:
Certain people have a propensity to create value for others, and discriminatory values say to give such people more power so they have more opportunity to create value, and give them more material comfort so that they have more reason to stick around. For instance one might support private property, free trade, and trademarks to allow businesses to grow, or one might support firms promoting people based on internal evaluations of performance, or one might support representative democracy.
Certain characteristics that people have might cause people to create value for others, and again discriminatory values say to give such people more power and material comfort, so they have opportunities to generate value and more reason to stick around. For instance one might support ability testing for firms that hire people.
If discriminatory values are applied to a society with racial differences in socially valued traits, then some races would be much more assigned to positions of power, positions of material wealth, etc., based on their greater socially valued traits; those races would come to dominate society.
This conflicts with an alternative notion of “not being a racist”, which I tend to call “diversity values” or “egalitarian values”. (For simplicity I will stick to diversity values applied to race here, but it can also be applied in other circumstances.) Under diversity values, people should be treated as first-class citizens regardless of their race, and no races should be left behind. (A lot of people have rounded this position off to something like equality of outcome, but recently I’ve been wondering if subagents might provide a better perspective on it. TBD.)
I think this is the real crux behind a lot of opposition to discussion of racial differences in IQ. I regularly see opponents of the discussion say that even if robust IQ differences between races are real, they just justify interventions to equalize things. This seems to be indicative of egalitarian values.
So basically, when people want to distance themselves from racism while acknowledging racial differences, I think they should make it clear which of the positions they endorse. Simplifying for a moment to consider only black and white races:
“Black and white people have equal terminal moral values, but white people are instrumentally superior to black people, so white people should tend to dominate over black people, and we want to give white people more material comfort than black people so that white people associate with us more.”
“Black and white people should both have their perspectives well-represented among the leadership of society, and they should both have comparable material comfort, even if this involves giving black people special treatment over white people, relative to what is recommended by a predominant empowerment-focus.”
Also recommended reading: Book Review: Human Diversity.
This is an incredibly weird and disingenuous way of stating the position, there is no central authority to “give white people more material comfort than black people”, that’s not how this works. Salaries (and hence material comfort) are determined by supply and demand, if overall white people do jobs that are more in demand and in shorter supply than black people, then we should expect their material comfort to be higher. Do I “dominate over” my neighbor if I’m a high-paid surgeon and he’s a plumber? What a weird way of phrasing things.
If black people tend to have lower IQ than white people, then that’s an important explanatory cause for the difference in observed material income. Such a difference would also suggest different interventions than if no difference were there. Time and money currently being spent on various diversity initiatives would much better be spent getting pregnant black women to not drink and smoke, supplementing iodine, not being around heavy metals, i.e. mitigating all the environmental causes of low IQ, causes which we should research in much greater depth.
I do associate intelligence with moral weight to some extent (how could a Jupiter-brain have the same moral weight as a village idiot?), and an entire group of people having low intelligence is somewhat akin to a genocide-level catastrophe to me, everything should be done to ameliorate that state, and blinding ourselves to the evidence of the ongoing catastrophe does nothing useful.
I don’t understand what part of my phrasing of the position made you think I was talking about a centralized authority. My comment characterizing the position didn’t say that the position was “the central authority should give white people more material comfort than black people”, it said that the position was “we want to give white people more material comfort than black people”. Here, “we” is a nonspecific plural pronoun, which I intended to refer to the various people in society.
So for instance if you are a surgeon and your neighbors is a plumber, then the reason people pay you more is because they have a higher priority for making dealings with (associating with) a surgeon than a plumber, relative to the supply of surgeons and plumbers.
Do you dominate over the person who used to live in your apartment if he is a plumber who had to move out because housing prices rose while you as a surgeon can move in because you are highly paid?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you decide how the plumber’s social media works, because you are smart enough to pass exams/interviews and work for the social media company?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you end up using your greater merit and accumulated resources to become a politician and make rules for what the plumber can or cannot do?
Honestly—the answer is probably not. While these do get close to fitting the definition of domination, I think they are too distributed and noisy to really be usefully thought of in that light. When you move into a city, you don’t bid up the housing prices for the person who moved out of the house, but instead slightly for the general market in the future. When you work for a social media company, you don’t make rules about any specific random person. When you become a politician, you are accountable to a great deal of different interests.
However, when you average over entire groups of people, then the noise averages out, and the diffuse effects add up on the group level. So it seems like the lens works on the group level.
I think the difference is much more genetic than environmental. Though one could still search for environmental ways to improve IQ, I suppose—they just seem likely to apply just as well to white people as to black people.
Also, regarding the position:
This position is often criticized as being a position of “white supremacy”, which is usually considered to be horrible racism. On a first glance, this criticism seems valid to me; it seems to fit the definition of white supremacy (“the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society”), and it also seems to be the sort of thing a classical white nationalist would say and endorse as their ideology.
I think the main counterargument would be that this is a case of the noncentral fallacy. That is, we usually associate white supremacy with Jim Crow, the KKK, slavery, etc., or with laws that explicitly favor white people regardless of merit, whereas this position is compatible with rejecting such things.
However, I am not sure how solid the counterargument is. Maybe the issue is that the term “white supremacy” is badly named, but this position sure does seem to agree with classical white supremacists that it is desirable for white people to dominate society. (There’s some complications with asians and jews being higher IQ too, so that creates a distinction, but this distinction doesn’t seem central to why the position is considered bad.)
I think a primary distinction is one of legitimacy; classical white supremacy policies explicitly advantage whites in a way that makes it questionable whether whites truly are innately superior in the traits they claim to be, whereas the more mainstream white supremacy position wants to have at least a nominally even competition so that white people everywhere prove their superiority and that they deserve their power and wealth.
That seems to make a large difference. Hearing that someone is a white supremacist would normally make us update toward this person being white and irrationally thinking their own race (which happens to be white) being superior. A form of selfish bias. But if we hear that a white (particularly gentile white) person thinks that Northeast Asian people have higher average IQs than whites, and Ashkenazi Jews having even higher average IQs, then we would strongly update against the conclusion above.
(In general, the discussion seems unduly distorted by the fact that the focus is almost always on black/white rather than on white/Northeast Asian, or the like. For example, when it is claimed that one group would feel hurt and excluded when such differences are pointed out. Personally I know not of a single white person who has complained about feeling hurt and excluded when hearing about data supporting higher average IQs for Asians or Jews. Maybe this would be different when living as a white minority in, say, Japan, but that seems still uncertain to me.)
This seems to me like a quokka-like position.
Certain views are verboten to state and will, if stated, get you randomly attacked, especially by the crowd who’d look up 25 year old postings in the first place.
It does not matter what other things you do. It does not matter if you can be quoted as saying something that doesn’t put white people on the top.
“If only I had said it in a manner that makes it clear it’s not white supremacy, people wouldn’t hurt me” ignores that people don’t have rational discussion in mind. There is no way to say it in a manner that can’t be quoted out of context in social media and used to set a mob on you. You can’t avoid this by being nicer about it.
It’s also quokka-like in the opposite direction. Actual bona-fide white supremacists, like David Duke (founder of a revival of the KKK) will be indirect and evasive about their beliefs. If they can, they will totally try to get labelled not a white supremacist on some technicality.
I think among white nationalists who believe that asians and jews are smarter, there is often a tendency to still prefer europeans, with the explicit justification given that asians are more conformist and therefore less innovative, and jews are more libertine and therefore prone to leftism/immigration-friendliness/gender progressivism.
Among the sort of techy contrarian people who might talk about IQ differences while rejecting and distancing themselves from white supremacy, I think there is often a preference for asians and jews. I guess it’s fair enough to say that this is not a selfish racial bias.
I suspect that most grievances about genetic IQ differences are motivated by status.
Almost everyone perceives intelligence to be a marker of status, so spreading the belief “Group X have lower average IQ” has the consequence of lowering group X’s members’ status in the eyes of most people. And intentionally publicly lowering someone’s status using words is more-or-less the definition of an insult. The only difference in this case is that the status lowering isn’t intentional; unfortunately, intentions are very hard to signal convincingly.
It therefore seems to me that, if you want to make discussions about race and IQ more palatable to the public and less emotionally draining, you would need to make a strong or costly signal that you’re not trying to lower anyone’s status. To my mind, the only way to do this is to have high status in the minority group hurt by IQ claims and this is really hard to achieve. Simply saying one doesn’t think intelligence impies moral value won’t dissuade most sceptics.
One part of this issue: The answer to the question is literally unknowable with our current scientific tools (though as we develop better models for simulating biology and culture this might change). We can’t run experiments that are not contaminated by culture/biology.
What is left is observational evidence.
Proving causality with observational evidence usually doesn’t work. This is especially the case with an issue like this with only a moderate effect size (a one SD effect on test scores is tiny compared to the impact of smoking on lung cancer, or stomach sleeping on SIDS), and where both factors are always present and connected.
What is left is reasoning from priors.
Personally I think HBD is unlikely because the observed outcome differences are exactly the sort of thing the known cultural forces would create even if there was no genetic difference, so the existence of these outcome differences does not serve as additional evidence of genetic differences. This means that while it is totally possible there could be major intelligence differences between groups, I don’t have any particular reason to think they actually exist.
But this argument is simply not a robust or rigorous proof. I give it around a 1⁄100 chance of being wrong, while things that I actually know, like the name of the president, have a far, far smaller chance of being wrong.
The problem with racial differences in intelligence is that it’s not a very useful question. Race is much more a cultural thing than a genetic thing. Especially when it’s based just on skin colour, or where your grandparents were born. It’s obvious that certain genotypes are more intelligent, seeing as intelligence is very heritable. So you could make the case for universal genomic testing and having social scores based on the results or something (with a massive list of assumptions and caveats). But that’s very different from the current system of White, Black, Asian, Hispanic (if you’re American).
Cultural differences explain racial differences a lot better than genetics, at least for now.
A lot of the problems around this topic stem from the fact that currently there is an implicit (and often explicit) assumption that the smarter you are, the more you’re worthy of whatever is nice. Which in turn implies that if you’re not smart, then you’re worthless. Freddie DeBoer has written a lot about this subject.
Where is the evidence for this? I am not really well versed with this topic but am under the impression if this were true it would be heavily promoted/reported on.
Well, race is a very ill defined term from a genetic point of view. How would you define “white”? “Black” covers vastly more, genetically speaking, than all the other races put together. Which is to be expected, since humans originated in Africa. Where your ancestors are from is important in that it will make you more or less susceptible to various things (e.g. Africans are more resistant to malaria, Scandinavians are more resistant to HIV, pastoral people can tolerate lactose), but these tend to be single genes, or at most a few. In the case of features that are regulated by multiple genes, it’s spread out a lot more, with lots of genes giving small boosts.
In the case of intelligence, it’s a bit like asking whether there’s a homosexuality or speech gene. The simple answer is no, the deeper answer is (as always in biology) “it depends”. For example, in the case of speech, there is a family in England that has a genetic disorder that results in them not being able to speak. This doesn’t mean that FOXP2 is responsible for speech. It just means that it’s a critical element, the lack of which will break the speech system.
Intelligence is (most likely) similar. There are lots (hundreds or thousands) of genes correlated with intelligence. These genes are spread all over the gene pool, which has always (except remote islands, e.g. Tasmania) been mixing itself around. If there was a single gene for intelligence, I’m pretty sure it would spread really fast, unless it was a recent (e.g. 1000 years) mutation. Unless it was somehow intrinsically connected to superficial characteristics like toenail size, beard length, or skull shape, the intelligence gene would spread to other places without changing how the recipients look.
It’s like eyesight. Having good eyes is very useful. So you’d expect most people to have similar levels of sight (sans various defects and with a normalish distribution) because natural selection will be pushing up to the Pareto limit. Intelligence is similar. It’s too useful to give up.
An interesting example of cultural differences being more explanatory than genetics are the Dutch. Before 1875, the median height of Dutch men was 165cm. In 2014 it was 174cm. That’s not something that can be explained well with genetics (it’s too fast). The most likely explanation is that their genes had the potential to be really tall, but the environment didn’t supply enough resources. Average height is actually one of the best measures of social well being (along with when girls start menstruating), as it’s very sensitive to how healthy children are (each skipped meal and each illness result in a little less growth).
Isn’t that the whole point behind all the stories about poor children ending up in Harvard? About increasing spending to schools in more disadvantaged areas?
The problem with finding scientific evidence for this, is that the whole topic is radioactive. Whatever your results are, you’ll be called an SJW, racist, woke and wanting to reintroduce eugenics. Much safer and easier to just choose a different subject for your grant proposal.
Semi-automated mod message. You’ve been having a bunch of comments downvoted. I haven’t reviewed your comments in detail. But skimming then, I get a sense of you being pretty fixated on one particular topic in a kind-of ax-grindy way, and seem to be orienting to it through the lens of political conflict rather than “figure things out.” (I realize other people in this conversation may also be orienting to it through a political lens, I haven’t checked but it seems likely)
I think my main recommendation is “if you actually want to participate in LessWrong as a community member, rather than drive-by person arguing about a pet topic, I recommend… well also commenting on stuff other than this topic, and demonstrating that you’re here to actually here to figure interesting stuff out.
Talking about human genetic differences, on the literal internet, is lunacy. Every single person who knows the risks never does it.
It’s not a matter of personal preferences or priorities, either they understand the risks or they don’t.
Writing this under the assumption this is a good-faith post:
This question has been asked. There is no scientific evidence the racial group differences in IQ tests (if we want to define intelligence as IQ test results) are genetic.
There are social consequences for repeatedly raising this possibility, because it’s strong Bayesian evidence the person asking it is dishonest (since they’re just asking questions while ignoring evidence) and racist (for obvious reasons), and based on that inference, the person is then thrown out of the room.
When discussing evidence for or against hypotheses, it is often helpful to discuss it relative to other hypotheses. For instance, in the Bayesian paradigm, “evidence” is only meaningful over a collection of hypotheses, not over a single hypothesis, and in the scientific paradigm, it is common to engage in null-hypothesis significance testing, where one considers the compatibility of the evidence with an absurd trivial hypothesis of “the is nothing to see here”.
There is strong evidence for the hypothesis of innate racial differences in intelligence relative to a null hypothesis of no racial differences in intelligence. But null hypotheses are as mentioned often quite absurd, so one can consider various other hypotheses.
I don’t know your favorite hypothesis, but a lot of hypotheses have been tested, with many seemingly being worse explanations than innate differences in intelligence. As far as I know, there is no alternate hypothesis that has been shown to be the true explanation for the gaps. (I would be interested in learning if this was wrong.) It seems incorrect to summarize this state of the matter as “no evidence” for innate racial differences in intelligence.
But while this isn’t no evidence, it’s quite possible to my current epistemic state that it is only weak evidence. I see three main areas of trouble:
Certain hypotheses are particularly difficult to test through common social science tools, while also having strong opportunity for explaining it; the one I’ve been eyeing recently is self-selection into social networks/subcultures.
Playing hypothesis whack-a-mole assumes that we have a small number of feasible hypotheses, but maybe really we have an exponential area of unexplored territory. In that case maybe people really need to get going with some qualitative investigations.
Sometimes even if one alternative hypothesis can’t hold on its own, combining it with other alternative hypotheses makes it work. This is hard to work through and it opens up an exponential field like the above.
Maybe by “no evidence”, you really meant “weak evidence”, with reference to one of the above factors (or with reference to something else)? It would be helpful for you to clarify.
Why?
I know.
If we define intelligence as IQ test results, there is evidence for racial differences in intelligence. There is no scientific evidence those differences are genetic.
More importantly, you’re missing some hypotheses there (you’re comparing no racial differences in intelligence to racial differences in intelligence being nonzero and also being genetic (that’s what I assume you mean by innate), which is pointless).
According to Wikipedia, they’re environmental in origin.
More importantly, it’s important not to neglect seeing what’s really going on—people who, despite there being no scientific evidence for it, innocently suggest (the link talks about the fallacy, not about intelligence) that maybe the racial differences in intelligence, assuming they exist, might be genetic, have obviously a not-so-hidden and malicious agenda, or have been misled by such people.
After that meta is clearly stated, then we can talk about whether, despite there being no scientific evidence for that, there is >0% epistemic probability of >0% of the portion of racial IQ test result differences being genetically caused.
E is evidence if it should update our beliefs about a hypothesis H: P(H|E)≠P(H).
We can then expand a bit:
P(H|E)=P(H)P(E|H)P(E)=P(H)P(E|H)∑H′P(E|H′)P(H′)
If we have only a single hypothesis H’ = H such that P(H)=1, then the sum in the denominator reduces to P(E|H), which cancels out with the numerator and gives us P(H|E)=P(H), preventing E from being evidence.
Wikipedia used to present both an environmental and a hereditarian perspective, but eventually the hereditarian perspective got deleted by being declared fringe. You should feel encouraged to show how recent science disproved hereditarianism, but I don’t think the change represents a change in evidence base, but instead a change in political power. Of course it might also be that the political change was well justified because you think wikipedia used to be biased in favor of hereditarianism but now no longer is. If so I would be interested in what brings you to this conclusion.
Anyway I would respond to the claims of wikipedia but the page is 100 thousand characters long, so it might be more efficient if you mention whether there is some part that you find particularly convincing or insightful.
Well we first need to agree on whether there is no scientific evidence for it. I’m not sure about that, though it is easier to understand in the context of some alternate theory/worldview of race and IQ, if you have one that you would endorse. As then we can look at various pieces of evidence and see if there’s any pieces that have a likelihood ratio favoring the hereditarian position over your position.
Yes, I acknowledged that and discussed it in my comment, with a followup question asking for clarification on your position.
Why would P(H)=1? Did you mean, in your previous comment, that evidence is only meaningful when I have at least two hypotheses (e.g.H and ¬H)? If so, that’s obvious.
The two hypotheses here are “the differences in IQ testing are partially or completely genetically caused” and “the differences in IQ testing aren’t genetically caused at all.”
You should feel encouraged to show the Wikipedia article is a result of political power rather than evidence. Good luck.
That’s not good enough, because you were still being highly misleading. If I say there is strong evidence for you shooting Fred compared to the null hypothesis of Fred not being shot at all, it might still be a true statement, but it’s still connotatively misleading (even if I explicitly say so).
So there’s a sort of distinction to be made between two notions of hypothesis. One notion of hypothesis covers just about any proposition at all. But there’s a narrower notion of hypothesis which covers something which makes a positive description of the world.
For instance, Bayesianism is usually phrased in terms of measure theoretic foundations, where you have an outcome space containing the different ways that the world could be. Each such outcome could be considered a hypothesis in itself. There are other alternatives to the measure-theoretic foundations too.
But the problem is that “the differences in IQ testing aren’t genetically caused at all” is not a hypothesis in any sense like the above, because it doesn’t specify what alternative cause there is. Depending on the evidence a person has seen, they might have different things in mind for what the causes of the differences in IQ are, and that makes it hard to directly respond to them.
Well, my evidence for it being a result of political power is that if it was a result of evidence, then I’d have thought that you as the expert in the evidence disproving genetic race differences in IQ would point at the relevant novel evidence that changed the Wikipedia consensus.
Ehm, if anyone is being highly misleading, it is you. You said that there is “no scientific evidence the racial group differences in IQ are genetic”, yet if that’s true then how do you explain this?
Anything can be phrased as a positive description of the world—it only depends on the language used.
It is a hypothesis in that sense as well—the rest of the outcome space is the other hypothesis.
So, the evidence of your (evidenceless) hypothesis being right is that I haven’t pointed at the evidence that would contradict it. I see. I’m glad we cleared that up.
That’s an interesting one study. I don’t have time to learn the concepts enough to write about whether there are any other explanations than what the study suggests (for example, how did they control for environmental racism?, etc.).
The simplest explanation of the problem:
In order to evaluate evidence (and to apply the model!), we need to be able to make predictions, i.e. to compute P(E|H).
This is possible for a hypothesis H which makes a positive claim for how the world works—just turn the gears of the hypothesis, and predictions pop out.
However, it is not possible for a hypothesis that is defined purely by negative of a positive hypothesis, because then in order to make the predictions, one needs to have a collection of alternative positive claims to turn the gears for.
My model can be approximated as there being two possibilities:
You have a detailed understanding of the evidence cited on wikipedia, the history of wikipedia’s trustworthyness, etc.. If that was the case, then I would expect that after writing a query, you would have an idea for what of the evidence you’ve seen is relevant for that query, and would be capable of and interested in pointing at that evidence.
You do not have a detailed understanding of the evidence, and your initial declaration that “There is no scientific evidence the racial group differences in IQ tests are genetic” is mainly due to trusting various authorities (like wikipedia) to fairly summarize the topic.
While I kept both possibilities in mind, while responding to you, I was mainly writing the response while conditioning on possibility 1. Conditional on 1, the fact that you aren’t pointing out counterevidence is evidence that such counterevidence doesn’t exist, which in turn is evidence for my original claims.
However, 1 might be false, and I’m well aware that it might be false. Does this make me disingenuous to condition on it? It might? Maybe I should have started the conversation by asking which of the possibilities apply? I think that asking about that would usually be considered rude, though maybe that is just because I haven’t been creative enough with the phrasing.
Though I did in fact ask about some aspects of your perspective in my very first comment. In the future to make these sorts of conversations go more smoothly, if something more like possibility 2 is true, when someone asks for your detailed perspective, it would probably be best if you wrote something like “I haven’t researched it in depth, so I just trust outspoken academics and wikipedians on it” to clarify your epistemic position.
If I have three hypotheses “At least one swan is black,” “It’s not true at least one swan is black” and “All swans reflect EM waves on the wavelengths of the visible light,” which ones are negations of other hypotheses and which ones are positive?
Bayesian analysis:
On their own, none of these are positive in the sense I’m talking. They are propositions that describe properties of the world, but they don’t sketch out what that world looks like overall. This means that they generally can’t predict P(E|H) for arbitrary E, so they don’t have enough structure to be compared with other hypotheses for Bayesian updating.
If we negate them, the first two hypotheses just swap while the third hypothesis turns into “Not all swans reflect EM waves on the wavelengths of the visible light”, which also is a proposition that describes a property of the world but doesn’t sketch out what the world looks like overall, and so it too is not a positive hypothesis.
In summary, none of them are positive and none of them are negations of positive hypotheses.
Obviously that is not very helpful in practice, so there are a few things that can be used to improve the situation. First, we might assume that we have a lot of background knowledge W about what swans are like, such that this W can handle predictions on all other questions than the ones specifically dependent on these questions of swan blackness. In that case for each of the hypotheses H, we can form the hypothesis H∧W which conditions W on H.
The trouble is in the case of race is that what you get depends a lot on the shape of W. So for instance for you, ‘‘Thereisnogeneticracedifferenceinintelligence"∧W might be that race differences in IQ are caused by lead poisoning and test bias, whereas for me, since I have a different W than you, ‘‘Thereisnogeneticracedifferenceinintelligence"∧W might be that there are social network differences where black people are not getting sufficiently integrated into intellectual social groups. If I then start defending “The racial difference in IQ is genetic” with reference to evidence that there’s not much of interest going on with social network relations, then that is going to seem pointless to you because I am ignoring the real alternative hypothesis of lead poisoning and test bias.
Another approach than H∧W is to narrow the space of evidence under consideration. For instance if we assume that the observations we get is a set of indicators for an IID population of swans for whether or not those swans are black, then “It’s not true that at least one swan is black” does in fact predict P(E|H) for all E. Specifically, it permits observing that no swans are black but it does not permit observing that any swans are black. In fact for any fixed proportion p, “swans are black p of the time” is a positive hypothesis, which predicts an observation of n black and k white swans with probability pn(1−p)k.
Bringing the analogy to IQ-world, a hypothesis which breaks down the IQ gap, e.g. saying that there’s 2 points of gap due to lead, 1 point due to books, 2 points due to school quality, etc., would be sufficiently positive that I could engage with it. Like it wouldn’t predict everything about the world, but it would make predictions about the sorts of social science data that we would see (especially when augmented with other knowledge that is available).
More generally/abstractly, in the Bayesian framework, a hypothesis is not simply a proposition. There’s a few different ways to model what a hypothesis is instead depending on the flavor/mathematical foundations of Bayesianism one is using; e.g. one can model it as an event in an event space, or as a probability distribution over observations.
A third approach other than H∧W or restricting the evidence-space is to go non-Bayesian:
Scientific and logical inductor analysis:
Bayesianism basically requires a hypothesis to predict everything, which is computationally intractable and also kind of weird. There’s two alternate approaches, known as science and logical induction, which do not require hypotheses to make predictions on everything.
Rather than having the hypothesis predict all conceivable evidence, a hypothesis is an algorithm that only makes predictions in some areas that it happens to “care about”. So for instance, if the question comes up “Is this swan black?”, maybe “It’s not true at least one swan is black” would make a strong prediction that it isn’t, and gain credibility for that.
In science and logical induction, hypotheses get credit for making predictions on questions that no other hypotheses have made predictions on yet. So for instance if “black people are just genetically less intelligent” came first as a hypothesis for why black people did worse on certain cognitive tasks, then “black people are just genetically less intelligent” gets the credit for that prediction and gets considered a plausible hypothesis. If later other hypotheses such as “black people are not genetically less intelligent” come along, then they might not get any credit at all, due to not making clear predictions. On the other hands, “black people are less intelligent due to environmental lead pollution” may possibly get credit as a competitor once data on lead and IQ is collected, depending on what exactly that data says.
I left this one a long time without response while I gathered the energy to.
All three are real alternative hypotheses. But what I had in mind was scientific evidence specific enough that would single that one hypothesis out from all possible reasonable hypotheses.
In the mathematical sense of “evidence,” not observing any different social network relations is evidence for black people being less intelligent for genetic reasons (under the assumption that they are, in fact, less intelligent, which itself remains to be shown). But that’s not the kind of evidence that I had in mind.
If someone (not me, because I’m not interested) asks you what scientific evidence do you have for black people being genetically less intelligent, and you have specific evidence to disconfirm the hypotheses that they (even though not you) believe to be the alternative ones (like lead poisoning or test bias), you can bundle that evidence to the evidence you were going to give them, compensating for the fact that each of you have different alternative hypotheses.
In other words, what you’re writing seems to me technically correct, but practically irrelevant (as far as converging to the truth goes).
It sounds to me like you are endorsing the possibility I bought up at first here?
Reminds me of: The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication
Saying “no scientific evidence for X” conflates between “we did many experiments that were supposed to show X, and in none of them X was observed” and “we have never tested X properly (maybe we did a few experiments, but now we know they were methodologically flawed, so it’s best to ignore them)”. The former is evidence against X, the latter is not. I believe the situation with IQ is the latter.
As far as I know, the question of racial differences in intelligence has two difficult parts:
First, the concept of intelligence as a single dimension, and the validity of IQ tests.
The entire question would become meaningless if it turned out that there is simply no such thing as intelligence: some people happen to be better at X, other people happen to be better at Y, there is no connection between them; even if one person is better than other in nine different tasks, it does not help us predict whether they will be better at the tenth task. Known as the theory of multiple intelligences. (Although, even if this was the case, we could still talk about racial difference in specific tasks. Perhaps it would be less politically sensitive if it turned out that everyone has an advantage at something. Or maybe not, because people would resent being worse at high-status things, even if they were better at low-status things. Arguably, being better at low-status might even make it worse from certain perspective.)
Assuming that there is a meaningful single dimension of intelligence, the question is how well do the IQ tests measure it. Naively, “many tasks of different kind” should correlate with intelligence, but maybe it also correlates with something else. If there are complicated instructions in English, it disadvantages people for whom English is a second language, and dyslexics. If 20% of questions are about American literature, and 20% are about American history, it disadvantages immigrants, and people who had shitty education. And yes, the early IQ tests had all kinds of such problems, because it took some time to figure this out.
I believe the scientific consensus about this part is that (1) intelligence as a single dimension is a meaningful concept, and (2) while many old IQ tests are highly “culturally loaded”, the current ones are much better.
Second, considering that intelligence is partially inherited and partially influenced by environment (brain injury, parasitic load, childhood malnutrition, sleep deprivation, chronic stress, who knows what else), are we actually talking about the “genetic part of intelligence” or the “manifested intelligence”?
Obviously a person motivated by hysteria would not pay attention to this distinction, and would call both of them “racism”, but these make two very different predictions. If there is a difference between races in manifested intelligence, but not in the genetic part of intelligence—that would mean we have a technical problem that we can fix (e.g. by providing free lunches at school), and then the differences between the races will disappear, yay racial equality! (Yes, I am simplifying it.) On the other hand, if there are differences in the genetic part of intelligence, then we have to accept for a fact that the differences between manifested intelligence will stay here forever (or until we get much better at genetic engineering) and the different outcomes at school and whatever are not evidence of racism.
Here, please correct me if I am wrong, but I think the differences in manifested intelligence exist. But that is the less important of the two questions. More important is, what exactly causes them.
And here, I believe, the best available answer is “we don’t know (everyone is free to follow their priors)”.
A technical problem with proving causality is that you can’t treat race as an independent variable. You cannot e.g. take thousand white babies, randomly genetically engineer half of them to black, give them all for adoption to randomly selected families (preferably literally colorblind families, living in colorblind communities), and then give them IQ tests 20 years later.
The fact that proving causality is difficult doesn’t mean it is impossible, but you would need to be much more careful. Considering that bad actors exist (scientists willing to falsify their research in either direction in the name of ideology), and lot of psychological research does not replicate anyway, maybe our chances to research this properly are close to zero, and thus it simply isn’t worth doing. Maybe.
That is not the same as having evidence that there are no differences. The fact that we have no conclusive proof of differences is a weak evidence against the differences. The fact that different racial groups have different outcomes is a weak evidence in favor of the differences. I am not sure how to compare these two, so I just assume they maybe cancel out and say “I don’t know”. In such situation, it is a tradition among scientists to say “more research is needed”.
Honestly, what evidence are you talking about? (I hope it is not Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, or anything written by S. J. Gould or Nassim Taleb.) Evidence that the existing research sucks? I agree, but that is different from having evidence about the actual differences or a lack thereof.
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A thought experiment:
Imagine that in year 2100, scientists figure out that Black Americans have have an allergy to a certain plant that does not grow in Africa but is a part of diet in USA. The effects of the allergy are mostly difficult to notice, but among other things its regular consumption decreases the IQ of a child by 15 points on average. All you need to do is remove this plant from diet of children up to ten years old.
The scientists will say: “We could have easily figured this out hundred years ago, but in the 21st century there was a strong taboo against exploring the relations between IQ and race.” Assuming you are still alive in 2100, will you say that the taboo was worth it?
(I am not saying this will happen. It’s just an intuition pump for a possible non-racist motivation for science.)
To use an analogy:
It’s ok for criminalists to investigate whether Jeffrey shot William. That’s not a problem. (Even though it can be if they’re motivated by disliking Jeffrey, but even if that’s the case, that’s not the same as making the statement that some unbiased criminalists shouldn’t investigate him. (Edit: The problem there would be more complicated.))
But if Ordinary Internet Folks start talking about that maybe Jeffrey shot William in the absence of any evidence, they give away that they don’t like Jeffrey, and if the club of Nice People has a rule against disliking Jeffrey, they can throw such people out of the room. That doesn’t imply they’re claiming or implying that it’s wrong to investigate whether Jeffrey is or isn’t the culprit.
I’m agreeing with this, primarily because the discussions around Race and IQ are in the area of both little evidence either way, and it isn’t an impactful question in the first place.
Little evidence either way is traditionally interpreted as: “the absence of strong evidence for their side is strong evidence for our side”.
I support the idea that people who talk about inferiority of others, with little evidence, should shut up, or be kicked out of polite society. But the same should also apply to people who cry “X-ism”, with little evidence, just because they noticed that e.g. French people are underrepresented among Tetris players.
Little evidence either way means little evidence either way. If I see a French person playing Tetris, it is none of my business. If I see a group of ten people playing Tetris and none of them is French, it is also none of my business. Only if I have specific evidence of French people being treated unfairly, then I can comment on French people being treated unfairly.
The way people use the relations between IQ and race is to cop-out of the responsibility for human development in less developed areas. There is no actual practical reason to focus our attention on the relationship between IQ and race. People want to do it because of their own ego. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be productive for society. In fact, it’s a lot more counterproductive in terms of where we are going.
The reason why something lives in your head rent free is mostly a personal one. Of course, individuals are affected by their environment. Some people’s minds are more at the mercy of others.
Honestly, I have to agree with this take. Racial IQ discussions are more or less not worth it to study, even if we don’t fully buy the idea that everyone must be equal. Any plausible answer to the question would mostly change things very little.
What’s “scientific evidence”? Is there scientific evidence that paracetamol helps with fever, for example?
Yes, yes, there is. It’s experimentally confirmed to reduce fever in RCT studies, even if it wasn’t obvious the first time you take it. Sadly, the theoretical basis for its action is still sorely lacking. So, while the effect has plenty of scientific evidence, the reasons behind it do not have much, as far as I know.
This meta-analysis says that paracetamol is effective at reducing fever in a short time, but doesn’t seem to accelerate fever clearance in a statistically significant way. So it depends on what you mean by “reducing fever”; as short-term impact on fever is usually considered a secondary outcome in these studies.
It’s true that the mechanism of action is not well understood. However, depending on exactly how you interpret the claim above, it might be true that there is “scientific evidence” for it, or it might not be. Ditto for a claim such as “racial group differences in IQ tests are genetic”. What exactly are we talking about when we make this claim?
Yeah, Ege Erdil’s analogy is unlikely to work out, because the innate race/intelligence hypothesis is actually quite complicated. It’s not just asserting that genetic differences between races cause IQ differences between races, but also that these differences are not mediated by stuff like racism.
I think most who promote it would also go further and say that it is not mediated by high-level psychological stuff like interests, which is definitely a stop where I jump off and say that I haven’t seen evidence for.
I don’t think this is the case, because actually the claim “paracetamol helps with fever” is fairly underdetermined.
Scientific evidence.
Yes.