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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 I “dominate over” my neighbor if I’m a high-paid surgeon and he’s a plumber? What a weird way of phrasing things.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.)
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.
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 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.