There’s something I want to say here that I think is really important to be said, but I’m having trouble finding the words. Please paraphrase and augment my message in a more coherent direction, if you can figure out how to, but what I want to say is along these lines:
I think it is really important that we bring up the fact that the statement we’re arguing about is fundamentally racist and treating this question as just a question of fact lends way too much respectability to the question. I mean, who cares if one genetic group has a higher average IQ than another genetic group? It’s NOT like discussing the third digit of pi, and not just because it’s more complex.
I’m afraid we’re offending minority groups reading this site and I feel acutely embarrassed by the possibility that we’ll bring the subject up, dabble in it, and then won’t argue carefully enough or fully enough because we don’t have the resources, subtlety or interest. People will come here and think that Less Wrong doesn’t really care. I realize that people in these threads are providing arguments, but they seem too calm and impartial, given the issues involved.
People will come here and think that Less Wrong doesn’t really care. I realize that people in these threads are providing arguments, but they seem too calm and impartial, given the issues involved.
You mean not appearing to have been mind-killed is a bad thing?
In the world at large, sanity is valued much less than it is here at lesswrong. Absurd as it sounds, many people would value righteous indignation above rational debate, or even above positive results.
You mean conspicuously not displaying the emotion that should fit the facts sends a signal that it’s not present and that you possibly don’t think it should be, a position that isn’t exactly unheard of in the present world?
I guess I’m missing the humanitarian aspect; facts don’t exist in a vacuum and the “question of fact” we’re considering has already cut reality into an absurd slice of state space. Given the world we live in, I would like to see some solidarity with a discriminated group before we dive into answering an ill-posed question willy-nilly.
It seems to me that there are so many foundational questions we’d need to consider first.
What is intelligence? Who gets to define intelligence? Could we possibly measure intelligence in an accurate non-culturally-skewed way? If we could define intelligence, what would its dimension be (i.e., how many parameters would we need to specify it)?
Should the multi-dimensional measure of intelligence be assigned according to a person’s peak potential, or their average potential? If measures of peak potential verses range of potential vary independently from person to person, how would we compare two people? In general, how do we compare two multi-dimensional distributions that don’t have the same shape?
What is the value of asking about the result due to genetics in particular given that it is practically impossible to separate genetic and environmental effects? Consider:
(i) without the effects of cultural selection maintaining the different populations, genetic meanings of ‘black’ and ‘white’ would quickly become meaningless
(ii) even if someone imagined they were controlling for genetics by looking at cross-racial adoptions, a lot of cultural selection has already occurred in the biological mother’s choice of partner and with environmental effects during gestation (there is already a large health gap between mothers of each race, and if the child was given up for adoption, the care during gestation may be an influencing factor)
(iii) Genetics is a result of environmental selection anyway, and it might be non-sensical to compare distributions that are not in equilibrium.
Given that the question is so complex and ill-posed you have to ask why the question is being asked. What exactly would be irrational about not wanting to glibly admit (socially) if one group has a higher IQ than another group, if it was possible to know it? Is it irrational to not want to entertain a racist agenda? Is it irrational to find it quite troubling that someone you’re talking to would want to discuss the issue of whether one race is inferior to another race, for any reason? I understand that we can’t avoid ‘truth’ just because it is troubling, but what kind of ‘truth’ are we pursuing here? I don’t think we’re qualified to answer this last set of questions. We’re reductionists, and need to keep in mind that some issues are so complex there’s no way to currently address them without being greedy.
I don’t think we’re qualified to answer this last set of questions.
We’re qualified to inquire into any topic that seems worthy of curiosity.
There seems to be much convergent evidence that people who self-identify as “black” tend to test more poorly on some standard measures of cognitive ability than do people who self-identify as “white”, and I don’t think acknowledging that makes someone racist.
I’m in violent agreement with you that a) self-identification as a member of some ethnic group is a cultural phenomenon, not obviously related to any “natural kinds” or empirical clusters, b) standard measures of cognitive ability are a very poor proxy for what we may generally think of as “competencies”, whereby individual humans contribute value to the world, c) it’s unclear even if the ‘genetic’ claim were established as fact what influence it should have on social policies.
If we think about a) clearly enough we might be able to dissolve the confusing term “race” and that seems perhaps a worthy goal. If we think about b) clearly we might be able to dissolve the confusing term “intelligence” and its cortege of mysterious questions, and if we think about c) clearly enough the mysterious questions of ethics.
Isn’t that what this site has been about all along?
Thank you for helping to frame this. I believe I can clarify my position now as the following: I’m afraid it is unethical to dive into the relationship between (a) and (b) if we can gauge in advance we are going to be unsuccessful (culturally, politically, real-world-wise) with (c). Let’s stick with working on (a), (b) and (c) in the abstract before we dive into a real-world example for which even our discussion will have immediate personal and socio-political consequences.
(Or let’s work on (c) first. This is what I mean by facts not existing in a vacuum.)
There seems to be much convergent evidence that people who self-identify as “black” tend to test more poorly on some standard measures of cognitive ability than do people who self-identify as “white”, and I don’t think acknowledging that makes someone racist.
Yes, it does, by definition. If you disagree, define racism in a way such that someone who believes different races have different distributions of attributes is not racist.
The problem is we have two meanings of “racist”. One is “a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races”. The other is, roughly, “a person who hates members of other races”. Most people believe these are equivalent.
The problem is we have two meanings of “racist”. One is “a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races”. The other is, roughly, “a person who hates members of other races”. Most people believe these are equivalent.
I agree with what you mean, but I’m not sure the demarcation line between the two is very sharp, especially for non-nerds who don’t overthink the issue.
Our brains store information as rough summaries, and don’t always separate the value judgement from the characteristics. I’m not sure that there’s a big difference between the mental representations for “X has such-and-such negative characteristic” and “I don’t like X”.
The first is a singularly useless definition satisfied by everyone. Everyone believes that the distribution of skin color differs between black people and white people.
I’d propose a third definition: “someone who treats different people differently based on their race.”
Suggested alternate that captures what I think Phil means by the first definition “a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races in a way that matters in some deep sense.” That doesn’t make it much more precise but I think it captures what he is trying to say in terms of your objection.
Everyone believes that the distribution of skin color differs between black people and white people.
I think this makes the first definition a singularly useful one, because people who think about it and try to be consistent must either find some way in which skin color is a qualitatively different kind of property than every other property people have, or they must admit they are racists.
It’s useful as a polemical tool, not useful in describing the ordinary meaning of the word, that describes actual clusters of common characteristics observed out in the world. I’m uninterested in using definitions constructed for polemical purposes instead of describing empirically observed clusters.
One thing I’m afraid of is that the forces of political correctness would only permit inquiring into sensitive topics as long as the questions are framed and definitions (of things such as “intelligence”) redefined to such a state, that it’s not possible to get a politically incorrect answer, facts be damned.
Is it irrational to find it quite troubling that someone you’re talking to would want to discuss the issue of whether one race is inferior to another race, for any reason?
I don’t know if it’s “irrational”, but I find it troubling when someone wishes to discourage inquiring—for any reason, at that! - into some topic. Whenever that happens, I smell a conflict between free inquiry and a moral fashion. It’s pretty obvious to me which side I should take there…
Yes, some topics are more dangerous than others, more politically loaded or likely to offend or difficult to reduce. But to me it also means they are promising. Widely held views on such a topic are at least somewhat likely to prove incorrect.
I don’t think we’re qualified to answer this last set of questions.
We’re not qualified, and we never will be, and we shouldn’t ever hope or try to be?
I don’t believe that (i), (ii) and (iii) are real reasons. In fact, I think your real reasons may be better in as much as they are normative and I probably accept them in a somewhat milder form.
Is it irrational to find it quite troubling that someone you’re talking to would want to discuss the issue of whether one race is inferior to another race, for any reason?
I don’t know about that. I just know that it has the instrumental consequence of me holding the ‘you’ in question in utter contempt. I pretty much write off people as intellectually irrelevant unless I have reason to believe that their epistemic incompetence is an isolated event.
The people with the advocated flaw of thought should be expected to be extremely prejudiced. Because they are obliged to do… what’s it called again? When you be sexist or racist or otherwise discriminate because you think it makes things fair? Affirmative action. That’s the one. You have to take affirmative action whenever there is a difference in performance because it couldn’t possibly be due to actual individual merit. If a basketball team has a greater proportion of black people than would be representative of the population it is because they are racist.
Oh, and I should expect them to conclude that Ethiopians are all drug cheats. Because their success is a statistically implausible sampling from a fair distribution.
This isn’t to say that I encourage bringing up the subject of racial inequalities when it is not immediately relevant. The times I can recall holding people in contempt is if they speak up on the subject and declare equivalence (contrary to evidence), speak up and condemn anyone who doesn’t make their own error or when people comment on a decision that relies on the forbidden epistemic question as a premise as though their opinion has any meaning. Because that is just, well, evil.
EDIT: Oh, wow! I just noticed that the grandparent is me! Hi Wedrifid_2010! What comment brought me back here again?
Upvoted because you have stumbled upon the issue with all of these seemingly-abstract discussions of race and IQ.
You don’t have to deny that IQ is something measurable or that it has correlates with other things (both personal traits, and life outcomes) to be unwilling to take at face value that what IQ is measuring can best be described as “general intelligence.” Context is of massive importance here.
The focus on genetics is especially problematic, but I suspect that reflects a prevailing subconscious attitude that IQ is pretty much just that: a measure of your general intelligence. Most of the people on this site are probably not poor, not women (though that ratio seems to be changing, I daresay it’s still nothing like even) not members of a racial minority in their country (I’m guessing the vast majority here are either “white” colonials in North America or Australia, or else Western Europeans), probably not disabled in a highly-visible way...
In short, these issues are just abstract to them, so they will tend to have very few “buttons” around it except around being seen as bigoted towards people who are.
As to the question itself, you’ve nailed the issue when you say:
Given that the question is so complex and ill-posed you have to ask why the question is being asked.
What exactly would be irrational about not wanting to glibly admit (socially) if one group has a higher IQ than another group, if it was possible to know it? Is it irrational to not want to entertain a racist agenda?
Is it irrational to find it quite troubling that someone you’re talking to would want to discuss the issue of
whether one race is inferior to another race, for any reason? I understand that we can’t avoid ‘truth’ just
because it is troubling, but what kind of ‘truth’ are we pursuing here?
Consider the point Brazil was making in the context, by making the claim more realistically comparable now to making the “no God” claim some time ago.
I think it is really important that we bring up the fact that the statement we’re arguing about is fundamentally [religiously intollerant] and treating this question as just a question of fact lends way too much respectability to the question.
I would expect similar social pressure for the God question historically (in a god-denying but PC heavy context). It seems to me that the comparison is an accurate one.
I mean, who cares if one genetic group has a higher average IQ than another genetic group?
For purposes of this discussion, the reason I care is that the racial IQ gap is the big taboo of our age just as the existence of God was the big taboo at some point in the past (and still is to a certain extent).
The real test for whether or not somebody is a “cheap credit” skeptic will necessarily involve inflammatory issues, it seems to me.
I agree, byrnema. Speaking that way is status lowering.
Talking matter-of-factly about things that the other person finds displeasing or offensive.
It makes people feel bad. So it’s no surprise site stumbler (from certain groups) are bound to sprint. But that wouldn’t prove they couldn’t talk controversials.
I’m afraid we’re offending minority groups reading this site
There is probably a substantial population of people who are minorities and more offended by your projection of them as emotionally fragile and thin skinned, if you’ll pardon the expression.
I’ve meditated on this comment, and have sorted this out: your comment appears to be raising the question, in a particularly non-face-saving way, of whether this conversation is offensive.
Because if it is offensive, then I can surely regret offending. If it isn’t offensive, only then would I be projecting ‘emotional fragility and thin-skinned-ness’.
I would like to point out the obvious, that if it turns out to not be offensive, then this only means that I am emotionally fragile and thin-skinned, a persona I’m happy to wear if it gives me liberty to speak out earlier than otherwise. I speak again of the discomfort I feel of ‘speaking out’ towards the end of this comment. I’m not sure where it comes from but it’s not really a fear of being emotionally fragile. Rather, it’s the confusion of not knowing where to draw the line, and looking for a line to be crossed, and wondering if the line was crossed already and you should already have said something or say something stronger.
I would guess (charitably, I hope) that you expect that any carefully measured, rational discussion of any issue should not be offensive.
However, from previous experience I simply don’t trust this site to have this conversation. My prejudice is that in particular commenters here are overall too naive to notice, or too apathetic to respond appropriately, to the ways evil introduces itself into these intended rational conversations.
Humans are humans are humans everywhere. We have this potential for evil when we try to convince ourselves we’re superior to another group of humans. The next step is rationalize things being different for that group of people. We’ve already been there, for a long time, with minorities. Things are better but they’re still bad and humans are humans are always humans. I’ll skip enumerating examples of the blatant racism I’ve encountered in my life. There’s way to much hatred going on to pretend that this is ‘just a question’, and there is too much potential for abuse—even if the conversation really is rational, which I believe might be possible in a closed discussion here—due to the public nature of the conversation.
My point isn’t that this question is particularly taboo (I think it’s rather absurd, actually) or that a rational discussion isn’t possible. I really think there are other steps that need to be taken first, for example, beginning with a panel of people specifically educated in the appropriate topic (social justice? I’ve no idea) to moderate and make the correct disclaimers regarding the intention of the discussion. I think we (including myself certainly, I have continuously felt extremely uncomfortable speaking out due to being so inarticulate and uninformed) are just butchering the topic, applying a hack-saw willy-nilly to a set of issues that needs some care, considering.
As you may have guessed by now, I think the answer is status. Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it’s to defend someone’s status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest.
I would guess (charitably, I hope) that you expect that any carefully measured, rational discussion of any issue should not be offensive.
Offensiveness is not a property of a discussion, it’s a property of a relationship between an action like speech or a discussion and a person, the offended person. For every discussion, there are possible minds who would be offended by it.
superior
Error: word undefined. Any definition implicates not only a theory of facts of the world but also a theory of values.
There’s way to much hatred going on
Why do you speak primarily of hatred, rather than of other emotions, or of thoughts, or of consequences? For example, it is possible to feel hated while actually being despised, envied, or not thought of at all; one can only infer another’s emotions, it’s an unsure thing.
make the correct disclaimers regarding the intention of the discussion.
Your enemies are not innately evil. When you infer only one meaning from someone’s speech, it is not necessarily what they meant, and the notion both the listener and the speaker may have that the speech only had one meaning is a failure of inferential distance. These are the most important disclaimers.
I’m afraid we’re offending minority groups reading this site and I feel acutely embarrassed by the possibility that we’ll > bring the subject up, dabble in it, and then won’t argue carefully enough or fully enough because we don’t have the
resources, subtlety or interest.
Frankly, “offending” is almost the wrong thing to worry about here. No amount of spinning people’s beliefs here on LW would make it less apparent to most non-White people visiting the site that the ideas and goals on display here are skewed by the site’s existing demographics.
There is serious, entrenched bias in this site’s population around matters racial. I am willing to make a bet that greater than 75 percent of this site’s membership is White or from some European majority ethnic group; their perspectives on what racism even is are affected by their experiences with it, and I daresay most people here have very little experience with racism.
Take the struggle to even define what it is downthread. Is it hating people of other skin colors? Is it acknowledging that skin color differences exist? Or only that there might be clusters of humanity grouped by some kind of shared trait?
Those definitions have very little to do with how racism is actually experienced by people of color in the US (it is difficult to even speak of this in a global context, since different regions of the globe have different experiences with colonialism, their diaspora and indigenous populations have different experiences of marginalization in different places). In the real world, it’s more complicated than that.
In the US population, white people’s ancestors were mostly settlers and colonists from abroad. But black people’s ancestors were mostly brought over involuntarily as property, not as people. Most East Asian families that came here a long time ago were barely-tolerated migrant workers welcome for their labor, but distrusted by the white population, unable to become citizens and unable to access many of the social networks open to whites only. Don’t even get me started on what Native populations faced during the first couple centuries (or even within the last one—how many people on this site realize it was still common practice for Indian Health Service doctors to perform involuntary sterilization on Native women when they came in for unrelated health complaints, or to give birth?) .
Not all white people wound up rich, but just being seen as white meant a greater chance of access to all kinds of social and wealth-creating opportunities (great example: The Homestead Act and westward expansion—basically not open to non-whites, reliant upon government funds and promises of newly-conquered or even still-owned Indian land). Not all of them saw the statistical benefit turn to their favor specifically, but those those who did more reliably had something to pass on to their descendants, meaning their descendants got to start with that much more in their favor. And because white people were the numerical majority and cultural majority (in terms of being the group that the largest number of media outlets, service providers, marketing types, politicians and so on were aiming to serve, represent, sell to or satisfy) this country’s society and culture have built up to be focused around the needs, resources, ambitions, desires and so on of an assumedly-white populace. They’re the mainstream. They’re the normal against which anything else is seen as an alternative.
This has compound effects as the generations go by. Poverty is every bit as inheritable as wealth, and for a much larger proportion of non-whites than whites, that’s what they’ll be born to. Poverty impacts health, opportunities for work and education, the social networks to which you can reasonably expect access, access to income, how hard you have to work to make ends meet, and a whole host of other things. This is before you get into active bigotry—and while today it’s hard to get away with signalling active bigotry in a mainstream context, it’s still trivial in practice to get away with many forms of unstated, even subconscious discrimination, conscious or not.
I’m outlining only a very small portion of the picture here—understanding how majority vs minority social positioning can affect your life seems to be very difficult for members of the majority, probably because on an individual level you’re all just living your lives and are acclimated to your own context. That context shapes your worldview in many subtle ways, and leads to many biases that are non-obvious to many members of this site (indeed, I fully expect the noise-to-signal ratio here to get bad in short order, though I hope I’m wrong about that).
So, yeah, you do have a point that the cavalier discussion of racial IQ differentials is probably a bit unseemly for a group probably composed mostly of white USians, Australians, Canadians and Europeans and tends to signal some things that may be offputting to people of color—but trust me, those things are going to come through abundantly anyhow.
(And yes, for the record, seeing race-and-IQ-discussions carried out on this site is just painful; but then it seems like so many people here tend to view IQ as primarily-genetic, whereas I tend to view it as more a measure of proficiency at functioning in an industrialized, highly-individualistic, mostly-urban capitalist society. Most of the people here wouldn’t last a day in a hunter-gatherer’s world; it is darn convenient that your idea of “general intelligence” is skewed towards the challenges you face in your own everyday life!)
So, this is well written and does bring up some valid points. But there are some serious issues:
First, your comment about defining racism misses the point: The issue there was specifically whether individuals are being racist and what that means. You seem to be arguing that that might not be terrible relevant. But that doesn’t undermine that discussion at all.
Another issue is that there a large set of minorities which have succeeded quite well in the US despite having had serious issues in the past. The Chinese and the Jews are excellent examples (the second curiously enough seems to be overrepresented here.)
so many people here tend to view IQ as primarily-genetic, whereas I tend to view it as more a measure of proficiency at functioning in an industrialized, highly-individualistic, mostly-urban capitalist society.
This confuses me in that you seem to be arguing that ability to function in an “industrialized, highly-individualistic, mostly-urban capitalist society” must not be genetic. But all the time traits which evolved in one context turn out to be relevant in a new environment. Incidentally, there’s a fair bit of evidence that conscientiousness matters as much if not more than IQ for actually succeeding in modern societies. (See e.g. this paper).
First, your comment about defining racism misses the point: The issue there was specifically whether
individuals are being racist and what that means.
I think it’s sort of important to understand what Property X is before we can meaningfully argue about whether a given case specimen has Property X, let alone whether it’s meaningful to group them in Reference Class X. Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse to do it the other way?
Another issue is that there a large set of minorities which have succeeded quite well in the US despite
having had serious issues in the past. The Chinese and the Jews are excellent examples (the second
curiously enough seems to be overrepresented here.)
The Chinese and the Jews have hard remarkably different outcome distributions, and Jews in the US generally fit into the “white” category these days (and have for a long time). I’d avoid over-presuming on the amount of success Chinese-Americans have had, too—see the Model Minority Stereotype, and consider that for most Asian Americans they’ve only enjoyed comparable gains to many whites at the cost of having to work two to four times harder to achieve it.
Even then, I’d still hardly call Chinese Americans included in mainstream-society; they’re still predominantly seen as “other” by whites except insofar as they assimilate.
What I’m arguing is that most people here seem to view IQ as “general intelligence” rather than context-specific functional level, and I don’t think that’s warranted. If you mean the latter when you say IQ, then we agree that far, but I haven’t found it safe to assume that here.
Assuming we do agree on that point, I’d add that as to whether it’s primarily genetic, I am skeptical, and while I would not call the question inherently uninteresting, I think it’s been poorly-framed and doesn’t warrant anything like the level of attention it receives compared to the many other questions that could be asked. The specific questions that seem to occur to people and their level of interest strikes me as very skewed.
There’s something I want to say here that I think is really important to be said, but I’m having trouble finding the words. Please paraphrase and augment my message in a more coherent direction, if you can figure out how to, but what I want to say is along these lines:
I think it is really important that we bring up the fact that the statement we’re arguing about is fundamentally racist and treating this question as just a question of fact lends way too much respectability to the question. I mean, who cares if one genetic group has a higher average IQ than another genetic group? It’s NOT like discussing the third digit of pi, and not just because it’s more complex.
I’m afraid we’re offending minority groups reading this site and I feel acutely embarrassed by the possibility that we’ll bring the subject up, dabble in it, and then won’t argue carefully enough or fully enough because we don’t have the resources, subtlety or interest. People will come here and think that Less Wrong doesn’t really care. I realize that people in these threads are providing arguments, but they seem too calm and impartial, given the issues involved.
You mean not appearing to have been mind-killed is a bad thing?
Welcome to the world. Sanity is not always valued so highly here as you might be used to.
Don’t confuse preference with prediction.
Where else have I been where sanity is valued more highly and how do I get back to it?
I see my joke fell flat.
In the world at large, sanity is valued much less than it is here at lesswrong. Absurd as it sounds, many people would value righteous indignation above rational debate, or even above positive results.
See the recent discussion on jokes with Rain. The joke implication missed.
I almost wish that did sound absurd.
You mean conspicuously not displaying the emotion that should fit the facts sends a signal that it’s not present and that you possibly don’t think it should be, a position that isn’t exactly unheard of in the present world?
I guess I’m missing the humanitarian aspect; facts don’t exist in a vacuum and the “question of fact” we’re considering has already cut reality into an absurd slice of state space. Given the world we live in, I would like to see some solidarity with a discriminated group before we dive into answering an ill-posed question willy-nilly.
It seems to me that there are so many foundational questions we’d need to consider first.
What is intelligence? Who gets to define intelligence? Could we possibly measure intelligence in an accurate non-culturally-skewed way? If we could define intelligence, what would its dimension be (i.e., how many parameters would we need to specify it)?
Should the multi-dimensional measure of intelligence be assigned according to a person’s peak potential, or their average potential? If measures of peak potential verses range of potential vary independently from person to person, how would we compare two people? In general, how do we compare two multi-dimensional distributions that don’t have the same shape?
What is the value of asking about the result due to genetics in particular given that it is practically impossible to separate genetic and environmental effects? Consider:
(i) without the effects of cultural selection maintaining the different populations, genetic meanings of ‘black’ and ‘white’ would quickly become meaningless
(ii) even if someone imagined they were controlling for genetics by looking at cross-racial adoptions, a lot of cultural selection has already occurred in the biological mother’s choice of partner and with environmental effects during gestation (there is already a large health gap between mothers of each race, and if the child was given up for adoption, the care during gestation may be an influencing factor)
(iii) Genetics is a result of environmental selection anyway, and it might be non-sensical to compare distributions that are not in equilibrium.
Given that the question is so complex and ill-posed you have to ask why the question is being asked. What exactly would be irrational about not wanting to glibly admit (socially) if one group has a higher IQ than another group, if it was possible to know it? Is it irrational to not want to entertain a racist agenda? Is it irrational to find it quite troubling that someone you’re talking to would want to discuss the issue of whether one race is inferior to another race, for any reason? I understand that we can’t avoid ‘truth’ just because it is troubling, but what kind of ‘truth’ are we pursuing here? I don’t think we’re qualified to answer this last set of questions. We’re reductionists, and need to keep in mind that some issues are so complex there’s no way to currently address them without being greedy.
It seems like you’re trying to torture the answer you want into the question.
We’re qualified to inquire into any topic that seems worthy of curiosity.
There seems to be much convergent evidence that people who self-identify as “black” tend to test more poorly on some standard measures of cognitive ability than do people who self-identify as “white”, and I don’t think acknowledging that makes someone racist.
I’m in violent agreement with you that a) self-identification as a member of some ethnic group is a cultural phenomenon, not obviously related to any “natural kinds” or empirical clusters, b) standard measures of cognitive ability are a very poor proxy for what we may generally think of as “competencies”, whereby individual humans contribute value to the world, c) it’s unclear even if the ‘genetic’ claim were established as fact what influence it should have on social policies.
If we think about a) clearly enough we might be able to dissolve the confusing term “race” and that seems perhaps a worthy goal. If we think about b) clearly we might be able to dissolve the confusing term “intelligence” and its cortege of mysterious questions, and if we think about c) clearly enough the mysterious questions of ethics.
Isn’t that what this site has been about all along?
Thank you for helping to frame this. I believe I can clarify my position now as the following: I’m afraid it is unethical to dive into the relationship between (a) and (b) if we can gauge in advance we are going to be unsuccessful (culturally, politically, real-world-wise) with (c). Let’s stick with working on (a), (b) and (c) in the abstract before we dive into a real-world example for which even our discussion will have immediate personal and socio-political consequences.
(Or let’s work on (c) first. This is what I mean by facts not existing in a vacuum.)
Yes, it does, by definition. If you disagree, define racism in a way such that someone who believes different races have different distributions of attributes is not racist.
The problem is we have two meanings of “racist”. One is “a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races”. The other is, roughly, “a person who hates members of other races”. Most people believe these are equivalent.
I agree with what you mean, but I’m not sure the demarcation line between the two is very sharp, especially for non-nerds who don’t overthink the issue.
Our brains store information as rough summaries, and don’t always separate the value judgement from the characteristics. I’m not sure that there’s a big difference between the mental representations for “X has such-and-such negative characteristic” and “I don’t like X”.
I’ll pass on playing definitional games. What are we arguing about?
The first is a singularly useless definition satisfied by everyone. Everyone believes that the distribution of skin color differs between black people and white people.
I’d propose a third definition: “someone who treats different people differently based on their race.”
Suggested alternate that captures what I think Phil means by the first definition “a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races in a way that matters in some deep sense.” That doesn’t make it much more precise but I think it captures what he is trying to say in terms of your objection.
I think this makes the first definition a singularly useful one, because people who think about it and try to be consistent must either find some way in which skin color is a qualitatively different kind of property than every other property people have, or they must admit they are racists.
It’s useful as a polemical tool, not useful in describing the ordinary meaning of the word, that describes actual clusters of common characteristics observed out in the world. I’m uninterested in using definitions constructed for polemical purposes instead of describing empirically observed clusters.
One thing I’m afraid of is that the forces of political correctness would only permit inquiring into sensitive topics as long as the questions are framed and definitions (of things such as “intelligence”) redefined to such a state, that it’s not possible to get a politically incorrect answer, facts be damned.
I don’t know if it’s “irrational”, but I find it troubling when someone wishes to discourage inquiring—for any reason, at that! - into some topic. Whenever that happens, I smell a conflict between free inquiry and a moral fashion. It’s pretty obvious to me which side I should take there…
Yes, some topics are more dangerous than others, more politically loaded or likely to offend or difficult to reduce. But to me it also means they are promising. Widely held views on such a topic are at least somewhat likely to prove incorrect.
We’re not qualified, and we never will be, and we shouldn’t ever hope or try to be?
I don’t believe that (i), (ii) and (iii) are real reasons. In fact, I think your real reasons may be better in as much as they are normative and I probably accept them in a somewhat milder form.
I don’t know about that. I just know that it has the instrumental consequence of me holding the ‘you’ in question in utter contempt. I pretty much write off people as intellectually irrelevant unless I have reason to believe that their epistemic incompetence is an isolated event.
The people with the advocated flaw of thought should be expected to be extremely prejudiced. Because they are obliged to do… what’s it called again? When you be sexist or racist or otherwise discriminate because you think it makes things fair? Affirmative action. That’s the one. You have to take affirmative action whenever there is a difference in performance because it couldn’t possibly be due to actual individual merit. If a basketball team has a greater proportion of black people than would be representative of the population it is because they are racist.
Oh, and I should expect them to conclude that Ethiopians are all drug cheats. Because their success is a statistically implausible sampling from a fair distribution.
This isn’t to say that I encourage bringing up the subject of racial inequalities when it is not immediately relevant. The times I can recall holding people in contempt is if they speak up on the subject and declare equivalence (contrary to evidence), speak up and condemn anyone who doesn’t make their own error or when people comment on a decision that relies on the forbidden epistemic question as a premise as though their opinion has any meaning. Because that is just, well, evil.
EDIT: Oh, wow! I just noticed that the grandparent is me! Hi Wedrifid_2010! What comment brought me back here again?
Upvoted because you have stumbled upon the issue with all of these seemingly-abstract discussions of race and IQ.
You don’t have to deny that IQ is something measurable or that it has correlates with other things (both personal traits, and life outcomes) to be unwilling to take at face value that what IQ is measuring can best be described as “general intelligence.” Context is of massive importance here.
The focus on genetics is especially problematic, but I suspect that reflects a prevailing subconscious attitude that IQ is pretty much just that: a measure of your general intelligence. Most of the people on this site are probably not poor, not women (though that ratio seems to be changing, I daresay it’s still nothing like even) not members of a racial minority in their country (I’m guessing the vast majority here are either “white” colonials in North America or Australia, or else Western Europeans), probably not disabled in a highly-visible way...
In short, these issues are just abstract to them, so they will tend to have very few “buttons” around it except around being seen as bigoted towards people who are.
As to the question itself, you’ve nailed the issue when you say:
...
I can hear the Race-IQ question screaming as Byrnema applies her methods to it:
Consider the point Brazil was making in the context, by making the claim more realistically comparable now to making the “no God” claim some time ago.
I would expect similar social pressure for the God question historically (in a god-denying but PC heavy context). It seems to me that the comparison is an accurate one.
It matters to me as a person considering adopting children.
For purposes of this discussion, the reason I care is that the racial IQ gap is the big taboo of our age just as the existence of God was the big taboo at some point in the past (and still is to a certain extent).
The real test for whether or not somebody is a “cheap credit” skeptic will necessarily involve inflammatory issues, it seems to me.
Wow, yeah. This suggests another Umeshism to me:
If you haven’t horrified or offended anyone you care about, you’re not a genuine skeptic.
(It goes without saying that the inverse of this statement is false.)
I agree, byrnema. Speaking that way is status lowering.
It makes people feel bad. So it’s no surprise site stumbler (from certain groups) are bound to sprint. But that wouldn’t prove they couldn’t talk controversials.
Side note: I have a mixed background.
There is probably a substantial population of people who are minorities and more offended by your projection of them as emotionally fragile and thin skinned, if you’ll pardon the expression.
I’ve meditated on this comment, and have sorted this out: your comment appears to be raising the question, in a particularly non-face-saving way, of whether this conversation is offensive.
Because if it is offensive, then I can surely regret offending. If it isn’t offensive, only then would I be projecting ‘emotional fragility and thin-skinned-ness’.
I would like to point out the obvious, that if it turns out to not be offensive, then this only means that I am emotionally fragile and thin-skinned, a persona I’m happy to wear if it gives me liberty to speak out earlier than otherwise. I speak again of the discomfort I feel of ‘speaking out’ towards the end of this comment. I’m not sure where it comes from but it’s not really a fear of being emotionally fragile. Rather, it’s the confusion of not knowing where to draw the line, and looking for a line to be crossed, and wondering if the line was crossed already and you should already have said something or say something stronger.
I would guess (charitably, I hope) that you expect that any carefully measured, rational discussion of any issue should not be offensive.
However, from previous experience I simply don’t trust this site to have this conversation. My prejudice is that in particular commenters here are overall too naive to notice, or too apathetic to respond appropriately, to the ways evil introduces itself into these intended rational conversations.
Humans are humans are humans everywhere. We have this potential for evil when we try to convince ourselves we’re superior to another group of humans. The next step is rationalize things being different for that group of people. We’ve already been there, for a long time, with minorities. Things are better but they’re still bad and humans are humans are always humans. I’ll skip enumerating examples of the blatant racism I’ve encountered in my life. There’s way to much hatred going on to pretend that this is ‘just a question’, and there is too much potential for abuse—even if the conversation really is rational, which I believe might be possible in a closed discussion here—due to the public nature of the conversation.
My point isn’t that this question is particularly taboo (I think it’s rather absurd, actually) or that a rational discussion isn’t possible. I really think there are other steps that need to be taken first, for example, beginning with a panel of people specifically educated in the appropriate topic (social justice? I’ve no idea) to moderate and make the correct disclaimers regarding the intention of the discussion. I think we (including myself certainly, I have continuously felt extremely uncomfortable speaking out due to being so inarticulate and uninformed) are just butchering the topic, applying a hack-saw willy-nilly to a set of issues that needs some care, considering.
Why would anyone expect that?
What does it mean to be offended? How is it different from being insulted? Is an insult that is true not an insult?
Relevant: The Nature of Offense.
Seems to match this case perfectly.
Offensiveness is not a property of a discussion, it’s a property of a relationship between an action like speech or a discussion and a person, the offended person. For every discussion, there are possible minds who would be offended by it.
Error: word undefined. Any definition implicates not only a theory of facts of the world but also a theory of values.
Why do you speak primarily of hatred, rather than of other emotions, or of thoughts, or of consequences? For example, it is possible to feel hated while actually being despised, envied, or not thought of at all; one can only infer another’s emotions, it’s an unsure thing.
Your enemies are not innately evil. When you infer only one meaning from someone’s speech, it is not necessarily what they meant, and the notion both the listener and the speaker may have that the speech only had one meaning is a failure of inferential distance. These are the most important disclaimers.
Frankly, “offending” is almost the wrong thing to worry about here. No amount of spinning people’s beliefs here on LW would make it less apparent to most non-White people visiting the site that the ideas and goals on display here are skewed by the site’s existing demographics.
There is serious, entrenched bias in this site’s population around matters racial. I am willing to make a bet that greater than 75 percent of this site’s membership is White or from some European majority ethnic group; their perspectives on what racism even is are affected by their experiences with it, and I daresay most people here have very little experience with racism.
Take the struggle to even define what it is downthread. Is it hating people of other skin colors? Is it acknowledging that skin color differences exist? Or only that there might be clusters of humanity grouped by some kind of shared trait?
Those definitions have very little to do with how racism is actually experienced by people of color in the US (it is difficult to even speak of this in a global context, since different regions of the globe have different experiences with colonialism, their diaspora and indigenous populations have different experiences of marginalization in different places). In the real world, it’s more complicated than that.
In the US population, white people’s ancestors were mostly settlers and colonists from abroad. But black people’s ancestors were mostly brought over involuntarily as property, not as people. Most East Asian families that came here a long time ago were barely-tolerated migrant workers welcome for their labor, but distrusted by the white population, unable to become citizens and unable to access many of the social networks open to whites only. Don’t even get me started on what Native populations faced during the first couple centuries (or even within the last one—how many people on this site realize it was still common practice for Indian Health Service doctors to perform involuntary sterilization on Native women when they came in for unrelated health complaints, or to give birth?) .
Not all white people wound up rich, but just being seen as white meant a greater chance of access to all kinds of social and wealth-creating opportunities (great example: The Homestead Act and westward expansion—basically not open to non-whites, reliant upon government funds and promises of newly-conquered or even still-owned Indian land). Not all of them saw the statistical benefit turn to their favor specifically, but those those who did more reliably had something to pass on to their descendants, meaning their descendants got to start with that much more in their favor. And because white people were the numerical majority and cultural majority (in terms of being the group that the largest number of media outlets, service providers, marketing types, politicians and so on were aiming to serve, represent, sell to or satisfy) this country’s society and culture have built up to be focused around the needs, resources, ambitions, desires and so on of an assumedly-white populace. They’re the mainstream. They’re the normal against which anything else is seen as an alternative.
This has compound effects as the generations go by. Poverty is every bit as inheritable as wealth, and for a much larger proportion of non-whites than whites, that’s what they’ll be born to. Poverty impacts health, opportunities for work and education, the social networks to which you can reasonably expect access, access to income, how hard you have to work to make ends meet, and a whole host of other things. This is before you get into active bigotry—and while today it’s hard to get away with signalling active bigotry in a mainstream context, it’s still trivial in practice to get away with many forms of unstated, even subconscious discrimination, conscious or not.
I’m outlining only a very small portion of the picture here—understanding how majority vs minority social positioning can affect your life seems to be very difficult for members of the majority, probably because on an individual level you’re all just living your lives and are acclimated to your own context. That context shapes your worldview in many subtle ways, and leads to many biases that are non-obvious to many members of this site (indeed, I fully expect the noise-to-signal ratio here to get bad in short order, though I hope I’m wrong about that).
So, yeah, you do have a point that the cavalier discussion of racial IQ differentials is probably a bit unseemly for a group probably composed mostly of white USians, Australians, Canadians and Europeans and tends to signal some things that may be offputting to people of color—but trust me, those things are going to come through abundantly anyhow.
(And yes, for the record, seeing race-and-IQ-discussions carried out on this site is just painful; but then it seems like so many people here tend to view IQ as primarily-genetic, whereas I tend to view it as more a measure of proficiency at functioning in an industrialized, highly-individualistic, mostly-urban capitalist society. Most of the people here wouldn’t last a day in a hunter-gatherer’s world; it is darn convenient that your idea of “general intelligence” is skewed towards the challenges you face in your own everyday life!)
So, this is well written and does bring up some valid points. But there are some serious issues:
First, your comment about defining racism misses the point: The issue there was specifically whether individuals are being racist and what that means. You seem to be arguing that that might not be terrible relevant. But that doesn’t undermine that discussion at all.
Another issue is that there a large set of minorities which have succeeded quite well in the US despite having had serious issues in the past. The Chinese and the Jews are excellent examples (the second curiously enough seems to be overrepresented here.)
This confuses me in that you seem to be arguing that ability to function in an “industrialized, highly-individualistic, mostly-urban capitalist society” must not be genetic. But all the time traits which evolved in one context turn out to be relevant in a new environment. Incidentally, there’s a fair bit of evidence that conscientiousness matters as much if not more than IQ for actually succeeding in modern societies. (See e.g. this paper).
I think it’s sort of important to understand what Property X is before we can meaningfully argue about whether a given case specimen has Property X, let alone whether it’s meaningful to group them in Reference Class X. Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse to do it the other way?
The Chinese and the Jews have hard remarkably different outcome distributions, and Jews in the US generally fit into the “white” category these days (and have for a long time). I’d avoid over-presuming on the amount of success Chinese-Americans have had, too—see the Model Minority Stereotype, and consider that for most Asian Americans they’ve only enjoyed comparable gains to many whites at the cost of having to work two to four times harder to achieve it.
Even then, I’d still hardly call Chinese Americans included in mainstream-society; they’re still predominantly seen as “other” by whites except insofar as they assimilate.
What I’m arguing is that most people here seem to view IQ as “general intelligence” rather than context-specific functional level, and I don’t think that’s warranted. If you mean the latter when you say IQ, then we agree that far, but I haven’t found it safe to assume that here.
Assuming we do agree on that point, I’d add that as to whether it’s primarily genetic, I am skeptical, and while I would not call the question inherently uninteresting, I think it’s been poorly-framed and doesn’t warrant anything like the level of attention it receives compared to the many other questions that could be asked. The specific questions that seem to occur to people and their level of interest strikes me as very skewed.