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.
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.