the causes of violent crime are biological in nature and then suggest biological interventions
For a moment there, I feared you’d speak of genetics and eugenics, but then
(someone on LessWrong recently suggested fish pill oils to correct for micronutrient deficiencies)
if you mean something as prosai as dietetics, I can totally get behind that; I find it easy to believe that crappy food induces cranky mood (and that, in the US, crappy cheap food is remarkably deleterious).
If you could acknowledge that culture problems and social multipliers have huge effects on adult criminality and success, and make policy decisions based on that (although this problem is very difficult) how many more lives could be saved?
Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?
If the political climate only allows you to say that different outcomes are the result of the discriminatory schooling system, those nasty racists and the prejudiced authorities
Putting the full blame on them is as absurd as fully absolving them. What insane political climate do you live in, that you’d have to settle for either fallacy?
if it describes the way the world is then its just science
I remain unconvinced that this is exactly the case, and, even though I can accept its provisional validity, with many caveats and reservations, I’m pretty sure the actual reality is more interesting than “blacks and latinos are born dumber, White-Jews and White-Asian nerds are born smarter, and White-Christians are born a little bit smarter than average”.
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers’ inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers’ inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?
It’s not even that we would need to use it, just that denying it would be harmful.
Without taking sides on the object-level debate of whether it’s true or not, let me sketch out some ways that, if scientific racism were true, we would want to believe that it was true. In the spirit of not making this degenerate further, I’ll ignore everything to do with eugenics, and with partisan issues like affirmative action.
(1) Racial differences tend to show up most starkly on IQ tests. This has led to the cultural trope that IQ is meaningless or biased or associated with racism. This has led to a culture in which it is unacceptable (borderline illegal depending on exactly how you do it) to use IQ tests in situations like employment interviews. But employers continue to want highly intelligent employees.
This encourages credentialism—the use of prestigious college degrees as a marker for intelligence. This means everyone needs to get a prestigious college degree. This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.
This decreases social mobility since poor people aren’t going to be able to get into Harvard at the same rate as rich people.And it leaves everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, forcing them to optimize for high-paying jobs like finance rather than socially productive ones. And it sticks our economy precariously on top of an even bigger mountain of debt than before.
(2) If scientific racism is true but everyone insists violently that it is false, we can’t explicitly describe this state of affairs: “Psssst, all that racist stuff we’re attacking is actually true, but you’re not supposed to talk about it. Pass it on.”
But we would expect smart and intellectually honest people who study science and understand statistics to eventually figure out it is true. For whatever reason, smart and intellectually honest people seem unusually bad at picking up non-explicit social norms, so they’re likely to respond with “HEY! GUYS! ALL THAT SCIENTIFIC RACISM WE’VE BEEN VIOLENTLY ATTACKING AS ACTUALLY TRUE! WEIRD, ISN’T IT?” Everyone will then violently attack them as racist and they will be traumatized.
The end result is that a lot of the smartest and most intellectually honest people hate the rest of society and are hated by them in turn. The dumber and less intellectually honest you are, the more likely you are to remain unostracized and end up being a “thought leader”.
(3) If scientific racism were true, we would expect the fields of academic intelligence research and population genetics to know about it and generally believe it. We would then expect those fields to either be loathed and discredited by the general population for this reason, or else retreat to a hedgehogesque defensive posture, or else exist in a constant low-grade civil war.
All of these things seem to be true to a degree. Just to give one example, Arthur Jensen, whom everyone including his enemies agrees was smart and nice and intellectually honest, who helped pioneer the intelligence research field—got literally burned in effigy, had people threaten to kill his children, and eventually had to hire bodyguards just to go around campus. This seems like it might disincentivize people to study intelligence.
But I think intelligence research and associated areas are some of the most important fields that exist! These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt! These are the people who noticed that lead decreases IQ and very likely also executive function and so probably was responsible for like the entire giant crime wave of the latter half of this century which we successfully reversed by banning lead. These are people so awesome that I strongly suspect if we took a billion dollars away from the physicists and gave it to the intelligence researchers, then in thirty years we would have more intelligence research and probably also more physics.
And so we should be trying encourage them to continue doing good work, and one way we might do this is by not threatening to kill their children.
If scientific racism is true, then believing it is true will make us less likely to do things like threaten to kill the children of intelligence researchers because they are engaged in disproving it.
(You may say “But we could argue with them without using violence!” But how exactly do you think you are going to prevent a true thing from coming out, for all time, without using desperate measures?)
(4) Tiny advantages in mean or variance magnify with every standard deviation you go from the center of the bell curve. So if scientific racism were true, we would expect high-IQ communities to come from disproportionately high-IQ groups. The Southern Baptist Church would be laudably diverse, but the atheist community would be full of nerdy white/Asian/Jewish/Indian men, easily abbreviate to “nerdy white dudes”.
If it is assumed that all differences in group membership are because groups are racist, exclusionary, or bullying, this means that all high-IQ groups will be accused of racism, exclusion, and bullying and be considered bad people. No doubt there will be some genuine incidents of such in these groups (as there are in all groups) and these will be seized upon as proof.
So high-IQ groups will once again end up either loathed by the general population, in defensive hedgehog postures, or in a state of low-grade civil war (cf: the modern atheist movement)
But presumably high-IQ groups are smart and have ideas worth listening to. When they get ignored and marginalized, that either gives comfort to false or harmful ideas like evangelical religion, or creates this really creepy situation where very powerful people who help shape the world are suspected by, and suspicious of, everyone else (like what seems to be developing with Silicon Valley tech culture).
(5) If scientific racism is true, then we need to use dark side epistemology to deny it.
For example, a lot of people’s chosen strategy is to just deny that race exists or that genes can differ systematically across human populations. But the drug carbamazepine is a safe and effective anticonvulsant in white and black people, but has a significant risk of causing a fatal skin reaction in Asian people.
So we have to manage this complicated balancing act where we must get everybody to intone that Genes Cannot Differ Systematically Across Human Populations, except doctors, whom we tell For God’s Sake Genotype All Your Asian Patients Before Giving Them Carbamazepine. One hopes this works.
Other people’s chosen strategies to deny scientific racism are to make bringing up problems involving certain races taboo. For example, my experience (is it yours?) is that if someone talks about “inner city crime” or “urban decay”, someone else will interject “You’re just using ‘inner city’ and ‘urban’ as euphemisms for black people, you racist!”
But inner city crime and urban decay are real problems, and ones that disproportionately victimize poor people and minorities.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like “the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed”, which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.
One final Dark Side strategy people use is to say “If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations, which we don’t want to do.”
Never mind that this wouldn’t actually happen. Think about people with Down Syndrome.
Our culture’s not perfect at tolerating them, but it’s as good as it is at tolerating any other group, and this success didn’t require claiming they had exactly equal IQ or were exactly equal along any other dimension except basic human dignity, which is not and shouldn’t be a scientifically testable claim.
The truth is robust. Lies are flimsy. If we go with lies, we might accidentally back ourselves into a corner where our stated position commits us to thinking people with Down Syndrome are inferior human beings without any basic human rights.
If we honestly and openly declare we really think—“We can leave the field of small population differences to the scientists, but everyone deserves to be treated compassionately regardless of what they find”—then we are freed from the complicated task of keeping our lies straight, and we might find it has some knock-on benefits somewhere down the line.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like “the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed”, which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.
The lead-crime link was brought to public attention by a prominent liberal journalist, writing in a prominent liberal/progressive magazine. As far as I’m aware, there was no huge outcry about this. In fact, the article was widely linked and praised in the liberal blogosphere. I am pretty sure that Drum and the editors at Mother Jones would denounce scientific racism quite vigorously if asked about it. So I think you are overestimating the “chilling effect” produced by a taboo against scientific racism.
One final Dark Side strategy people use is to say “If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations, which we don’t want to do.” Never mind that this wouldn’t actually happen. Think about people with Down Syndrome.
“About 92% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom and Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome are terminated. In the United States termination rates are around 67%” Wikiepdia
No analogy with respect to voluntary (via the mom) abortions, but one with many members of society being comfortable with significantly reducing the population size of the group.
Your comment seems to make many good points. However, I identified a few evident falsehoods in areas I know something about, which leads me to suspect a similar laxity with the truth in areas I know less about.
For instance:
This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.
If you want to practice law, you’re best served by studying lab sciences, math, or government in undergrad. (Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.) Then you go to law school, which is where you incur the goatloads of debt.
The fact that you can’t get admitted to the bar (in most of the U.S.) without going to law school is not a result of anyone’s ideology about intelligence. This policy change was adopted explicitly by states in response to pressure by the American Bar Association beginning in the 1890s. IQ testing didn’t even exist then. (And for what it’s worth, scientific racism was at that time deemed progressive.)
This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.
Wait, what?
And it leaves everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, forcing them to optimize for high-paying jobs like finance rather than socially productive ones.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I have to ask, are you pulling my leg here?
The end result is that a lot of the smartest and most intellectually honest people hate the rest of society and are hated by them in turn. The dumber and less intellectually honest you are, the more likely you are to remain unostracized and end up being a “thought leader”.
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Arthur Jensen, whom everyone including his enemies agrees was smart and nice and intellectually honest, who helped pioneer the intelligence research field—got literally burned in effigy, had people threaten to kill his children, and eventually had to hire bodyguards just to go around campus.
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
If scientific racism is true, then believing it is true will make us less likely to do things like threaten to kill the children of intelligence researchers because they are engaged in disproving it.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
But I think intelligence research and associated areas are some of the most important fields that exist!
Wow! Much enthusiasm! So keen!
These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!
These are the people who noticed that lead decreases IQ and very likely also executive function and so probably was responsible for like the entire giant crime wave of the latter half of this century which we successfully reversed by banning lead.
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
So high-IQ groups will once again end up either loathed by the general population, in defensive hedgehog postures, or in a state of low-grade civil war (cf: the modern atheist movement)
How is atheism a matter of IQ?
Other people’s chosen strategies to deny scientific racism are to make bringing up problems involving certain races taboo. For example, my experience (is it yours?) is that if someone talks about “inner city crime” or “urban decay”, someone else will interject “You’re just using ‘inner city’ and ‘urban’ as euphemisms for black people, you racist!”
But inner city crime and urban decay are real problems, and ones that disproportionately victimize poor people and minorities.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like “the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed”, which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.
This seems to make sense.
“If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations”
I would have said
“If we admitted scientific racism, some idiots out there would sugget we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations. Also black kids would get mocked and bullied at school, or would further interiorize the dumb thug role, and Asians and Jews would be even more pressured to succeed.”
If we go with lies, we might accidentally back ourselves into a corner where our stated position commits us to thinking people with Down Syndrome are inferior human beings without any basic human rights.
I can’t say I follow this reasoning.
For example, a lot of people’s chosen strategy is to just deny that race exists or that genes can differ systematically across human populations. But the drug carbamazepine is a safe and effective anticonvulsant in white and black people, but has a significant risk of causing a fatal skin reaction in Asian people.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
Wow. I was thinking of providing some sources for you since I assumed you were commenting in good faith, but then you pulled this little gem. So nope, I’m just going to downvote and snark.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
For a more complete explanation of the theory, see Half Sigma here (warning: post is more racist and sarcastic than I would personally endorse) and Bryan Caplan’s response here.
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Not sure what you’re saying here, but it seems sufficiently sarcastic that I should reply.
Suppose scientific racism is true. Presumably, smart people will figure this out. Some will have the social skills to stay quiet about it. What do you expect to happen to the rest of them?
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
I will signal the overabundance of sources I could use for this fact by limiting myself to only ones with “Times” in the title. Here’s New York Times, here’s The Times of Higher Education, and here’s the Los Angeles Times which adds the fact, previously unknown to me, that bomb squads had to open his mail.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
Sorry, typo. He found support for some aspects of it, nonsupport for other aspects of it, but was generally classified as a supporter.
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
Race is, like all categories, a set of artificial discontinuous labels being forced upon natural continuous variation. On the other hand, the same sort of lossy-but-nonuseless generalizing ability that allows me to say “Black people are more likely to have so-called ‘nappy’ hair than white people” allows scientific racists to say “black people are more likely to have certain mental characteristics than white people”. We could certainly improve accuracy further from there by better subdividing groups (“black people” becomes “Bantu”, “San”, et cetera; “white people” becomes “Scandinavian”, “Mediterranean”, etc) but we will lose accuracy by refusing to even make that first subdivision at all.
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
ITYM “most atheist groups in the US”; I wouldn’t assume the same to be true in northern Eurasia, for example.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
Let’s be perfectly honest here; If that was the meaning you were trying to convey, you could have phrased that better than “we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!”
I’ll be some time before I can properly examine your sources. Until then, I bid you farewell for now.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I’m not sure that the whole story (but then again I’ve never been within a couple thousand miles of the US, so what do I know), but tuitions in the US are one order of magnitude more expensive than in continental Europe and this one is the only thing I’ve heard that even begins to explain that.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity.
That’s one explanation, I’m curious why you find it the most convincing.
Edit: if it is just lead, how come the correlation between race and IQ seems to persist across countries?
Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?
I think you overestimate people: read the comments here. This is a libertarian channel—even among the right there are those who think it is heresy to suggest that inequality is the result of anything other than discrimination. Also read this. Yep, its all the school’s fault.
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it
Stop doing stupid things mostly. Policy usually works better when it is based on the way the world actually works. There are many policies that are compatible with acknowledging biological differences—and I would guess that most of them are better than what we have now. Stupid things include having race quotas in professional schools and AP classes, firing innocent teachers, the list goes on and on.
Frankly the question gets asked a lot, but I don’t know why. Its a lot like the Christian argument “Well if you don’t believe in God then what? Are you going to murder people and start raping bunnies?”. Its sort of a ridiculous question—there is an enormous diversity in ~Christianity*. ~Christianity is not a worldview. And ~egalitarianism is not a worldview either.
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers’ inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?
For starters we can stop concluding that an outcome that correlates with race means that the process was racially biased. In particular, eliminate affirmative action and disparate impact.
What’s desperate impact? And not all affirmative action is racial. The kind I’m familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background. And women’s parity quotas, which are a clumsy-as-heck-policy that annoys everyone, women included. What kind are you familiar with?
The kind I’m familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background.
In US political debates about affirmative action, the term usually is meant to imply an overt lower admissions or hiring standard for the group that the affirmative action is supposedly helping.
Scholarships for smart kids from poor families are uncontroversial, and therefore don’t come up much in political discourse.
Regardless of why this is so, wouldn’t this outcome make the policy ineffectual and not worth continuing?
Yes, but if they were to admit the policy was ineffectual, they’d have to admit that there aren’t as many qualified black students as white students and that would be racist and evil.
Hardly. I myself change colour all the time, depending on how much sun I get. But it would appear that the races “scientific racism” as I understand it classifies as smarter, are all of paler disposition overall; “whites” in the traditional sense, european jews, and east asians. Calling them all White-X is a way of drawing attention to this strange fact. Is there something about sunlight deprivation that sharpens the mind?
Perhaps, on the other hand the places where civilizations first developed, i.e., Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Central America, don’t have harsh winters; I’m not sure about the Yellow River, but my brief Googling suggested their winters aren’t that harsh either.
The best geography/climate to develop a civilization is not necessarily the best geography/climate to produce high intelligence. Early civilizations arose in places where agriculture was productive enough to generate significant surplus.
I would hardly consider places like the valley of the Congo or Australia or the Sahara to be evolutionarily soft.
Evolution can push development into different directions. Winters promote long-term thinking and planning. The Congo basin probably promotes resistance to parasites and infections....
Generics are great. We need more of those. Patented drugs are way overpriced.
As for eugenics, depends on what we’re talking about. Is it “eugenics” as in “let’s genome-test embryos for horrible congenital diseases” or is it “eugenics” as in “let’s castrate every physically and mentally handicapped person whose disease is inheritable”? When I said “I feared you’d speak of genetics and eugenics”, I meant “I feared that you’d suggest the latter as policy”.
Is it “eugenics” as in “let’s genome-test embryos for horrible congenital diseases” or is it “eugenics” as in “let’s castrate every physically and mentally handicapped person whose disease is inheritable”
Isn’t the latter the “right thing to do” (tm) according to a utilitarian calculation? (Disclaimer, I am not a utilitarian.)
I wouldn’t know; neither am I. I tend to find that utilitarian calculations are above my competence. As Dr. Manhattan said to Ozymandias, when he asked him if he did the right thing in the end; “Nothing ever ends.”
The question he literally asked may well be stupid, but I think it’s charitable to interpret it as asking what practical use we have for scientific racism that wouldn’t violate some ethical injunctions. Likewise, if someone asked how to kill all the fleas on a cat I’d assume they mean that the cat must remain alive and in good health (example taken from here).
The question he literally asked may well be stupid, but I think it’s charitable to interpret it as asking what practical use we have for scientific racism that wouldn’t violate some ethical injunctions.
It would be a long stretch.
In any case, I would have normally let it slide if not for a particular sentence in a {grand}parent post...
...we’re talking about differences in average IQ between 95, 105, 110, 115. For one such as I, who’s got an IQ of 168, this degree of difference seems unimpressive, and, frankly, worth ignoring/not worth knowing.
For a moment there, I feared you’d speak of genetics and eugenics, but then
if you mean something as prosai as dietetics, I can totally get behind that; I find it easy to believe that crappy food induces cranky mood (and that, in the US, crappy cheap food is remarkably deleterious).
Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?
Putting the full blame on them is as absurd as fully absolving them. What insane political climate do you live in, that you’d have to settle for either fallacy?
I remain unconvinced that this is exactly the case, and, even though I can accept its provisional validity, with many caveats and reservations, I’m pretty sure the actual reality is more interesting than “blacks and latinos are born dumber, White-Jews and White-Asian nerds are born smarter, and White-Christians are born a little bit smarter than average”.
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers’ inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?
It’s not even that we would need to use it, just that denying it would be harmful.
Without taking sides on the object-level debate of whether it’s true or not, let me sketch out some ways that, if scientific racism were true, we would want to believe that it was true. In the spirit of not making this degenerate further, I’ll ignore everything to do with eugenics, and with partisan issues like affirmative action.
(1) Racial differences tend to show up most starkly on IQ tests. This has led to the cultural trope that IQ is meaningless or biased or associated with racism. This has led to a culture in which it is unacceptable (borderline illegal depending on exactly how you do it) to use IQ tests in situations like employment interviews. But employers continue to want highly intelligent employees.
This encourages credentialism—the use of prestigious college degrees as a marker for intelligence. This means everyone needs to get a prestigious college degree. This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.
This decreases social mobility since poor people aren’t going to be able to get into Harvard at the same rate as rich people.And it leaves everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, forcing them to optimize for high-paying jobs like finance rather than socially productive ones. And it sticks our economy precariously on top of an even bigger mountain of debt than before.
(2) If scientific racism is true but everyone insists violently that it is false, we can’t explicitly describe this state of affairs: “Psssst, all that racist stuff we’re attacking is actually true, but you’re not supposed to talk about it. Pass it on.”
But we would expect smart and intellectually honest people who study science and understand statistics to eventually figure out it is true. For whatever reason, smart and intellectually honest people seem unusually bad at picking up non-explicit social norms, so they’re likely to respond with “HEY! GUYS! ALL THAT SCIENTIFIC RACISM WE’VE BEEN VIOLENTLY ATTACKING AS ACTUALLY TRUE! WEIRD, ISN’T IT?” Everyone will then violently attack them as racist and they will be traumatized.
The end result is that a lot of the smartest and most intellectually honest people hate the rest of society and are hated by them in turn. The dumber and less intellectually honest you are, the more likely you are to remain unostracized and end up being a “thought leader”.
(3) If scientific racism were true, we would expect the fields of academic intelligence research and population genetics to know about it and generally believe it. We would then expect those fields to either be loathed and discredited by the general population for this reason, or else retreat to a hedgehogesque defensive posture, or else exist in a constant low-grade civil war.
All of these things seem to be true to a degree. Just to give one example, Arthur Jensen, whom everyone including his enemies agrees was smart and nice and intellectually honest, who helped pioneer the intelligence research field—got literally burned in effigy, had people threaten to kill his children, and eventually had to hire bodyguards just to go around campus. This seems like it might disincentivize people to study intelligence.
But I think intelligence research and associated areas are some of the most important fields that exist! These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt! These are the people who noticed that lead decreases IQ and very likely also executive function and so probably was responsible for like the entire giant crime wave of the latter half of this century which we successfully reversed by banning lead. These are people so awesome that I strongly suspect if we took a billion dollars away from the physicists and gave it to the intelligence researchers, then in thirty years we would have more intelligence research and probably also more physics.
And so we should be trying encourage them to continue doing good work, and one way we might do this is by not threatening to kill their children.
If scientific racism is true, then believing it is true will make us less likely to do things like threaten to kill the children of intelligence researchers because they are engaged in disproving it.
(You may say “But we could argue with them without using violence!” But how exactly do you think you are going to prevent a true thing from coming out, for all time, without using desperate measures?)
(4) Tiny advantages in mean or variance magnify with every standard deviation you go from the center of the bell curve. So if scientific racism were true, we would expect high-IQ communities to come from disproportionately high-IQ groups. The Southern Baptist Church would be laudably diverse, but the atheist community would be full of nerdy white/Asian/Jewish/Indian men, easily abbreviate to “nerdy white dudes”.
If it is assumed that all differences in group membership are because groups are racist, exclusionary, or bullying, this means that all high-IQ groups will be accused of racism, exclusion, and bullying and be considered bad people. No doubt there will be some genuine incidents of such in these groups (as there are in all groups) and these will be seized upon as proof.
So high-IQ groups will once again end up either loathed by the general population, in defensive hedgehog postures, or in a state of low-grade civil war (cf: the modern atheist movement)
But presumably high-IQ groups are smart and have ideas worth listening to. When they get ignored and marginalized, that either gives comfort to false or harmful ideas like evangelical religion, or creates this really creepy situation where very powerful people who help shape the world are suspected by, and suspicious of, everyone else (like what seems to be developing with Silicon Valley tech culture).
(5) If scientific racism is true, then we need to use dark side epistemology to deny it.
For example, a lot of people’s chosen strategy is to just deny that race exists or that genes can differ systematically across human populations. But the drug carbamazepine is a safe and effective anticonvulsant in white and black people, but has a significant risk of causing a fatal skin reaction in Asian people.
So we have to manage this complicated balancing act where we must get everybody to intone that Genes Cannot Differ Systematically Across Human Populations, except doctors, whom we tell For God’s Sake Genotype All Your Asian Patients Before Giving Them Carbamazepine. One hopes this works.
Other people’s chosen strategies to deny scientific racism are to make bringing up problems involving certain races taboo. For example, my experience (is it yours?) is that if someone talks about “inner city crime” or “urban decay”, someone else will interject “You’re just using ‘inner city’ and ‘urban’ as euphemisms for black people, you racist!”
But inner city crime and urban decay are real problems, and ones that disproportionately victimize poor people and minorities.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like “the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed”, which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.
One final Dark Side strategy people use is to say “If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations, which we don’t want to do.”
Never mind that this wouldn’t actually happen. Think about people with Down Syndrome.
Our culture’s not perfect at tolerating them, but it’s as good as it is at tolerating any other group, and this success didn’t require claiming they had exactly equal IQ or were exactly equal along any other dimension except basic human dignity, which is not and shouldn’t be a scientifically testable claim.
The truth is robust. Lies are flimsy. If we go with lies, we might accidentally back ourselves into a corner where our stated position commits us to thinking people with Down Syndrome are inferior human beings without any basic human rights.
If we honestly and openly declare we really think—“We can leave the field of small population differences to the scientists, but everyone deserves to be treated compassionately regardless of what they find”—then we are freed from the complicated task of keeping our lies straight, and we might find it has some knock-on benefits somewhere down the line.
The lead-crime link was brought to public attention by a prominent liberal journalist, writing in a prominent liberal/progressive magazine. As far as I’m aware, there was no huge outcry about this. In fact, the article was widely linked and praised in the liberal blogosphere. I am pretty sure that Drum and the editors at Mother Jones would denounce scientific racism quite vigorously if asked about it. So I think you are overestimating the “chilling effect” produced by a taboo against scientific racism.
“About 92% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom and Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome are terminated. In the United States termination rates are around 67%” Wikiepdia
So what would be the analogous behaviour w.r.t. races?
No analogy with respect to voluntary (via the mom) abortions, but one with many members of society being comfortable with significantly reducing the population size of the group.
Your comment seems to make many good points. However, I identified a few evident falsehoods in areas I know something about, which leads me to suspect a similar laxity with the truth in areas I know less about.
For instance:
If you want to practice law, you’re best served by studying lab sciences, math, or government in undergrad. (Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.) Then you go to law school, which is where you incur the goatloads of debt.
The fact that you can’t get admitted to the bar (in most of the U.S.) without going to law school is not a result of anyone’s ideology about intelligence. This policy change was adopted explicitly by states in response to pressure by the American Bar Association beginning in the 1890s. IQ testing didn’t even exist then. (And for what it’s worth, scientific racism was at that time deemed progressive.)
Does this control for different average IQ (or SAT, if you prefer) among different majors?
Wait, what?
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I have to ask, are you pulling my leg here?
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
Wow! Much enthusiasm! So keen!
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
How is atheism a matter of IQ?
This seems to make sense.
I would have said
I can’t say I follow this reasoning.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
Wow. I was thinking of providing some sources for you since I assumed you were commenting in good faith, but then you pulled this little gem. So nope, I’m just going to downvote and snark.
Which one of us are you talking to, and how is either of us speaking in bad faith? It’s okay to snark, but please be meaningful while you’re at it.
For a more complete explanation of the theory, see Half Sigma here (warning: post is more racist and sarcastic than I would personally endorse) and Bryan Caplan’s response here.
Not sure what you’re saying here, but it seems sufficiently sarcastic that I should reply.
Suppose scientific racism is true. Presumably, smart people will figure this out. Some will have the social skills to stay quiet about it. What do you expect to happen to the rest of them?
I will signal the overabundance of sources I could use for this fact by limiting myself to only ones with “Times” in the title. Here’s New York Times, here’s The Times of Higher Education, and here’s the Los Angeles Times which adds the fact, previously unknown to me, that bomb squads had to open his mail.
Sorry, typo. He found support for some aspects of it, nonsupport for other aspects of it, but was generally classified as a supporter.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
The crime wave where probably all kinds of crime increased five to ten times from 1880 to 1980. Both More Right and Slate Star Codex have blogged about this recently. Low IQ is indeed a strong risk factor for crime.
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
Race is, like all categories, a set of artificial discontinuous labels being forced upon natural continuous variation. On the other hand, the same sort of lossy-but-nonuseless generalizing ability that allows me to say “Black people are more likely to have so-called ‘nappy’ hair than white people” allows scientific racists to say “black people are more likely to have certain mental characteristics than white people”. We could certainly improve accuracy further from there by better subdividing groups (“black people” becomes “Bantu”, “San”, et cetera; “white people” becomes “Scandinavian”, “Mediterranean”, etc) but we will lose accuracy by refusing to even make that first subdivision at all.
ITYM “most atheist groups in the US”; I wouldn’t assume the same to be true in northern Eurasia, for example.
Let’s be perfectly honest here; If that was the meaning you were trying to convey, you could have phrased that better than “we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!”
I’ll be some time before I can properly examine your sources. Until then, I bid you farewell for now.
I’m not sure that the whole story (but then again I’ve never been within a couple thousand miles of the US, so what do I know), but tuitions in the US are one order of magnitude more expensive than in continental Europe and this one is the only thing I’ve heard that even begins to explain that.
That’s one explanation, I’m curious why you find it the most convincing.
Edit: if it is just lead, how come the correlation between race and IQ seems to persist across countries?
Various explanations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
I think you overestimate people: read the comments here. This is a libertarian channel—even among the right there are those who think it is heresy to suggest that inequality is the result of anything other than discrimination. Also read this. Yep, its all the school’s fault.
Stop doing stupid things mostly. Policy usually works better when it is based on the way the world actually works. There are many policies that are compatible with acknowledging biological differences—and I would guess that most of them are better than what we have now. Stupid things include having race quotas in professional schools and AP classes, firing innocent teachers, the list goes on and on.
Frankly the question gets asked a lot, but I don’t know why. Its a lot like the Christian argument “Well if you don’t believe in God then what? Are you going to murder people and start raping bunnies?”. Its sort of a ridiculous question—there is an enormous diversity in ~Christianity*. ~Christianity is not a worldview. And ~egalitarianism is not a worldview either.
*”~” means “not”
For starters we can stop concluding that an outcome that correlates with race means that the process was racially biased. In particular, eliminate affirmative action and disparate impact.
What’s desperate impact? And not all affirmative action is racial. The kind I’m familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background. And women’s parity quotas, which are a clumsy-as-heck-policy that annoys everyone, women included. What kind are you familiar with?
In US political debates about affirmative action, the term usually is meant to imply an overt lower admissions or hiring standard for the group that the affirmative action is supposedly helping.
Scholarships for smart kids from poor families are uncontroversial, and therefore don’t come up much in political discourse.
Sorry, typo. I meant disparate.
Good, I’m glad you see that this is a bad idea.
The kind where universities admit unqualified minority kids in order to have a “diverse student body”.
Do they get qualified along the way, or do they actually prove themselves to be persistently and irredeemably incompetent?
They tend to wind up dropping out.
Regardless of why this is so, wouldn’t this outcome make the policy ineffectual and not worth continuing?
Also why in the world did that comment get a down-vote? Is there someone here lurking, down-voting my posts on principle?
Yes, but if they were to admit the policy was ineffectual, they’d have to admit that there aren’t as many qualified black students as white students and that would be racist and evil.
Doesn’t that mean that the ones who don’t drop out aren’t that less … than … ?
That’s an interesting moniker.
So, you think that the humanity is divided into Whites and Blacks, it’s just that there are White-Caucasians, White-Asians, etc...?
Hardly. I myself change colour all the time, depending on how much sun I get. But it would appear that the races “scientific racism” as I understand it classifies as smarter, are all of paler disposition overall; “whites” in the traditional sense, european jews, and east asians. Calling them all White-X is a way of drawing attention to this strange fact. Is there something about sunlight deprivation that sharpens the mind?
East Asians (and specifically Han Chinese) were never called White.
No, but I suspect that the necessity to survive the winter led to increased evolutionary pressures.
Perhaps, on the other hand the places where civilizations first developed, i.e., Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Central America, don’t have harsh winters; I’m not sure about the Yellow River, but my brief Googling suggested their winters aren’t that harsh either.
The best geography/climate to develop a civilization is not necessarily the best geography/climate to produce high intelligence. Early civilizations arose in places where agriculture was productive enough to generate significant surplus.
I would hardly consider places like the valley of the Congo or Australia or the Sahara to be evolutionarily soft.
Evolution can push development into different directions. Winters promote long-term thinking and planning. The Congo basin probably promotes resistance to parasites and infections....
I’m not sure about that. I don’t have statistics, anecdotally dark skinned Indians appear to be comparable to East Asians.
Indians have very varied skin tones, ranging from the very very dark all the way to the very very pale.
By the way, do you have a rational argument for why we shouldn’t speak of genetics and eugenics?
Generics are great. We need more of those. Patented drugs are way overpriced.
As for eugenics, depends on what we’re talking about. Is it “eugenics” as in “let’s genome-test embryos for horrible congenital diseases” or is it “eugenics” as in “let’s castrate every physically and mentally handicapped person whose disease is inheritable”? When I said “I feared you’d speak of genetics and eugenics”, I meant “I feared that you’d suggest the latter as policy”.
Isn’t the latter the “right thing to do” (tm) according to a utilitarian calculation? (Disclaimer, I am not a utilitarian.)
I wouldn’t know; neither am I. I tend to find that utilitarian calculations are above my competence. As Dr. Manhattan said to Ozymandias, when he asked him if he did the right thing in the end; “Nothing ever ends.”
For someone who claims an IQ of 168 you asked, frankly speaking, a stupid question.
The question he literally asked may well be stupid, but I think it’s charitable to interpret it as asking what practical use we have for scientific racism that wouldn’t violate some ethical injunctions. Likewise, if someone asked how to kill all the fleas on a cat I’d assume they mean that the cat must remain alive and in good health (example taken from here).
It would be a long stretch.
In any case, I would have normally let it slide if not for a particular sentence in a {grand}parent post...
I never shied away from those; they tend to be useful.
Not this kind—ones to which a variety of answers become apparent after spending a minute thinking about it...