The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. (For example, quite recently, several respected geneticists declared that there was no such thing as race—an idea that not even the dimmest kid I knew back in Detroit would have fallen for.)
-- you misunderstand the position that you’re criticizing. The claim of the geneticists is not that race does not exist, but rather that it doesn’t map to the joints at which geneticists, qua geneticists, find it particularly useful to carve reality. But when trying to understand the social world, within which your kid in Detroit is steeped, Race is certainly a useful way to carve reality. And this is all that people mean when they say that Race is a social concept, not a genetic one.
For example, quite recently, several respected geneticists declared that there was no such thing as race—an idea that not even the dimmest kid I knew back in Detroit would have fallen for.
That struck me as a stunning nonsequitur. The kid in Detroit has no possible way of knowing how much of what they see is genetic versus environmental—unless they go online and read the scientific literature. Offering that sort of surface observation as evidence is on the level of “any kid in Detroit can see the Earth is flat”.
Some of the people making the claim probably have a more nuanced interpretation in mind. Many people repeating the claim have the simple interpretation in mind; or may have the nuanced interpretation, but are stating it in a way that they hope will be misinterpreted, yet give them plausible deniability.
I don’t remember now what the original “respectable geneticists” said. I have seen a summary of their work in Science magazine that used the simple interpretation. Does anyone have a link to some of the original publications?
A request to see the article corrected. This post has the combination of simplicity and relevance that makes me want to show it to others outside the lesswrong community, but the race anecdote damages its perceived credibility greatly.
PS: If you agree with me thus far, I would also recommend removing the self-help section: “The vaccines: Updating and emotions.” It’s lower quality than the rest of the article in that support for your claims here is very weak; it is also much narrower in relevance (as only hardcore rationalists would be interested.)
I’m not sure if Phil got the details right—but there are definitely a whole bunch of otherwise well-educated people who happily spout politically-correct nonsense on the issues of race and equality as though it was actually scientific truth. They typically cite Lewontin—but they ignore Lewontin’s fallacy.
Thank you for the mention of Lewontin’s Fallacy. I have been stuck trying to remember the name of that fallacy for half a year (although, to be fair, I had not looked very hard to find out its name), due to a discussion on the Forums at the Richard Dawkins’ website.
I am amazed at the level of discourse that many discussions on that site fall to. There are a number of very bright people there, yet it seems that many commit all manner of fallacies in the name of either political correctness, or because they fear giving ground to irrational theists/theism. A great example is about the term belief. Many on the RDF state that they “Have no Beliefs,” yet fail to realize that this statement itself is a belief.
They have had many discussions in which the issue of race has come up, and I remembered reading about Lewontin, yet could not recall his name… Thanks, again.
“Belief” is an overloaded word. Some use it to mean a p=1 concept, while others use it to mean a p > 0.95 concept. Of course, p=1 ideas are crazy faith issues, but some people seem to sustain them. The “I have no beliefs” crowd just mean to say that they “have no p=1 beliefs that they hold with absolute faith”—which is a fair enough thing to observe.
I wish that were the case, but it seems to me that the “I have no beliefs” crowd that I am familiar with means that they have no beliefs for which P<1.
In other words, they either know something with absolute certainty, or they give it no credence whatsoever.
I can’t think of how many times I have told them that they need to both reclaim the word “Belief” and to understand that they have many things for which P≠1 (P<1, but greater than .5, or some other arbitrary number for which they will accept some information as being true).
Yet, sometimes the certainties of faith get assumed by those without faith (of the religious kind)
I removed the not-very-good example, but I don’t want to remove the final section. It is lower quality. What bothers me more is that it doesn’t have a proper conclusive feeling about it; it doesn’t tie the post together and wrap it up in a satisfying way.
I know a woman who I think had negative feelings about blacks, who learned, as an adult, that her father was black. She’d always thought he was Hispanic. She was a little upset by it, but mostly thought it was a funny story to tell people.
One original publication is in the Feb. 8 2008 Nature Genetics. I don’t have it.
Articles citing it here. None of the titles mention race.
I don’t think you understand Watson’s point of view.
If I understand Watson correctly, he thinks the evidence suggests that the average IQ of native Africans is below 100. He didn’t say that all Africans have IQs below 100. I don’t know why you think he’d care that he’s descended from a black person. Presumably he thinks a substantial minority of Africans still have higher IQs than 100, so if he really cares about the IQ of his black ancestor, it’s still plausible that s/he had a high IQ.
But why would anyone care about the IQ of their ancestors? Even if you do think there are racial cognitive differences, there are better ways to measure your own IQ than to guess based on the race of your ancestors.
True, we should have more faith in our own demonstrated intelligence. But humans place values on things, and then make associations, and then have feelings. Under the circumstances, I would not expect him to have the level of detachment you suggest.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to sound gleeful. (I’ll edit my original statement a bit to try to fix that.) Or, rather, what glee I had was motivated not by my liberal, forward-looking views on race, but by my impression that Watson is full of himself. I approve of scientists making politically-unpopular statements when based on evidence.
I suspect that the same people who want to say there is no such thing as race, also would enjoy saying that Watson is 1⁄6 “black”.
But it’s fact that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours”? That is, not only is there a difference in IQ distribution, that difference is so significant that “all our social policies” are not going to help them.
I remember reading something by Flynn explaining that people with IQs below 70 today still have problems functioning even though they might score in the average range if given an IQ test normed on a population from the same country decades ago. From this I gather that the correlation between IQ and how well someone can function breaks down when you compare different populations.
In order to conclude that Watson’s quoted remark is scientific fact, you must not only prove that Africans have lower average IQ test scores, but you must prove that:
This interferes with our social policies towards Africa in some way.
Any evidence we draw about the capabilities of Africans with a certain IQ must be based on studies on the same population, not on Americans or Europeans or whatnot with the same IQ.
It’s unlikely that such a broad sweeping statement like “all our social policies”, applied to the whole of Africa, is correct, considering the considerable variation both of social policies and across the continent.
Additionally, I find it interesting that people see the backlash against these remarks as merely “politically correct” anti-racism. It seems clear that this is a challenge to an entrenched way of thinking about a wide range of problems including international relations and poverty. Watson is claiming (in a rather nonspecific and unsupported way from what I’ve heard, which is only second hand) that the status quo for trying to help or otherwise influence Africa isn’t working because we make bad assumptions about their intelligence. Now, I’m sure we make many, many bad assumptions about Africans that influence our social policies and that may break many or make them less efficient or keep us from hitting on something that really works. Intelligence is the most controversial candidate, of course, for historical reasons. But some of the backlash is embedded in our very lack of practice in treating any such assumptions as malleable.
Can we please not have this discussion here? Posters here are posting under their real names or lasting pseudonyms, so they can’t defend the un-PC arguments without making numerous crimethink statements that could rebound against them in real life. So those who advance the PC arguments will wind up shadowboxing with those who don’t fear retaliation or reputational costs, and we won’t get a real honest discussion.
Questions of race and intelligence will be settled decisively within 5 or 10 years when large scale whole-genome sequencing studies are done.
It’s complicated. Different people will probably interpret it differently. I figured the template is common enough that people would see it as a reference and not take the sarcasm personally, but still realize the argument rests on a shaky assumption. I got voted up a lot, so I figure people took it the way I intended.
Posters here are posting under their real names or lasting pseudonyms, so they can’t defend the un-PC arguments without making numerous crimethink statements that could rebound against them in real life.
While I’m not sure if avoiding the discussion altogether is an optimal solution I do share your frustration. It took me a while to realise that using my real name here was a bad idea. We aren’t all that much less wrong.
Precisely. Especially since, while a lot of us have jobs where we either work for ourselves or our bosses just don’t care… some of us have those repressive nightmare jobs where our bosses google for us regularly outside of work hours.
It was political correctness—and transparently so—just as it was for Lawrence Summers, Chris Brand and Frank Ellis before him.
“’What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation”
I have a proposed explanation for “backlash”: personal investment.
Some of us may have done well in IQ tests, and focused on intelligence (and the associated notion of rationality) as personal strengths. Accepting the notion that IQ tests don’t measure anything “real” (except in the sense that they measure “the real ability to perform well on IQ tests”), would also mean downgrading estimation of one’s personal worth.
Explaining away evidence against IQ tests as “merely politically correct anti-racism” allows retaining that sense of worth.
Check with what happened: Watson was castigated for his views on the lower intelligence of Africans—not because of his other views about social policies.
I know. I knew when I was writing that. The ideas in that paragraph were just forming as I typed them out, which is why I attributed cause where I didn’t mean to.
Something closer to what I mean: It’s fine to discuss intelligence differences between race. My intro psych textbook has a long discussion about it. People have an uproar when, instead of saying, oh, here’s what the test results are, here’s what the results of experiments that shed some insight into the cause of the differences (ie environment vs. genetic), and leaving it at that, someone says that there’s a difference in IQ and that that explains social inequity.
So, yeah, they’re objecting because it’s racist, not because it challenges institutions or policies (other than the institution of denying racial difference, which to me seems relatively rational considering all the sources of bias that would cause people to make too much of racial difference). But it’s not racist just because he says Africans have done poorly on IQ tests but because he defaults to assuming that that’s enough to be “gloomy about the prospects of Africa”.
Furthermore, his quote in this piece of the interview:
. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
is pretty much as racist as you can get. His piece of evidence here is the anecdotal observations non-specific employers that fit right into a really old stereotype. Additionally, it seems odd—employers recruit who they employ, and you wouldn’t hire someone who had insufficient intelligence to do what you were hiring them for—the job selects for people of a certain intelligence range (which may be offset by, say, an intelligent person with a disability or who just didn’t get an education, or an average person who’s outperforming expectations of her intelligence due to hard work and a certain cultural background)--so race shouldn’t matter because you can only hire someone from a certain race for a job given they have adequate intelligence for the job.
All the press I’ve read so far on the topic stresses general racism, his tendency to make claims without scientific evidence, and his intentional offensiveness and doesn’t focus entirely on the issue of “lower intelligence of Africans”, which you seem to think. Maybe you’re talking about official reprimands or such that I haven’t read, but the public kinda objected to a lot more than just that. So I think you’re misguided in asserting that the only part of what he said that was controversial is low average African IQ and thereby claiming that he was on firm scientific ground.
Another part of the problem is intelligence = IQ. There’s evidence (from the Flynn effect and cross-cultural examination of answers given to standard IQ test type questions) that environment and culture strengthen specific cognitive abilities and predispose one to reason in certain ways or interpret questions in certain ways. So even if IQ scores show that average African IQ is whatever, that’s not indisputably the same as showing lower intelligence, because you could usefully define intelligence to include cognitive abilities/reasoning that Africans are stronger at than Westerners. And here I’ll mention that I don’t want to get in an argument over whether defining intelligence that way is good or not—I’m just saying it in response to this:
The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact.
Because while that sentence can be true, it is not sufficient evidence to conclude, as Watson does, that the testing is adequate to say Africans have lower intelligence. That depends on how you define intelligence. (Although his actual words just say that their intelligence is different, which does seem clear, but from other remarks he seems to think that Africans have lower intelligence due to genes, which is not scientifically undisputed at all.)
I am bothered by the fact that I know the discussions on race and intelligence that I have read are heavily biased in the information they present—for instance, in the US, racial intelligence differences correlating better with degree of pigmentation than with amount of African genes—because this information seems like it’s picked in order to prove the politically correct point, whereas the other side likes to ignore all the evidence for the politically correct point and just simplify things because it seems obvious to them that the bigoted view is true. Point me to a transparent, relatively unbiased discussion of all available experimental evidence and I’ll thank you.
I lean toward the politically correct side because it’s the side that presents a lot of evidence and then says, “It’s kinda inconclusive and we don’t really know what causes group intelligence difference, although we do know a lot of it isn’t genetic.” Whereas the non-politically-correct side attempts to explain away a lot of the evils of the world by saying inequity is genetically based just because there are differences in the way groups perform on a psychometric instrument. But it seems like history and other social forces can greatly affect the conditions of one group: a few generations ago, when my ancestors were impoverished farmers in Europe, I have little doubt they would’ve failed modern IQ tests, but my race’s genes haven’t change since then, and the genes weren’t responsible for our economic, social, and political problems.
It’s both reasonable and humane to assume that, given Westerners spent a century gaining IQ points due to the Flynn effect, and given that the low quality of life in the West changed radically over spans of centuries or decades, one group currently doing poorly on IQ tests and living in poverty has the potential to change just as drastically. Any pessimism about their prospects can surely be more strongly justified by citing current and historical economic, political, social, and environmental trends, as well as unprecedented possible events like existential threats.
Or we think we group up into sides, but I’m not even sure that’s true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exact opposite perspective: that the hbd-ers are honest and nuanced and the egalitarians are blinded by ideology. But in fact, there are no sides physically out there: rather, there are only various people who have studied various facets of the topic to various degrees and who believe and profess various things for various reasons. And this question of what various people believe is distinct from the question of what’s actually true.
I realize that this kind of aggressive reductionism isn’t very predictively useful—that indeed, I’m probably just a few steps above saying, “Well it’s all just quarks and leptons anyway.” But sometimes it is worth saying just that, if only to wrench ourselves free of this adversarial framing so that we can actually look at the data.
It’s [...] humane to assume
Humaneness is central to policy, but it should have nothing to do with our beliefs.
Upvoted, because you make the case well that we shouldn’t identify with sides when discussing issues like this.
But you’re not really using “Taboo” in the sense that Eliezer described. “Sides” do exist as social phenomena. They are a certain sort of coalition that people group into when they engage in public discourse. As you say, sides exist for non-truth-tracking reasons. However, like race, we need the concept of sides to talk about social dynamics, so, like race, sides exist.
(Of course, they exist as nothing more than certain configurations of the pieces of the stuff out of which reality is made.)
Why? To have a reasonable measure for the intelligence of their children.
Heard of regression to the mean? An unusually smart person from a background of dumb hick proles, is not going to have kids nearly as smart as they are.
People understand this at a genetic level when picking out mates. “Meet the family” before you decide to keep the girl/guy.
While looking for this info, I came across this awesome tidbit: James Watson, who claimed blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, is 1⁄6 black. Wonder how he felt on finding that out, especially since he’s the guy who said, “I didn’t win a Nobel prize. I won the [meaning most important ever] Nobel prize.”
Probably not terribly affected, as he has plenty of information about his intelligence screening off (EDIT: as steven says, this is not the correct term) his ancestry, and he AFAIK never claimed black people to be ‘inferior’ in any sense other than lower average IQ.
For example, we observed a missense mutation in the CR1 gene, the derived state of which has a frequency of 85% in Africans, but which is absent elsewhere. As this gene modulates the severity of malarial attacks in Papua New Guineans,our analysis strongly suggests that this particular CR1 mutation has been positively selected for in Africans because it modifies host susceptibility to malaria. Another important selective pressure that has confronted modern humans is adaptation to variable nutritional resources. … ENPP1 harbors a mutation with a derived state known to protect against obesity and type II diabetes that is present in B90% of non-Africans but virtually absent in Africans.
And this is all that people mean when they say that Race is a social concept, not a genetic one.
That is what some people mean. Others truly believe there are literally no differences between human populations apart from skin color and bone structure, and of course culture.
The point I’ve heard, back when I pressed a professor on the rather absurd statement “race is not genetic,” is that if you were simply to look at a bunch of human genomes, and compare them to one another, and rank them by their similarities and differences, the genes controlling race probably wouldn’t occur to you. This seems quite plausible.
On the whole a very good post. But here --
-- you misunderstand the position that you’re criticizing. The claim of the geneticists is not that race does not exist, but rather that it doesn’t map to the joints at which geneticists, qua geneticists, find it particularly useful to carve reality. But when trying to understand the social world, within which your kid in Detroit is steeped, Race is certainly a useful way to carve reality. And this is all that people mean when they say that Race is a social concept, not a genetic one.
That struck me as a stunning nonsequitur. The kid in Detroit has no possible way of knowing how much of what they see is genetic versus environmental—unless they go online and read the scientific literature. Offering that sort of surface observation as evidence is on the level of “any kid in Detroit can see the Earth is flat”.
Surely they could very easily observe that people with dark skin typically have parents with dark skin.
But the child has good evidence for the social concept, if not for the genetic one.
So he can disagree with “there is no such thing as race”.
Is this another one of those blegg/rube questions?
You’re right.
Some of the people making the claim probably have a more nuanced interpretation in mind. Many people repeating the claim have the simple interpretation in mind; or may have the nuanced interpretation, but are stating it in a way that they hope will be misinterpreted, yet give them plausible deniability.
I don’t remember now what the original “respectable geneticists” said. I have seen a summary of their work in Science magazine that used the simple interpretation. Does anyone have a link to some of the original publications?
A request to see the article corrected. This post has the combination of simplicity and relevance that makes me want to show it to others outside the lesswrong community, but the race anecdote damages its perceived credibility greatly.
PS: If you agree with me thus far, I would also recommend removing the self-help section: “The vaccines: Updating and emotions.” It’s lower quality than the rest of the article in that support for your claims here is very weak; it is also much narrower in relevance (as only hardcore rationalists would be interested.)
I’m not sure if Phil got the details right—but there are definitely a whole bunch of otherwise well-educated people who happily spout politically-correct nonsense on the issues of race and equality as though it was actually scientific truth. They typically cite Lewontin—but they ignore Lewontin’s fallacy.
Thank you for the mention of Lewontin’s Fallacy. I have been stuck trying to remember the name of that fallacy for half a year (although, to be fair, I had not looked very hard to find out its name), due to a discussion on the Forums at the Richard Dawkins’ website.
I am amazed at the level of discourse that many discussions on that site fall to. There are a number of very bright people there, yet it seems that many commit all manner of fallacies in the name of either political correctness, or because they fear giving ground to irrational theists/theism. A great example is about the term belief. Many on the RDF state that they “Have no Beliefs,” yet fail to realize that this statement itself is a belief.
They have had many discussions in which the issue of race has come up, and I remembered reading about Lewontin, yet could not recall his name… Thanks, again.
Don’t be too hard on them for that!
“Belief” is an overloaded word. Some use it to mean a p=1 concept, while others use it to mean a p > 0.95 concept. Of course, p=1 ideas are crazy faith issues, but some people seem to sustain them. The “I have no beliefs” crowd just mean to say that they “have no p=1 beliefs that they hold with absolute faith”—which is a fair enough thing to observe.
I wish that were the case, but it seems to me that the “I have no beliefs” crowd that I am familiar with means that they have no beliefs for which P<1.
In other words, they either know something with absolute certainty, or they give it no credence whatsoever.
I can’t think of how many times I have told them that they need to both reclaim the word “Belief” and to understand that they have many things for which P≠1 (P<1, but greater than .5, or some other arbitrary number for which they will accept some information as being true).
Yet, sometimes the certainties of faith get assumed by those without faith (of the religious kind)
I removed the not-very-good example, but I don’t want to remove the final section. It is lower quality. What bothers me more is that it doesn’t have a proper conclusive feeling about it; it doesn’t tie the post together and wrap it up in a satisfying way.
Phil,
If you are looking for others’ thoughts that may be able to tie your post together, you might want to read the Douglas Adams Artificial god that I cite here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/14az
Phil,
If you are looking for others’ thoughts that may be able to tie your post together, you might want to read the Douglas Adams Artificial god that I cite here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/14az
While looking for this info, I came across this tidbit: James Watson, who claimed blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, is 1⁄6 black. Wonder how he felt on finding that out, especially since he’s the guy who said, “I didn’t win a Nobel prize. I won the [meaning most important ever] Nobel prize.”
I know a woman who I think had negative feelings about blacks, who learned, as an adult, that her father was black. She’d always thought he was Hispanic. She was a little upset by it, but mostly thought it was a funny story to tell people.
One original publication is in the Feb. 8 2008 Nature Genetics. I don’t have it. Articles citing it here. None of the titles mention race.
I don’t think you understand Watson’s point of view.
If I understand Watson correctly, he thinks the evidence suggests that the average IQ of native Africans is below 100. He didn’t say that all Africans have IQs below 100. I don’t know why you think he’d care that he’s descended from a black person. Presumably he thinks a substantial minority of Africans still have higher IQs than 100, so if he really cares about the IQ of his black ancestor, it’s still plausible that s/he had a high IQ.
But why would anyone care about the IQ of their ancestors? Even if you do think there are racial cognitive differences, there are better ways to measure your own IQ than to guess based on the race of your ancestors.
True, we should have more faith in our own demonstrated intelligence. But humans place values on things, and then make associations, and then have feelings. Under the circumstances, I would not expect him to have the level of detachment you suggest.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to sound gleeful. (I’ll edit my original statement a bit to try to fix that.) Or, rather, what glee I had was motivated not by my liberal, forward-looking views on race, but by my impression that Watson is full of himself. I approve of scientists making politically-unpopular statements when based on evidence.
I suspect that the same people who want to say there is no such thing as race, also would enjoy saying that Watson is 1⁄6 “black”.
Are you suggesting that Watson’s statements were not based on evidence?
In the controversial comments that led to his retirement, Watson claimed of those in Africa:
‘’all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.″
The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact.
Whatever you think about Watson, in this case, he had the scientific evidence firmly on his side—as far as any scientific issue was concerned.
But it’s fact that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours”? That is, not only is there a difference in IQ distribution, that difference is so significant that “all our social policies” are not going to help them.
I remember reading something by Flynn explaining that people with IQs below 70 today still have problems functioning even though they might score in the average range if given an IQ test normed on a population from the same country decades ago. From this I gather that the correlation between IQ and how well someone can function breaks down when you compare different populations.
In order to conclude that Watson’s quoted remark is scientific fact, you must not only prove that Africans have lower average IQ test scores, but you must prove that:
This interferes with our social policies towards Africa in some way.
Any evidence we draw about the capabilities of Africans with a certain IQ must be based on studies on the same population, not on Americans or Europeans or whatnot with the same IQ.
It’s unlikely that such a broad sweeping statement like “all our social policies”, applied to the whole of Africa, is correct, considering the considerable variation both of social policies and across the continent.
Additionally, I find it interesting that people see the backlash against these remarks as merely “politically correct” anti-racism. It seems clear that this is a challenge to an entrenched way of thinking about a wide range of problems including international relations and poverty. Watson is claiming (in a rather nonspecific and unsupported way from what I’ve heard, which is only second hand) that the status quo for trying to help or otherwise influence Africa isn’t working because we make bad assumptions about their intelligence. Now, I’m sure we make many, many bad assumptions about Africans that influence our social policies and that may break many or make them less efficient or keep us from hitting on something that really works. Intelligence is the most controversial candidate, of course, for historical reasons. But some of the backlash is embedded in our very lack of practice in treating any such assumptions as malleable.
Can we please not have this discussion here? Posters here are posting under their real names or lasting pseudonyms, so they can’t defend the un-PC arguments without making numerous crimethink statements that could rebound against them in real life. So those who advance the PC arguments will wind up shadowboxing with those who don’t fear retaliation or reputational costs, and we won’t get a real honest discussion.
Questions of race and intelligence will be settled decisively within 5 or 10 years when large scale whole-genome sequencing studies are done.
Oh, look honey! It’s someone who thinks zealots are willing to change their minds when presented with overwhelming evidence!
That’s nice, dear.
Is it just me misunderstanding the subtleties of a foreign language, or is this un-LW-ishly rude?
It’s complicated. Different people will probably interpret it differently. I figured the template is common enough that people would see it as a reference and not take the sarcasm personally, but still realize the argument rests on a shaky assumption. I got voted up a lot, so I figure people took it the way I intended.
While I’m not sure if avoiding the discussion altogether is an optimal solution I do share your frustration. It took me a while to realise that using my real name here was a bad idea. We aren’t all that much less wrong.
Yeah, rule numero uno of the internet is to remain ANON as much as possible.
Precisely. Especially since, while a lot of us have jobs where we either work for ourselves or our bosses just don’t care… some of us have those repressive nightmare jobs where our bosses google for us regularly outside of work hours.
But isn’t it easy to make a temporary pseudonymous account on this website?
14 years have passed. Has the issue been decisively settled?
I feel like a lot more direct genetic evidence has surfaced: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Those first 4 links, I think, are pretty unconvincing in isolation, but this one is fine.
[Disclaimer 1: I just linked things that I remembered off the top of my head.]
[Disclaimer 2: I think that the case for hereditarianism was quite overwhelming even 14 years ago, so you should consider me biased.]
It was political correctness—and transparently so—just as it was for Lawrence Summers, Chris Brand and Frank Ellis before him.
“’What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation”
Richard Dawkins.
I have a proposed explanation for “backlash”: personal investment.
Some of us may have done well in IQ tests, and focused on intelligence (and the associated notion of rationality) as personal strengths. Accepting the notion that IQ tests don’t measure anything “real” (except in the sense that they measure “the real ability to perform well on IQ tests”), would also mean downgrading estimation of one’s personal worth.
Explaining away evidence against IQ tests as “merely politically correct anti-racism” allows retaining that sense of worth.
Check with what happened: Watson was castigated for his views on the lower intelligence of Africans—not because of his other views about social policies.
I know. I knew when I was writing that. The ideas in that paragraph were just forming as I typed them out, which is why I attributed cause where I didn’t mean to.
Something closer to what I mean: It’s fine to discuss intelligence differences between race. My intro psych textbook has a long discussion about it. People have an uproar when, instead of saying, oh, here’s what the test results are, here’s what the results of experiments that shed some insight into the cause of the differences (ie environment vs. genetic), and leaving it at that, someone says that there’s a difference in IQ and that that explains social inequity.
So, yeah, they’re objecting because it’s racist, not because it challenges institutions or policies (other than the institution of denying racial difference, which to me seems relatively rational considering all the sources of bias that would cause people to make too much of racial difference). But it’s not racist just because he says Africans have done poorly on IQ tests but because he defaults to assuming that that’s enough to be “gloomy about the prospects of Africa”.
Furthermore, his quote in this piece of the interview:
is pretty much as racist as you can get. His piece of evidence here is the anecdotal observations non-specific employers that fit right into a really old stereotype. Additionally, it seems odd—employers recruit who they employ, and you wouldn’t hire someone who had insufficient intelligence to do what you were hiring them for—the job selects for people of a certain intelligence range (which may be offset by, say, an intelligent person with a disability or who just didn’t get an education, or an average person who’s outperforming expectations of her intelligence due to hard work and a certain cultural background)--so race shouldn’t matter because you can only hire someone from a certain race for a job given they have adequate intelligence for the job.
All the press I’ve read so far on the topic stresses general racism, his tendency to make claims without scientific evidence, and his intentional offensiveness and doesn’t focus entirely on the issue of “lower intelligence of Africans”, which you seem to think. Maybe you’re talking about official reprimands or such that I haven’t read, but the public kinda objected to a lot more than just that. So I think you’re misguided in asserting that the only part of what he said that was controversial is low average African IQ and thereby claiming that he was on firm scientific ground.
Another part of the problem is intelligence = IQ. There’s evidence (from the Flynn effect and cross-cultural examination of answers given to standard IQ test type questions) that environment and culture strengthen specific cognitive abilities and predispose one to reason in certain ways or interpret questions in certain ways. So even if IQ scores show that average African IQ is whatever, that’s not indisputably the same as showing lower intelligence, because you could usefully define intelligence to include cognitive abilities/reasoning that Africans are stronger at than Westerners. And here I’ll mention that I don’t want to get in an argument over whether defining intelligence that way is good or not—I’m just saying it in response to this:
Because while that sentence can be true, it is not sufficient evidence to conclude, as Watson does, that the testing is adequate to say Africans have lower intelligence. That depends on how you define intelligence. (Although his actual words just say that their intelligence is different, which does seem clear, but from other remarks he seems to think that Africans have lower intelligence due to genes, which is not scientifically undisputed at all.)
I am bothered by the fact that I know the discussions on race and intelligence that I have read are heavily biased in the information they present—for instance, in the US, racial intelligence differences correlating better with degree of pigmentation than with amount of African genes—because this information seems like it’s picked in order to prove the politically correct point, whereas the other side likes to ignore all the evidence for the politically correct point and just simplify things because it seems obvious to them that the bigoted view is true. Point me to a transparent, relatively unbiased discussion of all available experimental evidence and I’ll thank you.
I lean toward the politically correct side because it’s the side that presents a lot of evidence and then says, “It’s kinda inconclusive and we don’t really know what causes group intelligence difference, although we do know a lot of it isn’t genetic.” Whereas the non-politically-correct side attempts to explain away a lot of the evils of the world by saying inequity is genetically based just because there are differences in the way groups perform on a psychometric instrument. But it seems like history and other social forces can greatly affect the conditions of one group: a few generations ago, when my ancestors were impoverished farmers in Europe, I have little doubt they would’ve failed modern IQ tests, but my race’s genes haven’t change since then, and the genes weren’t responsible for our economic, social, and political problems.
It’s both reasonable and humane to assume that, given Westerners spent a century gaining IQ points due to the Flynn effect, and given that the low quality of life in the West changed radically over spans of centuries or decades, one group currently doing poorly on IQ tests and living in poverty has the potential to change just as drastically. Any pessimism about their prospects can surely be more strongly justified by citing current and historical economic, political, social, and environmental trends, as well as unprecedented possible events like existential threats.
Taboo side. Complex empirical issues do not have sides. Humans, for their own non-truth-tracking reasons, group into sides, but it’s not Bayesian, and it has never been Bayesian.
Or we think we group up into sides, but I’m not even sure that’s true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exact opposite perspective: that the hbd-ers are honest and nuanced and the egalitarians are blinded by ideology. But in fact, there are no sides physically out there: rather, there are only various people who have studied various facets of the topic to various degrees and who believe and profess various things for various reasons. And this question of what various people believe is distinct from the question of what’s actually true.
I realize that this kind of aggressive reductionism isn’t very predictively useful—that indeed, I’m probably just a few steps above saying, “Well it’s all just quarks and leptons anyway.” But sometimes it is worth saying just that, if only to wrench ourselves free of this adversarial framing so that we can actually look at the data.
Humaneness is central to policy, but it should have nothing to do with our beliefs.
Upvoted, because you make the case well that we shouldn’t identify with sides when discussing issues like this.
But you’re not really using “Taboo” in the sense that Eliezer described. “Sides” do exist as social phenomena. They are a certain sort of coalition that people group into when they engage in public discourse. As you say, sides exist for non-truth-tracking reasons. However, like race, we need the concept of sides to talk about social dynamics, so, like race, sides exist.
(Of course, they exist as nothing more than certain configurations of the pieces of the stuff out of which reality is made.)
Briefly—since this is getting off topic—if anyone is interested, my views on the matter are here: http://timtyler.org/political_correctness/
|The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact.
Yes, but most interpreted him to be claiming that their genes prevented them from attaining equal test scores. This is definitely disputed.
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/494.html http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/
It was Watson—not those with reading comprehension problems among his audience—who wound up out of a job.
I’m not expressing an opinion on whether Watson’s statements were based on evidence.
Why? To have a reasonable measure for the intelligence of their children.
Heard of regression to the mean? An unusually smart person from a background of dumb hick proles, is not going to have kids nearly as smart as they are.
People understand this at a genetic level when picking out mates. “Meet the family” before you decide to keep the girl/guy.
Probably not terribly affected, as he has plenty of information about his intelligence screening off (EDIT: as steven says, this is not the correct term) his ancestry, and he AFAIK never claimed black people to be ‘inferior’ in any sense other than lower average IQ.
I disagree.
Is this it? many ungated versions.
This seems more the opposite. It says,
-wtf am i reading-
that “1/6” black came from a funky genetics test.
A reasonable test for percentage of blackness, is going back say, about 5 generations, and seeing how many black people are in his ancestry.
There were none, since his parents/grandparents,yada yada came from Europe.
Wonder how he felt about it? He understood it was a bullshit media piece.
Is there a genetic funkiness test?
The first link is a 404. Maybe try here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/watsons-black-dna-ultimate-irony/
That is what some people mean. Others truly believe there are literally no differences between human populations apart from skin color and bone structure, and of course culture.
Yes, there are no doubt some people who believe that.
The point I’ve heard, back when I pressed a professor on the rather absurd statement “race is not genetic,” is that if you were simply to look at a bunch of human genomes, and compare them to one another, and rank them by their similarities and differences, the genes controlling race probably wouldn’t occur to you. This seems quite plausible.