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.)
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/