I think the main debate these days is not at all about the validity of the tests, it’s a debate over business necessity versus disparate impact.
Which is still ridiculous. It’s been known for generations that IQ has a positive impact on basically every job, which should imply that the default is to assume business necessity for IQ tests.
Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:
1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in the law, seem extremely high.
2) It is interesting that LW sees so many rational arguments for policies that would give more resources to whites or Asians, especially white or Asian males with high test scores who may not have gone to college. While these arguments are phrased as both logical and obvious, LW rarely (ever?) entertains the easily constructed, similarly phrased arguments that would push resources away from LW’s typical membership. For example: “It’s been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners.” Or how’s this: “It’s been known for generations that religious identification with the in-group eases working relationships and obviates friction over expressions of belief, so employers should as a default prefer employees share their religions.”
Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests?
Very possible. I would take the Steve Sailer approach here, of acknowledging underlying differences and making the best of the situation. Let’s step away from race and just talk about tracking in schools- by the time someone is 12, we have a pretty good guess what their eventual social strata / broad kind of career will be.
In countries like Germany, they respond to this with different high schools- someone who will be a technician can go to a technical school, and someone who will be an engineer can go to an academic school. Both get work suited for their intellectual ability and interests, and so the first isn’t drowning and the second isn’t bored. (Relevant here is the finding that getting rid of shop classes increases the high school dropout rate in America- turns out that for an easily identifiable group of students, the primary benefit they get out of high school is a place to practice basic handyman skills!)
In the US, we get lunacy like “whether or not someone takes the first optional math class is a very strong predictor of whether or not they go to college. Let’s make that class mandatory for graduating high school!” which makes everyone involved worse off, as the students not pointed at college now find it more difficult to graduate high school.
For example: “It’s been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners.”
I’m not sure this would see significant disagreement here on LW. The main response I would give is yes, but the preference is miscalibrated. Ceteris paribus, a stronger partner is likely to be better (assuming they aren’t prone to domestic violence), but my reflective preferences would give a weight to athleticism that’s orders of magnitude lower than the weight my attraction heuristics give athleticism. This mismatch seems to be because those heuristics were tuned in an era when the chance of being the victim (or beneficiary!) of violent crime was orders of magnitude higher than they currently are.
Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests?
Of course it has. But the issue is that the society isn’t going to come out and say that—it will deliberately distort the map and make claims that are not true in reality.
The argument being made isn’t “50% of people are below median intelligence, we still need to and can productively employ them”, the argument is “we will pretend that all groups of people are exactly equally smart and if you say otherwise we’ll sue your ass into the ground”.
people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners
Nope, not true since Mr.Colt made an equalizer :-) But I’ll agree that firearms training and ownership can be a reasonable plus in looking for a romantic partner. Well, unless his name is Pistorius...
Of course it has. But the issue is that the society isn’t going to come out and say that—it will deliberately distort the map and make claims that are not true in reality.
So, reason dictates that… “we” should shove our offended senses of intellectual consistency and naively understood “honesty” up our collective butt, and just do whatever helps people.
And we should absolutely not help people “equally”! Whatever you think of the abstract moral/political ideal of equality, in practical terms people’s circumstances in any society are so unequal that symmetrical treatment makes no sense. Any policy that does not identify the most vulnerable and marginalized groups and offer them targeted aid and protection is not “fair”, it’s not “impartial”… it’s basically a waste of resources, failing to seek out the greatest marginal utility for its subjects. So, ironically, it becomes a core left-wing idea that people should not be approached as identical or treated in an “equal” manner. Bam!
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”—Anatole France on “legal equality”
I think your problem is that you’re so focused on the “fairest” way to divide a fixed set of goods, that you’re forgetting that the decisions in question also have a large effect on the amount of goods available.
“It’s been known for generations that religious identification with the in-group eases working relationships and obviates friction over expressions of belief, so employers should as a default prefer employees share their religions.”
That’s actually an interesting argument. I wouldn’t mind seeing it expanded, if you happen to have real numbers lying around.
Though some obvious confounders do come to mind: in a really diverse religious environment (like, for example, the Silicon Valley tech scene), you’re giving up quite a bit in talent if you recruit only from your co-religionists. And if you weight it less heavily, I’d be very surprised if the response looked linear: I wouldn’t expect a workplace that’s (say) 50% Christian with the rest split between atheists, Hindus, and Buddhists to be that much more harmonious than one with equal numbers of all of the above plus the odd Wiccan or Discordian. It might actually be worse under some circumstances, although this is rank speculation.
A lot of the current research focuses on “trust” inside groups. This is not exactly double-blinded climate controlled stuff, as you might expect, just brave and smart social psychologists doing their best. I find it highly plausible and confirmatory of many centuries of non-scientific observations about insularity. Disclaimer: I AM NOT SAYING DISTRUST OF PEOPLE OF OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS IS GOOD, JUST THAT IT HAPPENS.
I know of no studies on friction over expression of religious beliefs. I do kind of take as a given that there are fewer HR complaints when everybody’s got the same Sacred Heart/Darwin amphibian/Santa Muerte/COEXIST bumper sticker.
Though some obvious confounders do come to mind...
Granted that there are huge trade-offs for religious homogeneity, and I think that it’s almost always a bad business decision (exceptions: semi-utopian communes? survival in Hobbesian chaos? new colonies without hope of reinforcement?) It was just an exemplary argument of a sort made less often than, you know, arguments about race and IQ.
Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people.
To refer back to the OP, why is the relevant disadvantaged class “black people” rather than “people with low IQ” or even “people unqualified for the job”?
why is the relevant disadvantaged class “black people”
As far as it goes, I’m in favor of preserving opportunities for all sorts of people to work, because it’s humanizing and it makes people happy. We’re all in favor of that, right?
But I also don’t think there’s been historic, organized pressure to keep low-IQ people from finding useful labor, and while such people deserve the protection of the law, it’s not illuminating to compare their plight to a group of people who were denied the ability to find employment they were very capable of using intimidation, violence, and bad-faith law....
...tools which, and this is sad, were very much still in use when the Civil Right Act was passed, and would still be in use today if it had never been passed.
Racial “classes”—not sets of corresponding genetic polymorphisms, which science tells us about, but race as we understand it in America, which is both more and less complicated—were not created by the Civil Rights Act, or the civil rights movement. They were created long before that, to justify cruelty, and to deny the continuing effect of that social construction would have been, in the the judgment of the majority of our Congress in 1964 and our Supreme Court since then, counterproductive.
All other things being equal, is anyone disagreeing with this?
Not at all. It’s a very rationalist sort of argument. There are many like it. I think it would be terrific if we spent more time exploring those, possibly at the expense of focusing heavily on arguments that seem a little less than disinterested.
Which is still ridiculous. It’s been known for generations that IQ has a positive impact on basically every job, which should imply that the default is to assume business necessity for IQ tests.
Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:
1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in the law, seem extremely high.
2) It is interesting that LW sees so many rational arguments for policies that would give more resources to whites or Asians, especially white or Asian males with high test scores who may not have gone to college. While these arguments are phrased as both logical and obvious, LW rarely (ever?) entertains the easily constructed, similarly phrased arguments that would push resources away from LW’s typical membership. For example: “It’s been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners.” Or how’s this: “It’s been known for generations that religious identification with the in-group eases working relationships and obviates friction over expressions of belief, so employers should as a default prefer employees share their religions.”
Very possible. I would take the Steve Sailer approach here, of acknowledging underlying differences and making the best of the situation. Let’s step away from race and just talk about tracking in schools- by the time someone is 12, we have a pretty good guess what their eventual social strata / broad kind of career will be.
In countries like Germany, they respond to this with different high schools- someone who will be a technician can go to a technical school, and someone who will be an engineer can go to an academic school. Both get work suited for their intellectual ability and interests, and so the first isn’t drowning and the second isn’t bored. (Relevant here is the finding that getting rid of shop classes increases the high school dropout rate in America- turns out that for an easily identifiable group of students, the primary benefit they get out of high school is a place to practice basic handyman skills!)
In the US, we get lunacy like “whether or not someone takes the first optional math class is a very strong predictor of whether or not they go to college. Let’s make that class mandatory for graduating high school!” which makes everyone involved worse off, as the students not pointed at college now find it more difficult to graduate high school.
I’m not sure this would see significant disagreement here on LW. The main response I would give is yes, but the preference is miscalibrated. Ceteris paribus, a stronger partner is likely to be better (assuming they aren’t prone to domestic violence), but my reflective preferences would give a weight to athleticism that’s orders of magnitude lower than the weight my attraction heuristics give athleticism. This mismatch seems to be because those heuristics were tuned in an era when the chance of being the victim (or beneficiary!) of violent crime was orders of magnitude higher than they currently are.
Of course it has. But the issue is that the society isn’t going to come out and say that—it will deliberately distort the map and make claims that are not true in reality.
The argument being made isn’t “50% of people are below median intelligence, we still need to and can productively employ them”, the argument is “we will pretend that all groups of people are exactly equally smart and if you say otherwise we’ll sue your ass into the ground”.
Nope, not true since Mr.Colt made an equalizer :-) But I’ll agree that firearms training and ownership can be a reasonable plus in looking for a romantic partner. Well, unless his name is Pistorius...
So, reason dictates that… “we” should shove our offended senses of intellectual consistency and naively understood “honesty” up our collective butt, and just do whatever helps people.
And we should absolutely not help people “equally”! Whatever you think of the abstract moral/political ideal of equality, in practical terms people’s circumstances in any society are so unequal that symmetrical treatment makes no sense. Any policy that does not identify the most vulnerable and marginalized groups and offer them targeted aid and protection is not “fair”, it’s not “impartial”… it’s basically a waste of resources, failing to seek out the greatest marginal utility for its subjects. So, ironically, it becomes a core left-wing idea that people should not be approached as identical or treated in an “equal” manner. Bam!
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”—Anatole France on “legal equality”
I think your problem is that you’re so focused on the “fairest” way to divide a fixed set of goods, that you’re forgetting that the decisions in question also have a large effect on the amount of goods available.
That’s actually an interesting argument. I wouldn’t mind seeing it expanded, if you happen to have real numbers lying around.
Though some obvious confounders do come to mind: in a really diverse religious environment (like, for example, the Silicon Valley tech scene), you’re giving up quite a bit in talent if you recruit only from your co-religionists. And if you weight it less heavily, I’d be very surprised if the response looked linear: I wouldn’t expect a workplace that’s (say) 50% Christian with the rest split between atheists, Hindus, and Buddhists to be that much more harmonious than one with equal numbers of all of the above plus the odd Wiccan or Discordian. It might actually be worse under some circumstances, although this is rank speculation.
A lot of the current research focuses on “trust” inside groups. This is not exactly double-blinded climate controlled stuff, as you might expect, just brave and smart social psychologists doing their best. I find it highly plausible and confirmatory of many centuries of non-scientific observations about insularity. Disclaimer: I AM NOT SAYING DISTRUST OF PEOPLE OF OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS IS GOOD, JUST THAT IT HAPPENS.
Atheism associated with lack of “trustworthiness signals” by believers.
Religious in-group trust and cooperation is higher.
I know of no studies on friction over expression of religious beliefs. I do kind of take as a given that there are fewer HR complaints when everybody’s got the same Sacred Heart/Darwin amphibian/Santa Muerte/COEXIST bumper sticker.
Granted that there are huge trade-offs for religious homogeneity, and I think that it’s almost always a bad business decision (exceptions: semi-utopian communes? survival in Hobbesian chaos? new colonies without hope of reinforcement?) It was just an exemplary argument of a sort made less often than, you know, arguments about race and IQ.
To refer back to the OP, why is the relevant disadvantaged class “black people” rather than “people with low IQ” or even “people unqualified for the job”?
As far as it goes, I’m in favor of preserving opportunities for all sorts of people to work, because it’s humanizing and it makes people happy. We’re all in favor of that, right?
But I also don’t think there’s been historic, organized pressure to keep low-IQ people from finding useful labor, and while such people deserve the protection of the law, it’s not illuminating to compare their plight to a group of people who were denied the ability to find employment they were very capable of using intimidation, violence, and bad-faith law....
...tools which, and this is sad, were very much still in use when the Civil Right Act was passed, and would still be in use today if it had never been passed.
Racial “classes”—not sets of corresponding genetic polymorphisms, which science tells us about, but race as we understand it in America, which is both more and less complicated—were not created by the Civil Rights Act, or the civil rights movement. They were created long before that, to justify cruelty, and to deny the continuing effect of that social construction would have been, in the the judgment of the majority of our Congress in 1964 and our Supreme Court since then, counterproductive.
Not at all. It’s a very rationalist sort of argument. There are many like it. I think it would be terrific if we spent more time exploring those, possibly at the expense of focusing heavily on arguments that seem a little less than disinterested.