What I suspect is going on is that Epiphany is statistically innumerate (as suggested by her rather hilarious statement about 25% of Africans being above average), but doesn’t want to loose status by admitting she doesn’t understand the arguments.
Both of the citations I was given by you guys said clearly that they were uncertain about the connection between race and IQ. That is the reason I don’t agree—because even your citations do not agree. I assume those are the best citations you have, so that your citations do not agree with you makes your belief look very bad indeed.
Also, by arguing that the reason I don’t agree is because I am statistically innumerate and that the reason I don’t agree is because I’m too inept to understand, you have made an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the person does zilch to support your argument.
I can’t believe I just saw an ad hominem attack on LessWrong. That is the the most obvious behavior that one avoids if one wants to have a rational debate.
Both of the citations I was given by you guys said clearly that they were uncertain about the connection between race and IQ. That is the reason I don’t agree—because even your citations do not agree.
I don’t think you’re correctly distinguishing between multiple related claims.
Claim A is that IQ distributions vary by race. This is supported by mountains of evidence. This alone is sufficient to justify using race as a factor when predicting IQ. This is the original point under discussion, as you argued against using race as a factor when predicting IQ both here and here.
Claim B is that differences in measured IQs overestimate the actual differences in intelligence or life outcomes between races. There is substantial evidence against this claim, and it is only weakly related to the original point under discussion. (Were it true, it would suggest that estimating IQ is not as important when doing between-race comparisons as other estimations, but does not impact IQ estimation.)
Claim C is that X% of difference in racial average IQ is due to genetic factors. It is currently not clear what X is for any particular between-race comparison, which the citations reflect. This is unrelated to the original point under discussion.
Also, by arguing that the reason I don’t agree is because I am statistically innumerate and that the reason I don’t agree is because I’m too inept to understand, you have made an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the person does zilch to support your argument.
Not quite. The arguments you’ve made recently are mostly social arguments- “you say Y, but your citation says Z, how do you account for that!”- rather than technical arguments.
The arguments seem vacuous to a technical expert, because Y and Z turn out to be totally compatible, but may still seem impressive to a non-expert who is unfamiliar with the relationship between Y and Z. Similarly, a non-expert doesn’t know what sort of claims do and don’t need citations, and so may see a virtuous skeptic against credulous believers, rather than a crank who defends their perpetual motion machine by insisting on a citation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. (This is not to say that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is taken on faith; what it means is that there are some issues where ignorance, confusion, or denial is solid evidence against being a curious and open-minded scholar.)
An effective social response is to poke at the technical content of your claims at a much more basic level (i.e. charges of innumeracy). If you aren’t familiar with means and medians, and disengage when someone presses you on a basic statistical point, then anyone who is familiar with statistics can use that to gauge your level of technical ability. (And if you aren’t familiar with stats 101, why have a confident opinion on an inherently statistical topic?)
IQ distributions vary by race. This alone is sufficient to justify using race as a factor when predicting IQ.
Contrast this with Epiphany’s comment earlier on
If you want to attribute the IQ scores to race, not poverty or circumstances [emphasis mine] (...)
I guess it mostly comes down to “race” being such a charged term. Epiphany seems to be fighting “Someone being an African American predicts a lower than US-average IQ” because that has a lot of negative connotations, whereas you may reply “Well, but it’s technically correct, even if did turn out (unlikely/no idea) the correlation only exists because race predicts/includes poverty/culture/social customs, which in turn causally [e|a]ffect IQ”, while she would say “But then it’s not race!”.
Maybe something like “I refuse to use race as a predictor (even if I could) because that’s mindkilling/misleading, unless poverty/culture/social customs have all been controlled for. Since there is no scientific consensus on race when poverty/culture/social customs have all been controlled for, we shouldn’t speculate and rather work on the latter confounders, which can probably be improved with socially acceptable policies.” would capture most of her point and be more palatable?
you may reply “Well, but it’s technically correct, even if did turn out (unlikely/no idea) the correlation only exists because race predicts/includes poverty/culture/social customs, which in turn causally [e|a]ffect IQ”, while she would say “But then it’s not race!”.
I agree that there are a handful of valuable points one can make about the underlying causal diagrams. Suppose the diagram is X<-Y->Z: then the correlation between X and Z is indirect and acausal, where we should not expect that modifying X or Z will modify the other one. If the diagram is instead X->Y->Z, then the correlation between X and Z is indirect but modifying X may modify Z.
I disagree that those subtle points are the ones under discussion. It seems to me that this discussion is indirectly about the social acceptability of noticing the correlation between race and IQ, and that the technical points are used mostly for obfuscation. Suppose we were uncertain which of the two causal diagrams I described above were correct; we would still be certain that X and Z were correlated if Y is unmeasured, because that is the case in both causal diagrams, and responding to the claim that X and Z are correlated with “we don’t know if X causes Y or Y causes X” is irrelevant.
Since there is no scientific consensus on race when poverty/culture/social customs have all been controlled for, we shouldn’t speculate and rather work on the latter confounders, which can probably be improved with socially acceptable policies.
I would agree that it’s easier to intervene in wealth, culture, and customs than intelligence, and that we already know of several obvious ways where interventions in those three can positively impact intelligence. I don’t think Epiphany and I would agree on what interventions are most beneficial there, but that’s a separate conversation that’s not worth having here.
Arguments ad hominem are inappropriate for deciding the truth of the matter. They are entirely appropriate for deciding whether you want to take someone seriously or even just to talk to a person.
What I suspect is going on is that Epiphany is statistically innumerate (as suggested by her rather hilarious statement about 25% of Africans being above average), but doesn’t want to loose status by admitting she doesn’t understand the arguments.
Both of the citations I was given by you guys said clearly that they were uncertain about the connection between race and IQ. That is the reason I don’t agree—because even your citations do not agree. I assume those are the best citations you have, so that your citations do not agree with you makes your belief look very bad indeed.
Also, by arguing that the reason I don’t agree is because I am statistically innumerate and that the reason I don’t agree is because I’m too inept to understand, you have made an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the person does zilch to support your argument.
I can’t believe I just saw an ad hominem attack on LessWrong. That is the the most obvious behavior that one avoids if one wants to have a rational debate.
I don’t think you’re correctly distinguishing between multiple related claims.
Claim A is that IQ distributions vary by race. This is supported by mountains of evidence. This alone is sufficient to justify using race as a factor when predicting IQ. This is the original point under discussion, as you argued against using race as a factor when predicting IQ both here and here.
Claim B is that differences in measured IQs overestimate the actual differences in intelligence or life outcomes between races. There is substantial evidence against this claim, and it is only weakly related to the original point under discussion. (Were it true, it would suggest that estimating IQ is not as important when doing between-race comparisons as other estimations, but does not impact IQ estimation.)
Claim C is that X% of difference in racial average IQ is due to genetic factors. It is currently not clear what X is for any particular between-race comparison, which the citations reflect. This is unrelated to the original point under discussion.
Not quite. The arguments you’ve made recently are mostly social arguments- “you say Y, but your citation says Z, how do you account for that!”- rather than technical arguments.
The arguments seem vacuous to a technical expert, because Y and Z turn out to be totally compatible, but may still seem impressive to a non-expert who is unfamiliar with the relationship between Y and Z. Similarly, a non-expert doesn’t know what sort of claims do and don’t need citations, and so may see a virtuous skeptic against credulous believers, rather than a crank who defends their perpetual motion machine by insisting on a citation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. (This is not to say that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is taken on faith; what it means is that there are some issues where ignorance, confusion, or denial is solid evidence against being a curious and open-minded scholar.)
An effective social response is to poke at the technical content of your claims at a much more basic level (i.e. charges of innumeracy). If you aren’t familiar with means and medians, and disengage when someone presses you on a basic statistical point, then anyone who is familiar with statistics can use that to gauge your level of technical ability. (And if you aren’t familiar with stats 101, why have a confident opinion on an inherently statistical topic?)
Contrast this with Epiphany’s comment earlier on
I guess it mostly comes down to “race” being such a charged term. Epiphany seems to be fighting “Someone being an African American predicts a lower than US-average IQ” because that has a lot of negative connotations, whereas you may reply “Well, but it’s technically correct, even if did turn out (unlikely/no idea) the correlation only exists because race predicts/includes poverty/culture/social customs, which in turn causally [e|a]ffect IQ”, while she would say “But then it’s not race!”.
Maybe something like “I refuse to use race as a predictor (even if I could) because that’s mindkilling/misleading, unless poverty/culture/social customs have all been controlled for. Since there is no scientific consensus on race when poverty/culture/social customs have all been controlled for, we shouldn’t speculate and rather work on the latter confounders, which can probably be improved with socially acceptable policies.” would capture most of her point and be more palatable?
Sorry for the verbosity.
I agree that there are a handful of valuable points one can make about the underlying causal diagrams. Suppose the diagram is X<-Y->Z: then the correlation between X and Z is indirect and acausal, where we should not expect that modifying X or Z will modify the other one. If the diagram is instead X->Y->Z, then the correlation between X and Z is indirect but modifying X may modify Z.
I disagree that those subtle points are the ones under discussion. It seems to me that this discussion is indirectly about the social acceptability of noticing the correlation between race and IQ, and that the technical points are used mostly for obfuscation. Suppose we were uncertain which of the two causal diagrams I described above were correct; we would still be certain that X and Z were correlated if Y is unmeasured, because that is the case in both causal diagrams, and responding to the claim that X and Z are correlated with “we don’t know if X causes Y or Y causes X” is irrelevant.
When I read “there is no scientific consensus,” it sounds like “but there’s still a chance, right?”
I would agree that it’s easier to intervene in wealth, culture, and customs than intelligence, and that we already know of several obvious ways where interventions in those three can positively impact intelligence. I don’t think Epiphany and I would agree on what interventions are most beneficial there, but that’s a separate conversation that’s not worth having here.
Because for Epiphany it’s not a statistical topic, it’s an issue of fairness and equality—she fights for Great Justice!
No doubt this, too, is an ad hominem, in some sense.
Arguments ad hominem are inappropriate for deciding the truth of the matter. They are entirely appropriate for deciding whether you want to take someone seriously or even just to talk to a person.
We are in agreement.