Sure. But it still seems to imply that I’m morally at fault for making the best hypothesis I could from what little data I had at the time. Confusing heuristics with willful prejudice muddles the discussion, puts people on the defensive, etc.
In fact, I’m brewing up a discussion post on that very topic, because I have seen the difference between an honest mistake based on imprefect heuristics, and a willful misinterpretation of the facts, being the source of much unnecessary conflict.
The difference between someone defending unconventional views for the sake of truth, and someone who uses the guise of the former to push an inhumane agenda, is also worth examining.
And another topic that has me baffled is the very existence of racists, sexists, and other such sorts. The sort that would say to women engineering students “it’s fine if you’ve come here because you wish to marry an engineer, it’s a good plan, but don’t ever expect to become engineers on your own; women shouldn’t become engineers” (this actually happened to one of my teachers). What motivates them? How do they think?
But it still seems to imply that I’m morally at fault for making the best hypothesis I could from what little data I had at the time.
Moral fault isn’t the issue here. Accuracy is.
In fact, I’m brewing up a discussion post on that very topic, because I have seen the difference between an honest mistake based on imprefect heuristics, and a willful misinterpretation of the facts, being the source of much unnecessary conflict.
Sure, I make honest mistakes based on imperfect heuristics. That Blue over there? They engage in willful misinterpretations of the facts.
And another topic that has me baffled is the very existence of racists, sexists, and other such sorts. The sort that would say to women engineering students “it’s fine if you’ve come here because you wish to marry an engineer, it’s a good plan, but don’t ever expect to become engineers on your own; women shouldn’t become engineers” (this actually happened to one of my teachers). What motivates them? How do they think?
So first, it is noteworthy that Imm hasn’t said anything like that at all. But more to the point, if you can’t understand some group’s motivation, does that not cause you to doubt more whether a given individual is in that group?
As to sexism, there are a variety of different motivations. One motivation is thinking that intrinsically there are differences between men and women that matter in some context, and that those differences are so large that they cannot be overcome in the relevant context. That’s a factual question. In your example, you and I think they are factually wrong, but that’s a statement about the universe we live in. And there are conceivable universes where that isn’t the case. Second, there are motivations extending from values. These values can range from thinking that whatever is traditional should continue, to thinking that division of labor is a good thing, to simple cultural holdovers of earlier values that actually made sense at one point. That’s complicated by the common failure to distinguish carefully between terminal and goal-oriented values. But this has little to do with the actual issue at hand. that you are making claims about Imm’s values and beliefs that are not justified by the evidence.
One more—this is a theory which I think explains a lot, but I’m not sure I’m right.
There seems to be a fairly large proportion of heterosexual men who don’t like being around women, especially women who aren’t family members or potential sexual partners.
Have an evo-psych explanation, for what little that’s worth. If men improve their reproductive chances by succeeding in competition with other men, what good does it do them to double the number of potential competitors?
There seems to be a fairly large proportion of heterosexual men who don’t like being around women, especially women who aren’t family members or potential sexual partners.
“Don’t like” or “are uncomfortable with”, mostly because they don’t know how to deal with them?
There are a number of possibilities. One of my male friends says (if I understand him correctly) that women are just distracting for men, and men would like some time off from being aroused under circumstances when they aren’t supposed to show it. I’m sure he’s accurate about himself, but he assumes he’s typical of men, and I’m not sure he’s right.
I’ve heard claims that groups of men behave differently if there’s 10% or more women present. (Sorry, no cite.) If women have even moderate amounts of status, they may have a civilizing effect, and men could find that tiresome. The civilizing effect would vary according to culture—it might be something like cursing is unwelcome, or at least must be apologized for. Or (specific example from the source I can’t remember), if there are women associated with a fraternity (?), the men quit doing things like having indoor beach parties with huge piles of sand.
Really, I don’t know, and there could be a number of reasons. It just seems like there’s a tendency which shows up in many cultures for men to want men-only space.
Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I’ve only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn’t risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
Ironically, I find myself attempting to convince you that my thinking was sound, even though you believe I arrived at the wrong conclusion. In the meantime, I anticipate that every post I add to this discussion will earn me some amount of negative karma. Perhaps I would have been better off biting the bullet and engaging him on those things?
That Blue over there?
Where?
So first, it is noteworthy that Imm hasn’t said anything like that at all.
I wasn’t talking about Imm’s post anymore. But I would argue that it is not worthy of note: we live in a society where racism is so discredited-but-not-extinct that even presenting empirical facts that might support it is taboo. Open normative statements such as the one I mentioned occurred often in back when one could comfortably be open and cruel in one’s sexism, because back then that was the norm, and women engineers, challenging it, came under fire.
Nowadays, racists and such are under a lot of pressure not to leave any evidence at all of their affiliation. As a result, the probability that someone showing weark evidence of belonging to that group actually belongs to that group increases, because you don’t expect to find strong evidence, and because you expect most people not to want to be associated with it that they’d go out of their way to show even weak evidence of it. Thus, what would otherwise be weak evidence becomes much stronger.
I’ve only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn’t risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
Just raising the possibility of somebody being part of a low-status group is often enough to damage their image in the eyes of others, and many conversational norms treat raising such a possibility as the same thing as an outright accusation—for good reason. (Bullies would love the freedom to go around implying bad things about people while facing no risk of censure.)
I’ve just paid five Karma to answer this: all I wanted was for Imm to understand where I came from when I dropped the discussion, and to show him that it is not an entirely irrational train of thought that would draw people away from discussing these topics with him. I failed to consider the fact that I was talking to him in public, and that what I was saying had implications on a level above that of the discussion. From what I’ve seen so far, I gather that I should have either ignored him outright without saying anything at all (perhaps it would have looked like I had forgotten the discussion altogether?) or continued via PM as soon as those topics were broached.
Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I’ve only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn’t risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
So in addition to Kaj’s point, I’m also curious what percentage that attitude triggers at. Is that a 5% chance, 10%? 55%, 99%? And more to the point, when you say racist, what do you mean by it? That’s a term that not only has a lot of connotative baggage, it also is a term that has a lot of different meanings.
I hadn’f thought you were referencing that. It might please you to know that I actually usually do not accuse other political colours of willfully misrepresenting facts, at least not initially.
I’ve met xenophobes who have simply never dealt with the objects of their contempt outside of the kind of menial work filled by the uneducated, or in the context of media portrayals that focus on crime and such, politicians who blame them for taking benefits or jobsm; spending a little time with me has made them question their beliefs, spending a lot of time has made them change them outright.
As for me, I used to be a sexist myself (of the “we’re different but not unequal; complimentary” type… ugh...), because of the memeplex that surrounded me, but, because of my irrepressible curiosity, I began finding out what the world looked like from the eyes of a woman : I am obviously not one anymore. I also used to be kind of a racist: the first time I saw a black kid, I hid inside my car. And I used to remain instinctually scared of the darker-skinned type, because my entire exposure to them was in media, as criminals and delinquents (muthafucka!) until I actually spent some time with some, in a context of equality. And I was raised anti-semitic, of the conspiracy-theorist sort, but then I met and befriended several jewish persons, and updated my views according to the immediate, personal evidence.
By the way, thank you for making me specify the definition of racism, because now I can finally relax. According to Wikipedia
Racism is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that consider the human species to be divided into races with shared traits, abilities, or qualities, such as personality, intellect, morality, or other cultural behavioral characteristics, and especially the belief that races can be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to others, or that members of different races should be treated differently.
If Imm believes that the results of these unspeakable studies (namely, “some races are, by and large, stupider than others, and some are more crime-prone”) are correct, he is a racist. If his beliefs happen to be correct, he is a racist who is right, but none the less a racist. And if, from there, he believes that the smarter, more law-abiding races should be granted a disproportionate amount of power over the others, that makes him a racial supremacist.
And, you know what? I hadn’t thought of that before, Joshua. It’s your asking me to define “racist” that made me go and check, and report my findings. Before your intervention, I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Imm a racist, being too afraid of inaccurately placing thim in a bad group. Now I can call him that without feeling uncomfortable at all. Nice job breaking it, hero.
EDIT: Just to be extra-precise, that he’s a racist doesn’t make him a Klanner burning crosses, or a skinhead beating up black people at night, no more than Martin Luther King being a criminal (he broke the law, he went to jail) makes him a burglar in the night threatening families with a gun. That would be fallacious reasoning. Moreover, if he is right, we would all have to become racists, as we all wish to believe that which is true.
However, I do not think we need to fear too much. Racism has been scientifically discredited; I don’t know why it was discredited, but I would bet that it wasn’t just ideological egalitarianism that brought this outcome about, and that there is some solid empirical basis for this change in paradigm.
Racism has been scientifically discredited; I don’t know why it was discredited, but I would bet that it wasn’t just ideological egalitarianism that brought this outcome about, and that there is some solid empirical basis for this change in paradigm.
By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies. Besides that, my guess is that people who had a vested interest in the maintenance of a racist, sexist, etc. worldview (namely, rich white men) had more wealth and power at their disposal than those who had the opposite vested interest, which means they have some influence over funding and publication, publicity, acclaim and awarding, etc. If racism were provably right beyond reasonable doubt, I assume they would have made damn sure everyone knew it. If the alternative hypothesis has prevailed in spite of these odds, I would assume that it had a very strong appearance of being provably less wrong.
Of course, if white-rich-men funded and influenced research concluded that these rich white dudes were not the smartest bunch overall, and, say, arab women were instead, and that this racist view prevailed and became the scientific consensus against these controlling interests’ … interests, I would assume it to be true.
In short, if most scientists agree on a paradigm in spite of the fact that it’s inconvenient to those scientis’ bosses, I believe that that paradigm is more likely to be true.
This is of course assuming that the studies are done rigorously and faithfully, with good experiment design, good analysis of the statistic, intelligent and pertinent drawing of conclusions, etc etc.; that scientists aren’t being stupid and aren’t screwing with the results. As someone who used to believe what he’d read in Talent Is Overrated, and whose views on nutrition and the science thereof have been badly unsettled by Good Calories, Bad Calories, I can guarantee that I for one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without help.
Ashkenazi Jews are something like slightly less than one standard deviation above whites, so in the 110-115 range. East Asians (Han Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc) score a little higher, about 103-106. The size of the standard deviations within groups also varies between groups.
Also if you look into the sub-factors that g measures, you’ll find variation. Some groups have higher Verbal than Visuospatial for example, though I don’t remember which ones have which at the moment.
Thank you. Those are some interesting results. Due to my limited capacity to compile and properly evaluate research (call it laziness), I’ll just take your word for it and accept them.
So, if I understand you right, some demographics are proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have a higher IQ than others, by and large and with some idiosyncrasies in distribution and aspects. Said IQ actuallhy reliably measures something, and that something is well-defined and resembles what is commonly thought of as “intelligence”. Okay. Well, what now?
To clarify, that bit is clear, but one should understand that the evidence that that correlation is genetic is much weaker. There are a lot of other possible explanations, including early childhood education, cultural correlates at a young age, nutrition levels, parasite load, stereotype threat, and everything else sometimes put under a catchall of socioeconomic factors. Ashenazi Jews for example are one of the best performing groups, but there are some massive confounding factors since there’s a heavily intellectual culture that emphasizes learning.
It means that any political argument, any social policy, any philosophy, predicated on the cognitive abilities of groups being equal, needs to be re-evaluated. A lot of things have it as a hidden assumption. Here are a few examples:
Immigration. In order to make a proper analysis of what X number of migrants per year will do to the country, it’s not enough to assume that each potential migrant has the same cognitive capacity relative to both other migrants and to the natives. If migrants from ethnic group A have a higher IQ than ethnic group B, is it a good idea to let a lot of Bs into the country?
School performance. Though it has closed a little over the decades, the gap between Black and White achievement in schools remains persistent and large. All manner of interventions have been tried to try to close the gap. If it is due to a real genetic difference between the two groups, much of this may have been pointless. Given what we also know about the drawbacks of mixed-ability classrooms, segregation comes back on the table as a plausible candidate.
Fertility. In the US, the White total fertility rate is below replacement (1.84), while Blacks are just above (2.11). Hispanics are even higher, at 2.99. What implications does this have for the intellectual capital of the USA in the coming decades?
International competition. China does not have the same taboos on group differences in cognitive ability that the Western world does. They are also quite happy and capable to do immense social engineering programs. Putting the two together …
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The better way of course, is just to limit immigration to high-skilled workers, or with qualifications above a certain threshold. A lot of countries already do this. The only thing we’d need to change is our response to noticing that the ethnicities that tend to meet the requirements aren’t representative of those that apply.
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The incentive is there, but how much cheating would follow? Teenagers taking GCSE & A-level exams have incentives to cheat too, but the observed rate of exam malpractice is nonetheless very low, about 0.02%. No doubt some cheating isn’t caught, but even if all malpractice were cheating, and 99% of cheating went undetected, the cheat rate would be a scant 2%.
More generally, is the potential for cheating the true objection here? (It seems worth asking that rather than silently downvoting, troll toll be damned.) Unless cheating were really pervasive, raising the IQ threshold for entry could maintain the average IQ of immigrants granted entry.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping. They’re designed to be taken without any familiarity of the material or context. I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, but it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone. In contrast, GCSE/A-Level exams are designed knowing that students spend a great deal of effort studying and revising for them.
If an IQ test were developed that had the retest effect as a feature rather than a bug, I’d be more in favor of using them for immigrants.
Ah, I’d interpreted “cheating” to mean nefarious activity taking place during or after the test, not pre-test coaching or preparation.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping.
This much is true. But
I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone.
is probably false. There’re three reasons why I say that.
In the real world, IQ & IQ-like tests appear to work as usual, even when taken by thousands of people who can prep as much as they like. The US Armed Forces are content to test a million people a year with the ASVAB, despite the proliferation of ASVAB prepping resources. As another example, standardized tests like the GRE predict graduate students’ GPA, faculty ratings, and even the number of citations to their publications; this is all the more impressive considering the range restriction of ability among the prospective students taking the tests!
Logically, prep-induced score boosts don’t necessarily imply a drop in predictive validity. If people who started with high scores gained more from prepping than people who started with low scores, a test’s predictive validity could go up, because widening the gap between high- & low-scorers can improve the test’s ability to distinguish the two groups. And there are cases where high-scorers gainedmore from practising, although the effect on predictive validity as such doesn’t look like it was measured in those studies.
One can also look at how much practice reduces the g loading of IQ tests. It looks like the reduction in g loading is typically small. This review article gives various examples:
Neubauer and Freudenthaler (1994) showed that after 9 h of practice the g loading of a modestly complex intelligence test dropped from .46 to .39. Te Nijenhuis, Voskuijl, and Schijve (2001) showed that after various forms of test preparation the g loadedness of their test battery decreased from .53 to .49. [pages 284-285]
Using the combined experimental and control group, a principle axis factor analysis on the pretest and posttest scores, respectively, resulted in a first unrotated factor explaining 22% of the variance in the pretest scores and 18% of the variance in the posttest scores. [page 294]
That last result comes from a study of South African psychology students, mostly non-white, some of whom were randomly assigned to “mediated learning” training; all of them were tested twice with none other than Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices.
As my stats professor used to say “data costs money.”
For every IQ test you need to pay a psychologist trained in using that test to administer and score it. And since this is supposed to be scaled up for millions of people that means paying full-time trainers, scoring committees, not to mention buying large amounts of testing materials from whichever company winds up winning the bidding process.
Race is a weak measure but it also happens to be a very cheap one. Setting quotas based on race and providing exceptions by educational/professional merit would let in most of the high-IQ workers we want while preventing dysgenic and culturally destabilizing mass immigration.
(This ignores, of course, the massive numbers of illegal immigrants who would still be free to come in at will and stay as long as they care to. That is a serious issue as well, and one unlikely to be resolved by psychometric testing.)
For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.
By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies.
And how did you actually gain your view of what the current scientific consensus is? Remember, the popular media hasn’t managed to get its head around the fact that IQ even measures anything, when the scientific consensus says it does. If you only read what the New York Times says about IQ, you’d be much more likely to consider hypotheses that are empirically garbage, like Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. If the press can’t wrap its head around the validity of IQ, how can you even expect it to report faithfully on something that is both predicated on that fact, and ginormously controversial in its own right?
We know that IQ differences aren’t mostly nurture, and that has been quietly accepted by psychometricians for decades.
Also, I believe you’re starting with a false assumption about just how much power “rich white men” actually have in academia. The people that grant funding in these fields aren’t rich white businessmen, they’re mild-mannered scholars with tenure. Remember that this is at the cross-section between sociology and psychology, both of which tend to be populated by people with the cluster of political leanings variously called “leftist”, “liberal”, “progressive” or “socialist”, depending on who you ask. You must have read about the blank-slatist dogma of psychology that still persists in diminished form up to the present day.
(And FYI, the data suggests that rich white men are in 3rd place, behind East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, and there are probably other ethnic groups that outperform WASPs that we haven’t managed to get good data for yet, the Parsis of India for example.)
EDIT
I’m pleased that you recognize that we’re circling dangerously close to the Noncentral Fallacy when using the term “racist” in these kinds of discussions. It can lead to Denotation/Connotation confusions that just drag down the quality of debate. I appreciate the irony in asking, but it would make things go smoother if we taboo it.
I’ve only skimmed the Wikipedia article, but how about this?
I would rather be right; I can only hope that racism is wrong. If it were right, I (we?) would have to think long and hard about how precisely it is right, what the implications should be, and what I (we?) should do about it. Among others, there should be a debate on whether the general public should be trusted with this truth; what do you think they would do with it?
Assuming they would accept it, I can easily see the members of the groups branded as “better” looking down on the rest with condescendence and contempt, resentful feelings of entitlement from those of the “better” group that are “worse” than many members of the “worse” groups, and so on and so forth.
The Bell Curve suggests that intelligence (synergetically with wealth and power) is concentrating among an elite, a slowly-emerging “master race”, if you will. Let’s have a thought experiment, and assume this is true: should measures be taken against that?
The most obvious measure that comes to mind is to discourage making children among the “poor and stupid”, and encourage it among the “bright and rich”, so that eventually both wealth and intelligence even out from the top. However, it’s not very hard to imagine this measure being extremely unpopular, and not just because of pattern-matching with the Nazis and other previous eugenic movements.
It would also require lots of secondary adjustments (the poor and stupid would need an extra-large pension to compensate for the lack of children to support them in their old age, for example).
So, yeah, it’s no laughing matter, and most certainly not something to be treated lightly.
I’ve only skimmed the Wikipedia article, but how about this?
Try not skimming but reading. For example, to quote from your own link: “There was a long-standing 15 point or 1 SD difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans, though it might have narrowed slightly in the then recent years. The difference was largest on those tests, verbal or non-verbal, that best represented the general intelligence factor (g). Controlled studies of the way the tests were formulated and administered had shown that this did not contribute substantially to the difference. Attempts to devise tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind had been unsuccessful.”
I (we?) would have to think long and hard
It’s never too early to start thinking long and hard.
there should be a debate on whether the general public should be trusted with this truth
Oh, boy. And who would you like to place in charge of deciding what general public can be “trusted with” and what it cannot?
It’s a lot of stuff and I have a lot of work and a limited amount of energy which I would rather not spend debating something that I anticipate to be false. It can definitely be too early to think long and hard, but if you want to save time, you could unbury what the rulers and intellectuals of the eras in which racism was the paradigm, and analyze them from an ethical point of view. I’ll be waiting.
I dunno about the placing-in-charge part, but I would assume it would be “whoever finds out first”. Remember the matter with publicizing research on self-modifying AI? Remember when Einstein sent that one letter about a hypothetical city-flattening bomb? Why the concept of the Bayesian Conspiracy could seem like a remotely good idea? “What can be destroyed by the truth, should be” is a very nice motto as a self-discipline, but don’t be a stupid Principles Zealot about it. There are times when it is good and wise to shut up and keep the truth to yourself.
I would go even further and say that, if you want to discuss the implications of assuming racism is right, you would do well to do it in a place other than the public website of Lesswrong, if you care at all about not hindering MIRI and the the Future of Humanity Institute from saving humanity from being paperclip-maximized.
As you know, racism is extremely unpopular for reasons ranging from the blindingly simple (the “lesser” races these studies suggest would constitute the larger part of humanity, who aren’t keen on being categorized as, by and large, the stupider groups, for instance). to more convoluted causes, such as being associated with very monstrous assholes, who, from these assumptions, did monstrous things.
In the case of the USA, for instance, there was a concerted effort to breed an entire group of people into human cattle. In the case of Germany, there was an effort of extermination: the Nazi was a populist party, and Jews were assumed to be a “smarter and richer elite” (there is still talk today about Jewish people having inherently higher IQs). Now imagine what a populist movement would do with the widespread knowledge (assuming, of course, that it is true) that a racial minority is smarter and richer than the rest, and that they will keep getting smarter and richer than the rest, like a Real Life version of the pigs from Animal Farm. Do you think they would grudgingly accept this inevitable fate, or do you think they would go Khmer Rouge on the “smartasses”?
The Khmer Rouge enjoyed broad popular support of the poor, uneducated peasant masses of village Khmers, who were envious towards “those city guys”, which wasn’t helped by the fact that a lot of city-dwellers were ethnically Chinese, and were overrepresented in the rich classes. But soon it turned out that Khmer Rouge in general, and the dictator Pol Pot in particular, didn’t make any distinction between two populations. Their motto was “To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss,” and they cheerfully applied it to anyone. Pol Pot’s regime led to the death of around 2 million people [≈ population of Kosovo, nation] out of a population of 8 million. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million died as a whole.
Of course, in the same way that we could hope that our current “rich and bright” would be enlightened enough not to repeat the monstrosities of their racist predecessors, were they to become racist again, we could also hope that our current “poor and stupid” would not be stupid enough (it’s just fifteen miserly IQ points after all) to repeat some of their predecessors’ horrible acts. We could hope. Are you ready for the consequences, if your hopes are misplaced?
Remember when Einstein sent that one letter about a hypothetical city-flattening bomb?
You mean the Einstein–Szilárd letter? That was a rather unique situation, historically; the experiments laying the groundwork had been performed only a year previously, a world war was imminent, and enormous weapons potential was there to be taken by any government with the requisite technical and scientific resources. It’s also worth mentioning that the physics behind nuclear weapons is rather simple, undergraduate-level stuff by modern standards; the real challenge is in materials and engineering, which, far more than the basic theory, is what made getting a head start so important back in 1939.
I don’t have an informed opinion on the race-and-IQ issue, nor do I care to pursue one. But whatever the raw data says, it describes a condition that we’re already dealing with. There are plausible ways of placing some of the possible results on the spectrum of information hazards, but no direct way to turn them into megadeaths without a lot of unpredictable social intermediaries.
Sure. But it still seems to imply that I’m morally at fault for making the best hypothesis I could from what little data I had at the time. Confusing heuristics with willful prejudice muddles the discussion, puts people on the defensive, etc.
In fact, I’m brewing up a discussion post on that very topic, because I have seen the difference between an honest mistake based on imprefect heuristics, and a willful misinterpretation of the facts, being the source of much unnecessary conflict.
The difference between someone defending unconventional views for the sake of truth, and someone who uses the guise of the former to push an inhumane agenda, is also worth examining.
And another topic that has me baffled is the very existence of racists, sexists, and other such sorts. The sort that would say to women engineering students “it’s fine if you’ve come here because you wish to marry an engineer, it’s a good plan, but don’t ever expect to become engineers on your own; women shouldn’t become engineers” (this actually happened to one of my teachers). What motivates them? How do they think?
Moral fault isn’t the issue here. Accuracy is.
Sure, I make honest mistakes based on imperfect heuristics. That Blue over there? They engage in willful misinterpretations of the facts.
So first, it is noteworthy that Imm hasn’t said anything like that at all. But more to the point, if you can’t understand some group’s motivation, does that not cause you to doubt more whether a given individual is in that group?
As to sexism, there are a variety of different motivations. One motivation is thinking that intrinsically there are differences between men and women that matter in some context, and that those differences are so large that they cannot be overcome in the relevant context. That’s a factual question. In your example, you and I think they are factually wrong, but that’s a statement about the universe we live in. And there are conceivable universes where that isn’t the case. Second, there are motivations extending from values. These values can range from thinking that whatever is traditional should continue, to thinking that division of labor is a good thing, to simple cultural holdovers of earlier values that actually made sense at one point. That’s complicated by the common failure to distinguish carefully between terminal and goal-oriented values. But this has little to do with the actual issue at hand. that you are making claims about Imm’s values and beliefs that are not justified by the evidence.
One more—this is a theory which I think explains a lot, but I’m not sure I’m right.
There seems to be a fairly large proportion of heterosexual men who don’t like being around women, especially women who aren’t family members or potential sexual partners.
Have an evo-psych explanation, for what little that’s worth. If men improve their reproductive chances by succeeding in competition with other men, what good does it do them to double the number of potential competitors?
“Don’t like” or “are uncomfortable with”, mostly because they don’t know how to deal with them?
There are a number of possibilities. One of my male friends says (if I understand him correctly) that women are just distracting for men, and men would like some time off from being aroused under circumstances when they aren’t supposed to show it. I’m sure he’s accurate about himself, but he assumes he’s typical of men, and I’m not sure he’s right.
I’ve heard claims that groups of men behave differently if there’s 10% or more women present. (Sorry, no cite.) If women have even moderate amounts of status, they may have a civilizing effect, and men could find that tiresome. The civilizing effect would vary according to culture—it might be something like cursing is unwelcome, or at least must be apologized for. Or (specific example from the source I can’t remember), if there are women associated with a fraternity (?), the men quit doing things like having indoor beach parties with huge piles of sand.
Really, I don’t know, and there could be a number of reasons. It just seems like there’s a tendency which shows up in many cultures for men to want men-only space.
Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I’ve only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn’t risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
Ironically, I find myself attempting to convince you that my thinking was sound, even though you believe I arrived at the wrong conclusion. In the meantime, I anticipate that every post I add to this discussion will earn me some amount of negative karma. Perhaps I would have been better off biting the bullet and engaging him on those things?
Where?
I wasn’t talking about Imm’s post anymore. But I would argue that it is not worthy of note: we live in a society where racism is so discredited-but-not-extinct that even presenting empirical facts that might support it is taboo. Open normative statements such as the one I mentioned occurred often in back when one could comfortably be open and cruel in one’s sexism, because back then that was the norm, and women engineers, challenging it, came under fire.
Nowadays, racists and such are under a lot of pressure not to leave any evidence at all of their affiliation. As a result, the probability that someone showing weark evidence of belonging to that group actually belongs to that group increases, because you don’t expect to find strong evidence, and because you expect most people not to want to be associated with it that they’d go out of their way to show even weak evidence of it. Thus, what would otherwise be weak evidence becomes much stronger.
Just raising the possibility of somebody being part of a low-status group is often enough to damage their image in the eyes of others, and many conversational norms treat raising such a possibility as the same thing as an outright accusation—for good reason. (Bullies would love the freedom to go around implying bad things about people while facing no risk of censure.)
I’ve just paid five Karma to answer this: all I wanted was for Imm to understand where I came from when I dropped the discussion, and to show him that it is not an entirely irrational train of thought that would draw people away from discussing these topics with him. I failed to consider the fact that I was talking to him in public, and that what I was saying had implications on a level above that of the discussion. From what I’ve seen so far, I gather that I should have either ignored him outright without saying anything at all (perhaps it would have looked like I had forgotten the discussion altogether?) or continued via PM as soon as those topics were broached.
So in addition to Kaj’s point, I’m also curious what percentage that attitude triggers at. Is that a 5% chance, 10%? 55%, 99%? And more to the point, when you say racist, what do you mean by it? That’s a term that not only has a lot of connotative baggage, it also is a term that has a lot of different meanings.
Have you read the story of blues and greens?
I hadn’f thought you were referencing that. It might please you to know that I actually usually do not accuse other political colours of willfully misrepresenting facts, at least not initially.
I’ve met xenophobes who have simply never dealt with the objects of their contempt outside of the kind of menial work filled by the uneducated, or in the context of media portrayals that focus on crime and such, politicians who blame them for taking benefits or jobsm; spending a little time with me has made them question their beliefs, spending a lot of time has made them change them outright.
As for me, I used to be a sexist myself (of the “we’re different but not unequal; complimentary” type… ugh...), because of the memeplex that surrounded me, but, because of my irrepressible curiosity, I began finding out what the world looked like from the eyes of a woman : I am obviously not one anymore. I also used to be kind of a racist: the first time I saw a black kid, I hid inside my car. And I used to remain instinctually scared of the darker-skinned type, because my entire exposure to them was in media, as criminals and delinquents (muthafucka!) until I actually spent some time with some, in a context of equality. And I was raised anti-semitic, of the conspiracy-theorist sort, but then I met and befriended several jewish persons, and updated my views according to the immediate, personal evidence.
By the way, thank you for making me specify the definition of racism, because now I can finally relax. According to Wikipedia
If Imm believes that the results of these unspeakable studies (namely, “some races are, by and large, stupider than others, and some are more crime-prone”) are correct, he is a racist. If his beliefs happen to be correct, he is a racist who is right, but none the less a racist. And if, from there, he believes that the smarter, more law-abiding races should be granted a disproportionate amount of power over the others, that makes him a racial supremacist.
And, you know what? I hadn’t thought of that before, Joshua. It’s your asking me to define “racist” that made me go and check, and report my findings. Before your intervention, I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Imm a racist, being too afraid of inaccurately placing thim in a bad group. Now I can call him that without feeling uncomfortable at all. Nice job breaking it, hero.
EDIT: Just to be extra-precise, that he’s a racist doesn’t make him a Klanner burning crosses, or a skinhead beating up black people at night, no more than Martin Luther King being a criminal (he broke the law, he went to jail) makes him a burglar in the night threatening families with a gun. That would be fallacious reasoning. Moreover, if he is right, we would all have to become racists, as we all wish to believe that which is true.
However, I do not think we need to fear too much. Racism has been scientifically discredited; I don’t know why it was discredited, but I would bet that it wasn’t just ideological egalitarianism that brought this outcome about, and that there is some solid empirical basis for this change in paradigm.
How did you come to this conclusion?
By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies. Besides that, my guess is that people who had a vested interest in the maintenance of a racist, sexist, etc. worldview (namely, rich white men) had more wealth and power at their disposal than those who had the opposite vested interest, which means they have some influence over funding and publication, publicity, acclaim and awarding, etc. If racism were provably right beyond reasonable doubt, I assume they would have made damn sure everyone knew it. If the alternative hypothesis has prevailed in spite of these odds, I would assume that it had a very strong appearance of being provably less wrong.
Of course, if white-rich-men funded and influenced research concluded that these rich white dudes were not the smartest bunch overall, and, say, arab women were instead, and that this racist view prevailed and became the scientific consensus against these controlling interests’ … interests, I would assume it to be true.
In short, if most scientists agree on a paradigm in spite of the fact that it’s inconvenient to those scientis’ bosses, I believe that that paradigm is more likely to be true.
This is of course assuming that the studies are done rigorously and faithfully, with good experiment design, good analysis of the statistic, intelligent and pertinent drawing of conclusions, etc etc.; that scientists aren’t being stupid and aren’t screwing with the results. As someone who used to believe what he’d read in Talent Is Overrated, and whose views on nutrition and the science thereof have been badly unsettled by Good Calories, Bad Calories, I can guarantee that I for one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without help.
Why don’t you, um, educate yourself a bit?
IQ studies do show that rich white dudes are not the smartest bunch overall.
Who are, then, the smartest bunch overall?
Ashkenazi Jews are something like slightly less than one standard deviation above whites, so in the 110-115 range. East Asians (Han Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc) score a little higher, about 103-106. The size of the standard deviations within groups also varies between groups.
Also if you look into the sub-factors that g measures, you’ll find variation. Some groups have higher Verbal than Visuospatial for example, though I don’t remember which ones have which at the moment.
Thank you. Those are some interesting results. Due to my limited capacity to compile and properly evaluate research (call it laziness), I’ll just take your word for it and accept them.
So, if I understand you right, some demographics are proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have a higher IQ than others, by and large and with some idiosyncrasies in distribution and aspects. Said IQ actuallhy reliably measures something, and that something is well-defined and resembles what is commonly thought of as “intelligence”. Okay. Well, what now?
To clarify, that bit is clear, but one should understand that the evidence that that correlation is genetic is much weaker. There are a lot of other possible explanations, including early childhood education, cultural correlates at a young age, nutrition levels, parasite load, stereotype threat, and everything else sometimes put under a catchall of socioeconomic factors. Ashenazi Jews for example are one of the best performing groups, but there are some massive confounding factors since there’s a heavily intellectual culture that emphasizes learning.
Thank you for clarifying that.
It means that any political argument, any social policy, any philosophy, predicated on the cognitive abilities of groups being equal, needs to be re-evaluated. A lot of things have it as a hidden assumption. Here are a few examples:
Immigration. In order to make a proper analysis of what X number of migrants per year will do to the country, it’s not enough to assume that each potential migrant has the same cognitive capacity relative to both other migrants and to the natives. If migrants from ethnic group A have a higher IQ than ethnic group B, is it a good idea to let a lot of Bs into the country?
School performance. Though it has closed a little over the decades, the gap between Black and White achievement in schools remains persistent and large. All manner of interventions have been tried to try to close the gap. If it is due to a real genetic difference between the two groups, much of this may have been pointless. Given what we also know about the drawbacks of mixed-ability classrooms, segregation comes back on the table as a plausible candidate.
Fertility. In the US, the White total fertility rate is below replacement (1.84), while Blacks are just above (2.11). Hispanics are even higher, at 2.99. What implications does this have for the intellectual capital of the USA in the coming decades?
International competition. China does not have the same taboos on group differences in cognitive ability that the Western world does. They are also quite happy and capable to do immense social engineering programs. Putting the two together …
It is much more effective to give individuals IQ tests rather than try to divine the results based on weakly correlated features such as ethnic group.
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The better way of course, is just to limit immigration to high-skilled workers, or with qualifications above a certain threshold. A lot of countries already do this. The only thing we’d need to change is our response to noticing that the ethnicities that tend to meet the requirements aren’t representative of those that apply.
The incentive is there, but how much cheating would follow? Teenagers taking GCSE & A-level exams have incentives to cheat too, but the observed rate of exam malpractice is nonetheless very low, about 0.02%. No doubt some cheating isn’t caught, but even if all malpractice were cheating, and 99% of cheating went undetected, the cheat rate would be a scant 2%.
More generally, is the potential for cheating the true objection here? (It seems worth asking that rather than silently downvoting, troll toll be damned.) Unless cheating were really pervasive, raising the IQ threshold for entry could maintain the average IQ of immigrants granted entry.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping. They’re designed to be taken without any familiarity of the material or context. I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, but it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone. In contrast, GCSE/A-Level exams are designed knowing that students spend a great deal of effort studying and revising for them.
If an IQ test were developed that had the retest effect as a feature rather than a bug, I’d be more in favor of using them for immigrants.
Ah, I’d interpreted “cheating” to mean nefarious activity taking place during or after the test, not pre-test coaching or preparation.
This much is true. But
is probably false. There’re three reasons why I say that.
In the real world, IQ & IQ-like tests appear to work as usual, even when taken by thousands of people who can prep as much as they like. The US Armed Forces are content to test a million people a year with the ASVAB, despite the proliferation of ASVAB prepping resources. As another example, standardized tests like the GRE predict graduate students’ GPA, faculty ratings, and even the number of citations to their publications; this is all the more impressive considering the range restriction of ability among the prospective students taking the tests!
Logically, prep-induced score boosts don’t necessarily imply a drop in predictive validity. If people who started with high scores gained more from prepping than people who started with low scores, a test’s predictive validity could go up, because widening the gap between high- & low-scorers can improve the test’s ability to distinguish the two groups. And there are cases where high-scorers gained more from practising, although the effect on predictive validity as such doesn’t look like it was measured in those studies.
One can also look at how much practice reduces the g loading of IQ tests. It looks like the reduction in g loading is typically small. This review article gives various examples:
That last result comes from a study of South African psychology students, mostly non-white, some of whom were randomly assigned to “mediated learning” training; all of them were tested twice with none other than Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices.
I stand corrected, thanks for the links!
As my stats professor used to say “data costs money.”
For every IQ test you need to pay a psychologist trained in using that test to administer and score it. And since this is supposed to be scaled up for millions of people that means paying full-time trainers, scoring committees, not to mention buying large amounts of testing materials from whichever company winds up winning the bidding process.
Race is a weak measure but it also happens to be a very cheap one. Setting quotas based on race and providing exceptions by educational/professional merit would let in most of the high-IQ workers we want while preventing dysgenic and culturally destabilizing mass immigration.
(This ignores, of course, the massive numbers of illegal immigrants who would still be free to come in at will and stay as long as they care to. That is a serious issue as well, and one unlikely to be resolved by psychometric testing.)
For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.
Please ignore my many typos; my computer is riddled with viruses and my smartphone appears to be possessed by some sort of evil text-eating demon.
103-106 is higher than 110-115?
Yeah I worded that poorly. I meant slightly higher in relation to whites, not jews.
East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews (and possibly Indian Parsis) routinely achieve higher scores on IQ tests than do Europeans.
I see you didn’t like my suggestion...
What suggestion?
The suggestion in the post to which you were replying.
Make your suggestion explicit, because I can’t tell what it is.
Sure, I’ll quote myself:
“Why don’t you, um, educate yourself a bit?”
Note, particularly, that this suggestion implies the necessity of some effort on your part—maybe, I don’t know, even googling up something...
Downvoted for rudeness.
And how did you actually gain your view of what the current scientific consensus is? Remember, the popular media hasn’t managed to get its head around the fact that IQ even measures anything, when the scientific consensus says it does. If you only read what the New York Times says about IQ, you’d be much more likely to consider hypotheses that are empirically garbage, like Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. If the press can’t wrap its head around the validity of IQ, how can you even expect it to report faithfully on something that is both predicated on that fact, and ginormously controversial in its own right?
We know that IQ differences aren’t mostly nurture, and that has been quietly accepted by psychometricians for decades.
Also, I believe you’re starting with a false assumption about just how much power “rich white men” actually have in academia. The people that grant funding in these fields aren’t rich white businessmen, they’re mild-mannered scholars with tenure. Remember that this is at the cross-section between sociology and psychology, both of which tend to be populated by people with the cluster of political leanings variously called “leftist”, “liberal”, “progressive” or “socialist”, depending on who you ask. You must have read about the blank-slatist dogma of psychology that still persists in diminished form up to the present day.
(And FYI, the data suggests that rich white men are in 3rd place, behind East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, and there are probably other ethnic groups that outperform WASPs that we haven’t managed to get good data for yet, the Parsis of India for example.)
EDIT
I’m pleased that you recognize that we’re circling dangerously close to the Noncentral Fallacy when using the term “racist” in these kinds of discussions. It can lead to Denotation/Connotation confusions that just drag down the quality of debate. I appreciate the irony in asking, but it would make things go smoother if we taboo it.
An interesting approach. So, would you rather be right or be a non-racist?
Can you link to some generally accepted studies which show that IQ does NOT differ between large population groups?
I’ve only skimmed the Wikipedia article, but how about this?
I would rather be right; I can only hope that racism is wrong. If it were right, I (we?) would have to think long and hard about how precisely it is right, what the implications should be, and what I (we?) should do about it. Among others, there should be a debate on whether the general public should be trusted with this truth; what do you think they would do with it?
Assuming they would accept it, I can easily see the members of the groups branded as “better” looking down on the rest with condescendence and contempt, resentful feelings of entitlement from those of the “better” group that are “worse” than many members of the “worse” groups, and so on and so forth.
The Bell Curve suggests that intelligence (synergetically with wealth and power) is concentrating among an elite, a slowly-emerging “master race”, if you will. Let’s have a thought experiment, and assume this is true: should measures be taken against that?
The most obvious measure that comes to mind is to discourage making children among the “poor and stupid”, and encourage it among the “bright and rich”, so that eventually both wealth and intelligence even out from the top. However, it’s not very hard to imagine this measure being extremely unpopular, and not just because of pattern-matching with the Nazis and other previous eugenic movements.
It would also require lots of secondary adjustments (the poor and stupid would need an extra-large pension to compensate for the lack of children to support them in their old age, for example).
So, yeah, it’s no laughing matter, and most certainly not something to be treated lightly.
Try not skimming but reading. For example, to quote from your own link: “There was a long-standing 15 point or 1 SD difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans, though it might have narrowed slightly in the then recent years. The difference was largest on those tests, verbal or non-verbal, that best represented the general intelligence factor (g). Controlled studies of the way the tests were formulated and administered had shown that this did not contribute substantially to the difference. Attempts to devise tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind had been unsuccessful.”
It’s never too early to start thinking long and hard.
Oh, boy. And who would you like to place in charge of deciding what general public can be “trusted with” and what it cannot?
It’s a lot of stuff and I have a lot of work and a limited amount of energy which I would rather not spend debating something that I anticipate to be false. It can definitely be too early to think long and hard, but if you want to save time, you could unbury what the rulers and intellectuals of the eras in which racism was the paradigm, and analyze them from an ethical point of view. I’ll be waiting.
I dunno about the placing-in-charge part, but I would assume it would be “whoever finds out first”. Remember the matter with publicizing research on self-modifying AI? Remember when Einstein sent that one letter about a hypothetical city-flattening bomb? Why the concept of the Bayesian Conspiracy could seem like a remotely good idea? “What can be destroyed by the truth, should be” is a very nice motto as a self-discipline, but don’t be a stupid Principles Zealot about it. There are times when it is good and wise to shut up and keep the truth to yourself.
I would go even further and say that, if you want to discuss the implications of assuming racism is right, you would do well to do it in a place other than the public website of Lesswrong, if you care at all about not hindering MIRI and the the Future of Humanity Institute from saving humanity from being paperclip-maximized.
As you know, racism is extremely unpopular for reasons ranging from the blindingly simple (the “lesser” races these studies suggest would constitute the larger part of humanity, who aren’t keen on being categorized as, by and large, the stupider groups, for instance). to more convoluted causes, such as being associated with very monstrous assholes, who, from these assumptions, did monstrous things.
In the case of the USA, for instance, there was a concerted effort to breed an entire group of people into human cattle. In the case of Germany, there was an effort of extermination: the Nazi was a populist party, and Jews were assumed to be a “smarter and richer elite” (there is still talk today about Jewish people having inherently higher IQs). Now imagine what a populist movement would do with the widespread knowledge (assuming, of course, that it is true) that a racial minority is smarter and richer than the rest, and that they will keep getting smarter and richer than the rest, like a Real Life version of the pigs from Animal Farm. Do you think they would grudgingly accept this inevitable fate, or do you think they would go Khmer Rouge on the “smartasses”?
The Khmer Rouge enjoyed broad popular support of the poor, uneducated peasant masses of village Khmers, who were envious towards “those city guys”, which wasn’t helped by the fact that a lot of city-dwellers were ethnically Chinese, and were overrepresented in the rich classes. But soon it turned out that Khmer Rouge in general, and the dictator Pol Pot in particular, didn’t make any distinction between two populations. Their motto was “To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss,” and they cheerfully applied it to anyone. Pol Pot’s regime led to the death of around 2 million people [≈ population of Kosovo, nation] out of a population of 8 million. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million died as a whole.
Of course, in the same way that we could hope that our current “rich and bright” would be enlightened enough not to repeat the monstrosities of their racist predecessors, were they to become racist again, we could also hope that our current “poor and stupid” would not be stupid enough (it’s just fifteen miserly IQ points after all) to repeat some of their predecessors’ horrible acts. We could hope. Are you ready for the consequences, if your hopes are misplaced?
You mean the Einstein–Szilárd letter? That was a rather unique situation, historically; the experiments laying the groundwork had been performed only a year previously, a world war was imminent, and enormous weapons potential was there to be taken by any government with the requisite technical and scientific resources. It’s also worth mentioning that the physics behind nuclear weapons is rather simple, undergraduate-level stuff by modern standards; the real challenge is in materials and engineering, which, far more than the basic theory, is what made getting a head start so important back in 1939.
I don’t have an informed opinion on the race-and-IQ issue, nor do I care to pursue one. But whatever the raw data says, it describes a condition that we’re already dealing with. There are plausible ways of placing some of the possible results on the spectrum of information hazards, but no direct way to turn them into megadeaths without a lot of unpredictable social intermediaries.
Here’s an upvote and a sincere thanks for your moderating and thoughtful intervention.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the above text as my exhibit A to be used for defining the word “mindkilled”.
How so?
You are explicitly refusing to update on the evidence citing some irrelevant emotional scare-mongering.