Let me try to summarise the obvious parts of the situation as I understand it. I contend that:
(A) There are some measureable differences between ethnicities that are most plausibly attributed to biological differences. (There are some famous examples, such as greater susceptibility of some people to skin cancer, or sickle cell anemia. I assume there are smaller differences elsewhere. If anyone seriously disagrees, say so.)
(B) These are massively dwarfed by the correlation of ethnicity with cultural differences in almost all cases.
(C) There is a social taboo against admitting (A)
(D) There is a large correlation between ethnicity and various cultural factors, and between cultural factors.
(E) It is sometimes possible to draw probabalistic inferences based on (D). Eg. With no other information, you may guess that someone on the street in London is more likely to be a British citizen if they are Indian than East Asian (or vice versa, whichever is true).
(F) The human brain deals very badly with probabalistic inferences. If you guess someone’s culture based on their ethnicity or dress, you are likely to maintain that view as long as possible even in the face of new information, until you suddenly flip to the opposite view. Because of this, there is (rightly IMHO) a social taboo against doing (E) even when it might make sense.
(G) People who are and/or think they are good at drawing logicial inferences a la (E) but don’t have as much personal experience fo the pitfalls described in (F) are likely to resent the social taboo described in (F) because it seems fussy and nonsensical to them. I am somewhat prone to this error (not so much with race, but with other things)
(H) The word “racist” is horrendously undefined. It is used both to mean “someone or something which treats people differently based on ‘race’, rightly or wrongly” (including examples where treating people differently is the only possible thing to do, such as preventative advice for medical conditions, or advice on how to avoid bad racism from other people) and to mean “someone or something which is morally wrong to discriminate based on race.” Thus a description of whether something is “racist” is typically counterproductive.
I admit I only skimmed the OP’s transcript, but my impression is that he fairly describes why he is frustrated that it is difficult to talk about these issues, but I am extremely leery of a lot of the examples he uses.
I was going to write more, but am not sure how to push it. How am I doing so far...? :)
I think your summary is fine, but I’d add this: almost everyone who thinks in terms of “differences between races” massively overestimates the effect of race (alone, social class does matter a lot), to the point that pretending there is no difference is probably a better idea. (Similar to how it’s better to not designate a ‘current best candidate’, if you’re human.)
Yes, I’d agree. (I meant to include that in (B)). I mean, in fact, I’d say that “there are no biological differences between races other than appearance” is basically accurate, apart from a few medical things, without any need for tiptoeing around human biases. Even if the differences were a bit larger (as with gender, or even larger than that), I agree with your last parenthesis that it would probably still be a good idea to (usually) _act_as if there weren’t any.
From context, it seems “race realism” refers to the idea that there are legitimate differences between races, is that correct? However, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to refer to biological differences specifically, or any cultural differences? And it seems to be heavily loaded with connotations which I’m unaware of, that I would be hesitant to say it was “true” or “not true” even if I knew the answer to the questions in the two first sentences.
Seems like a pretty good summary. With more detail and possibly some experimental results there might be a good Less Wrong post in there—about the dangers of thinking about race if you’re a human.
Because of this, there is (rightly IMHO) a social taboo against doing (E) even when it might make sense.
Yep, I also think that the mainstream position on this is largely better than the more naive approach, whether you call it “race realism” or something else. It relies on denial, doublethink and hypocrisy, but none of these are really horrible in themselves—not compared to the things once done under the banner of “racial realism” (slavery, genocide, mistreatment, etc). Now, I understand the HBD advocates’ frustration; it might indeed be possible to build a better-working and more honest system—but I fear that most of them don’t even understand how much caution they need to exercise!
However, I upvoted the transcript of Aurini’s talk the moment I read it, as this is unusually good for that contrarian crowd; he displays some much-needed sympathy, courtesy and sorrow at the whole human tragedy.
True, nevertheless in this case you still have a problem. In order to maintain the lie that race realism is false, (I don’t know to what extent it’s actually true but the point is that you don’t either) you at the least have to explain away the disproportionate contribution of certain races to crime and the disproportionate presence of other races in technical fields.
The first requires either a never-ending-quest to find ever subtler forms of racism on the part of police and victims to explain this away as a product of a biased justice system, or finding ever subtler forms of racism on the part of society that is the “root cause” of these crimes. Alternatively, this requires you to lie about the crime statistics or not report them by race which makes it impossible to do accurate criminology (since at least all other studies will have a confounding variable that can’t be controlled for without raising awkward questions).
The second requires a similar never-ending-quest to find ever subtler forms of racism on the part academics that effect their hiring decisions, and ever subtler forms of racism on the part of educators that cause them to assign certain groups lower grades. Alternatively, insist that grades and hiring be normalized by race, and hope no one notices that members of certain races are incompetent compared to their peers or asks awkward questions about why this renormalization is necessary.
In fact, all of the above and more has been happening over the last 40 years.
And this is all before you start studying human genetics.
I imagine that depends a lot on to what extent one values truth, given that whatever X I value divides the world into righteous Xes and evil non-Xes. But I would agree that it’s really unlikely that any humans value truth to the exclusion of everything else, though I’ve met some who claim to.
Is the same level of caution necessary now that those historical atrocities are available as well-documented examples, and now that a wide range of ethnicities have political organizations willing and able to pursue their interests, as would have been necessary to prevent such things from happening in the first place?
Let me try to summarise the obvious parts of the situation as I understand it. I contend that:
(A) There are some measureable differences between ethnicities that are most plausibly attributed to biological differences. (There are some famous examples, such as greater susceptibility of some people to skin cancer, or sickle cell anemia. I assume there are smaller differences elsewhere. If anyone seriously disagrees, say so.)
(B) These are massively dwarfed by the correlation of ethnicity with cultural differences in almost all cases.
(C) There is a social taboo against admitting (A)
(D) There is a large correlation between ethnicity and various cultural factors, and between cultural factors.
(E) It is sometimes possible to draw probabalistic inferences based on (D). Eg. With no other information, you may guess that someone on the street in London is more likely to be a British citizen if they are Indian than East Asian (or vice versa, whichever is true).
(F) The human brain deals very badly with probabalistic inferences. If you guess someone’s culture based on their ethnicity or dress, you are likely to maintain that view as long as possible even in the face of new information, until you suddenly flip to the opposite view. Because of this, there is (rightly IMHO) a social taboo against doing (E) even when it might make sense.
(G) People who are and/or think they are good at drawing logicial inferences a la (E) but don’t have as much personal experience fo the pitfalls described in (F) are likely to resent the social taboo described in (F) because it seems fussy and nonsensical to them. I am somewhat prone to this error (not so much with race, but with other things)
(H) The word “racist” is horrendously undefined. It is used both to mean “someone or something which treats people differently based on ‘race’, rightly or wrongly” (including examples where treating people differently is the only possible thing to do, such as preventative advice for medical conditions, or advice on how to avoid bad racism from other people) and to mean “someone or something which is morally wrong to discriminate based on race.” Thus a description of whether something is “racist” is typically counterproductive.
I admit I only skimmed the OP’s transcript, but my impression is that he fairly describes why he is frustrated that it is difficult to talk about these issues, but I am extremely leery of a lot of the examples he uses.
I was going to write more, but am not sure how to push it. How am I doing so far...? :)
I think your summary is fine, but I’d add this: almost everyone who thinks in terms of “differences between races” massively overestimates the effect of race (alone, social class does matter a lot), to the point that pretending there is no difference is probably a better idea. (Similar to how it’s better to not designate a ‘current best candidate’, if you’re human.)
Yes, I’d agree. (I meant to include that in (B)). I mean, in fact, I’d say that “there are no biological differences between races other than appearance” is basically accurate, apart from a few medical things, without any need for tiptoeing around human biases. Even if the differences were a bit larger (as with gender, or even larger than that), I agree with your last parenthesis that it would probably still be a good idea to (usually) _act_as if there weren’t any.
From context, it seems “race realism” refers to the idea that there are legitimate differences between races, is that correct? However, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to refer to biological differences specifically, or any cultural differences? And it seems to be heavily loaded with connotations which I’m unaware of, that I would be hesitant to say it was “true” or “not true” even if I knew the answer to the questions in the two first sentences.
Given the existence of taboo (C) how can you possibly have enough evidence to be as sure of (B) as you are?
Seems like a pretty good summary. With more detail and possibly some experimental results there might be a good Less Wrong post in there—about the dangers of thinking about race if you’re a human.
Yep, I also think that the mainstream position on this is largely better than the more naive approach, whether you call it “race realism” or something else. It relies on denial, doublethink and hypocrisy, but none of these are really horrible in themselves—not compared to the things once done under the banner of “racial realism” (slavery, genocide, mistreatment, etc). Now, I understand the HBD advocates’ frustration; it might indeed be possible to build a better-working and more honest system—but I fear that most of them don’t even understand how much caution they need to exercise!
However, I upvoted the transcript of Aurini’s talk the moment I read it, as this is unusually good for that contrarian crowd; he displays some much-needed sympathy, courtesy and sorrow at the whole human tragedy.
The problem with “denial, doublethink and hypocrisy” is that once you commit to them all truth is ever after your enemy.
Frankly, this is the same argument theists use when they say that without God morality can’t exist.
That’s rash. The human world cannot be so black and white, divided neatly into righteous truths and evil lies.
True, nevertheless in this case you still have a problem. In order to maintain the lie that race realism is false, (I don’t know to what extent it’s actually true but the point is that you don’t either) you at the least have to explain away the disproportionate contribution of certain races to crime and the disproportionate presence of other races in technical fields.
The first requires either a never-ending-quest to find ever subtler forms of racism on the part of police and victims to explain this away as a product of a biased justice system, or finding ever subtler forms of racism on the part of society that is the “root cause” of these crimes. Alternatively, this requires you to lie about the crime statistics or not report them by race which makes it impossible to do accurate criminology (since at least all other studies will have a confounding variable that can’t be controlled for without raising awkward questions).
The second requires a similar never-ending-quest to find ever subtler forms of racism on the part academics that effect their hiring decisions, and ever subtler forms of racism on the part of educators that cause them to assign certain groups lower grades. Alternatively, insist that grades and hiring be normalized by race, and hope no one notices that members of certain races are incompetent compared to their peers or asks awkward questions about why this renormalization is necessary.
In fact, all of the above and more has been happening over the last 40 years.
And this is all before you start studying human genetics.
Race correlates with poverty correlates with crime. Next.
I imagine that depends a lot on to what extent one values truth, given that whatever X I value divides the world into righteous Xes and evil non-Xes. But I would agree that it’s really unlikely that any humans value truth to the exclusion of everything else, though I’ve met some who claim to.
Is the same level of caution necessary now that those historical atrocities are available as well-documented examples, and now that a wide range of ethnicities have political organizations willing and able to pursue their interests, as would have been necessary to prevent such things from happening in the first place?