OK, I read the transcript. Conclusion: Whether or not “race realism” is racist (my opinion, FWIW: no, it needn’t be, and some version of it might well be right), Aurini sounds very racist indeed; and since Aurini is an LW regular doing his best to present “race realism” impartially for an LWish audience, my estimate of the credibility of “race realism” just went down.
Of course “X sounds racist” isn’t much of an argument. Allow me to pick out a few things that seem to me to point that way. (Generally because they seem to me unreasonable in ways best explained by underlying racist attitude.) Quotes like this ”...” are actual quotations from Aurini; ones like this ‘...’ are quotations from others; ones like this <<...>> are paraphrases.
(1) Going straight from <> to “it does make sense to avoid events where there’s going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety”. (No, not without much finer-grained information about that difference in crime rates, it doesn’t.) Also, btw, “The Color of Crime” is not “done by the FBI”; it’s put out by an organization called the New Century Foundation. Readers may consult Google and make up their own minds about the impartiality and trustworthiness of that organization; I’ll say only that learning that Aurini’s numbers came from them greatly reduced my confidence in their correctness and relevance (though I believe it’s a very robust finding that in the US black people commit a lot more violent crime than white people).
(2) That 2.1 million dollars thing: there’s something super-fishy about this. Suppose you have two groups of people and you spent a lot of money trying to improve one group’s educational outcomes. This might work or it might not, but why would you expect whether there’s a genetic difference in their intelligence to have much to do with whether it works? Unless the less successful group are, literally, completely ineducable, it seems like pouring money into helping them do better ought to do something either way. So if there’s a big effort and no effect, for sure it’s interesting, but on the face of it it says nothing about the origins of whatever differences there were. (Also: On looking up the Cato Institute page, the figures seem very different from $2.1 million (perhaps it was $2.1 billion?) -- which is just as well, because $2M over 12 years isn’t actually all that much—and it seems like the city’s black students were not actually terribly well served by the initiative: ‘the district had discovered that it was easier to meet the court’s 60⁄40 integration ratio by letting black students drop out’; ‘Although the plan was ostensibly designed to benefit black inner-city students, in practice it required spending hundreds of mlilions [...] while neglecting the needs of inner-city blacks for health care, counseling, and basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.’ So this really doesn’t seem like good evidence about “race realism” or “human biodiversity”. And as for the description of it as “a social experiment that should never have been performed in the first place”—why not? Because everyone should have known it’s a waste of money to spend money trying to help black people because they’re Inferior, or what?
(3) “And so if blacks are underachieving [...] and if they are more likely to go to prison [...] we need to actually to come up with a theory of mind, a theory of evolution that explains these differences between the races.” That’s quite a leap you’ve made there.
(4) “so long as these popular grievers are out there, messing with government and stealing public money”—stealing? Srsly?
(5) “the attack on white culture, the attack on civilized culture”.
(6) “And most whites have experienced something where they were subtly threatened or just plain insulted by a group of blacks. And so this does arouse the passions, and in some cases it goes so far as hatred.”—Guess what? Most black people have been “subtly threatened or just plain insulted” by white people, too. It takes quite a remarkable level of obliviousness to play the Poor Beleaguered Threatened White People card here.
(7) “imagine you’re a black doctor. [...] if I see that you have black skin, I am going to assume on default that you got the job through affirmative action, that you’re nothing but a token”—if you are really going to assume that, just because you see someone with black skin, then I am sorry but you are a total idiot and you don’t get to blame the regrettable consequences on anything but your own idiocy and that of others similarly afflicted.
So, even without the extraordinary viciousness of Aurini’s responses to the mildest criticisms (and in some cases to actually being agreed with) in comments here, my personal estimate of Pr(Aurini’s views on race are at least partly the result of racism) is quite high.
OK, I read the transcript. Conclusion: Whether or not “race realism” is racist (my opinion, FWIW: no, it needn’t be, and some version of it might well be right), Aurini sounds very racist indeed; and since Aurini is an LW regular doing his best to present “race realism” impartially for an LWish audience, my estimate of the credibility of “race realism” just went down.
Of course “X sounds racist” isn’t much of an argument. Allow me to pick out a few things that seem to me to point that way. (Generally because they seem to me unreasonable in ways best explained by underlying racist attitude.) Quotes like this ”...” are actual quotations from Aurini; ones like this ‘...’ are quotations from others; ones like this <<...>> are paraphrases.
(1) Going straight from <> to “it does make sense to avoid events where there’s going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety”. (No, not without much finer-grained information about that difference in crime rates, it doesn’t.) Also, btw, “The Color of Crime” is not “done by the FBI”; it’s put out by an organization called the New Century Foundation. Readers may consult Google and make up their own minds about the impartiality and trustworthiness of that organization; I’ll say only that learning that Aurini’s numbers came from them greatly reduced my confidence in their correctness and relevance (though I believe it’s a very robust finding that in the US black people commit a lot more violent crime than white people).
(2) That 2.1 million dollars thing: there’s something super-fishy about this. Suppose you have two groups of people and you spent a lot of money trying to improve one group’s educational outcomes. This might work or it might not, but why would you expect whether there’s a genetic difference in their intelligence to have much to do with whether it works? Unless the less successful group are, literally, completely ineducable, it seems like pouring money into helping them do better ought to do something either way. So if there’s a big effort and no effect, for sure it’s interesting, but on the face of it it says nothing about the origins of whatever differences there were. (Also: On looking up the Cato Institute page, the figures seem very different from $2.1 million (perhaps it was $2.1 billion?) -- which is just as well, because $2M over 12 years isn’t actually all that much—and it seems like the city’s black students were not actually terribly well served by the initiative: ‘the district had discovered that it was easier to meet the court’s 60⁄40 integration ratio by letting black students drop out’; ‘Although the plan was ostensibly designed to benefit black inner-city students, in practice it required spending hundreds of mlilions [...] while neglecting the needs of inner-city blacks for health care, counseling, and basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.’ So this really doesn’t seem like good evidence about “race realism” or “human biodiversity”. And as for the description of it as “a social experiment that should never have been performed in the first place”—why not? Because everyone should have known it’s a waste of money to spend money trying to help black people because they’re Inferior, or what?
(3) “And so if blacks are underachieving [...] and if they are more likely to go to prison [...] we need to actually to come up with a theory of mind, a theory of evolution that explains these differences between the races.” That’s quite a leap you’ve made there.
(4) “so long as these popular grievers are out there, messing with government and stealing public money”—stealing? Srsly?
(5) “the attack on white culture, the attack on civilized culture”.
(6) “And most whites have experienced something where they were subtly threatened or just plain insulted by a group of blacks. And so this does arouse the passions, and in some cases it goes so far as hatred.”—Guess what? Most black people have been “subtly threatened or just plain insulted” by white people, too. It takes quite a remarkable level of obliviousness to play the Poor Beleaguered Threatened White People card here.
(7) “imagine you’re a black doctor. [...] if I see that you have black skin, I am going to assume on default that you got the job through affirmative action, that you’re nothing but a token”—if you are really going to assume that, just because you see someone with black skin, then I am sorry but you are a total idiot and you don’t get to blame the regrettable consequences on anything but your own idiocy and that of others similarly afflicted.
So, even without the extraordinary viciousness of Aurini’s responses to the mildest criticisms (and in some cases to actually being agreed with) in comments here, my personal estimate of Pr(Aurini’s views on race are at least partly the result of racism) is quite high.