You are claiming that low intelligence and violent tendencies are racial characteristics, which is generally considered racist nonsense by, well, non-racists.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
I hope that question doesn’t come off as too offensive, and it may turn out that you are genuinely more interested in being non-racist than correct. Given the treatment of prominent biologists for stating truths, one whose livelihood depends on public opinion and who isn’t an expert in biology might decide that adopting the dogma of the times is the wisest move.
But supposing that you are actually curious- that you are seriously attempting to determine the quantitative effect that race has on crime or intelligence or so on- what makes “0” such a special number? Sure, it’s the null hypothesis, but the null hypothesis for the effect of class on violence or intelligence is also 0. Why reject one out of hand, and not the other? Notice that we don’t have non-classists breathing down our necks to ensure we don’t point out that the poor are disproportionately represented in the jails.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.
Let me note that what is correlated with badness may be more the fact of speaking racist beliefs, not of ‘having them’—the latter is hard to collect info about, absent mind-reading technology.
It seems extremely likely that there’s a correlation between having racist beliefs and speaking them. In particular, the more extreme one’s racist beliefs are, the more likely that one will a) consider racist beliefs acceptable to say (some combination of illusion of transparency and typical mind fallacy) and b) will consider more moderate racial claims as less controversial in comparison.
True, though in general I don’t think we have much trouble discovering the unspoken beliefs of other people through their behaviors. I grant of course that if a racist belief has no relationship to someone’s behavior whatsoever, then it cannot be the cause of being a bad person (since this seems to be very much an issue of behavior).
But in such a case, I think serious questions could be raised about whether or not this belief is actually a belief the person holds.
The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing.
So, what do you mean by a “bad person” and how do you know that this includes both true and false beliefs? A related issue may be what one means by a “racist belief”. For example, is it a racist belief that Tay Sachs is more common among Ashkenazic Jews than the general population?
You’ve asked me a series of questions here about the terms I’m using, and I’m not sure how precisely to respond. I don’t think either of us is, for example, in the dark as to what ‘bad person’ means.
So could you, on the basis of your best guess about what I mean to say, just voice your objection?
My objections were I thought apparent. I apologize for the illusion of transparency on my part. Simply put “bad person” is highly subjective, and I don’t at all have a clear notion of what it means. Is a thief who gives some of his money to charity a bad person? Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
As for racism, my point was that I can give explicit examples of differences between what are classically called racial groups that you probably agree are all actual genetic differences that have substantial impact on their lives. Tay Sachs in Ashkenazim isn’t the only example. sickle-cell anemia in some African groups and Huntington’s disease in Western Europeans are other examples.
I suspect that you don’t consider yourself a bad person. So what we mean by “racist beliefs.” It seems one doesn’t just mean statistically significant differences in genetics that express themselves in the phenotype. So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
I agree that clear agreed upon notions of what a ‘bad person’ is would amount to clear and agreed upon notions of morality. But I think we clearly have the latter, and so the former as well. We may bounce back and forth over tricky cases, like your charitable thief, but that doesn’t mean we are in a state of fundamental confusion or disagreement about anything. (EDIT: notice, for example that you didn’t just ask me ‘is a thief a bad person?’)
So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
This last point would follow if intelligence were as irrelevant to moral worth as is a vulnerability for blood diseases. But we evidentially don’t think it is irrelevant. If I told a random black person on the street that I thought him more vulnerable to sickle-cell on the basis of his race, he would probably just agree with me. If I said he was probably stupid, on the basis of his race, he would (rightly, I think) call me a racist in the morally pejorative sense.
So again, it’s an open question as to what exactly the relationship is between intelligence and moral value such that this is different from the relationship between vulnerability to blood-disease and moral value. The fact that this is an open question should leave open the option that intelligence has nothing to do with moral value, as you imply. Yet I think we have substantial intuitive evidence that this isn’t a good way to go.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people’s flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it’s almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.
TL;DR: I’m non-racist in order to be correct. It’s a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it’s users well historically.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn’t correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that “all humans are ultimately the same” doesn’t seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely “all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God”?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing “ultimately the same”, which by reflex I would’ve asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between “source code” and “set values”. For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the “source code” and let our DNA and upbringing be the “set values”. I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, “the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible”.
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don’t hate our freedom, those women aren’t naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren’t really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster’s summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean “really” to mean “genetically”, note that my “weak racism” would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, “weak racism” is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.
By “really” I mean exactly what is usually meant: in reality.
Terrorists, as a point of fact, do not see themselves as enemies of freedom. They see them selves as defenders of civilization/morality/Islam,, heroically sacrificing themselves to strike a blow against the dark forces of America. They are willing to give their lives to protect their people from the forces of … well, whatever Bad Thing those dispicable americans did this week. Corrupting our women or spreading AIDS or starting wars without provocation. These are misguided, and any attempt to paint them as evil mutants is incorrect. These are facts.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
You keep stating facts that we all agree on, and straw-manning positions that no one here holds (keywords “enemies” “evil” “mutants” “genocide” “people” “monsters”).
You have failed to answer the weak racist’s position, or even acknoledge it’s existence. In case you missed it, the weak racist’s claim is “There are no inherent genetic differences in intelligence or antisocial behaviour between groups of people, but other heritable factors like culture make the differences between groups worth talking about anyways. Further, we should try to fix these problems (intelligence differences and antisocial behaviour being problems) with compassion and rationality, not hatred or denial.”
Sorry if I was unclear, that was intended as a clarification of my beliefs, not an attack on yours. I am well aware that you do not hold any of the beliefs referred to; they were selected for their empirical falseness. I was treating them as examples of mistakes my heuristic is intend to prevent, and did not intend to imply that theyw ere held by any participant on this site.
As regards your “weak racist’s position”, as stated it is generally accepted here AFAIK. I have never claimed that culture does not cause “differences between groups worth talking about” and I am puzzled that you would imply I should have. What I have claimed and continue to do so is that we should, based on the current evidence, treat culture and upbringing as screening off race for the purposes of intelligence, violent tendencies etc.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.
Is that really true, though ? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there are some flaws that are indeed attributable to race. For example, white people suffer from a lack of UV protection as compared to almost everyone else; Asians find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol; etc.
Granted, you are very probably right about intelligence and violence, though.
Sorry, I meant flaws in their personality or whatever. The psychological unity of mankind and all that. Your co-worker kicks his desk because he’s an angry person, you kick your desk because your alarm clock didn’t go off and you had to skip breakfast and then it was raining … or, more to the point, we have to keep on killing Them because those bastards wont stop trying to kill us. And so on.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
I hope that question doesn’t come off as too offensive, and it may turn out that you are genuinely more interested in being non-racist than correct. Given the treatment of prominent biologists for stating truths, one whose livelihood depends on public opinion and who isn’t an expert in biology might decide that adopting the dogma of the times is the wisest move.
But supposing that you are actually curious- that you are seriously attempting to determine the quantitative effect that race has on crime or intelligence or so on- what makes “0” such a special number? Sure, it’s the null hypothesis, but the null hypothesis for the effect of class on violence or intelligence is also 0. Why reject one out of hand, and not the other? Notice that we don’t have non-classists breathing down our necks to ensure we don’t point out that the poor are disproportionately represented in the jails.
This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.
Let me note that what is correlated with badness may be more the fact of speaking racist beliefs, not of ‘having them’—the latter is hard to collect info about, absent mind-reading technology.
It seems extremely likely that there’s a correlation between having racist beliefs and speaking them. In particular, the more extreme one’s racist beliefs are, the more likely that one will a) consider racist beliefs acceptable to say (some combination of illusion of transparency and typical mind fallacy) and b) will consider more moderate racial claims as less controversial in comparison.
True, though in general I don’t think we have much trouble discovering the unspoken beliefs of other people through their behaviors. I grant of course that if a racist belief has no relationship to someone’s behavior whatsoever, then it cannot be the cause of being a bad person (since this seems to be very much an issue of behavior).
But in such a case, I think serious questions could be raised about whether or not this belief is actually a belief the person holds.
The question is how causal is that correlation.
So, what do you mean by a “bad person” and how do you know that this includes both true and false beliefs? A related issue may be what one means by a “racist belief”. For example, is it a racist belief that Tay Sachs is more common among Ashkenazic Jews than the general population?
You’ve asked me a series of questions here about the terms I’m using, and I’m not sure how precisely to respond. I don’t think either of us is, for example, in the dark as to what ‘bad person’ means.
So could you, on the basis of your best guess about what I mean to say, just voice your objection?
My objections were I thought apparent. I apologize for the illusion of transparency on my part. Simply put “bad person” is highly subjective, and I don’t at all have a clear notion of what it means. Is a thief who gives some of his money to charity a bad person? Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
As for racism, my point was that I can give explicit examples of differences between what are classically called racial groups that you probably agree are all actual genetic differences that have substantial impact on their lives. Tay Sachs in Ashkenazim isn’t the only example. sickle-cell anemia in some African groups and Huntington’s disease in Western Europeans are other examples.
I suspect that you don’t consider yourself a bad person. So what we mean by “racist beliefs.” It seems one doesn’t just mean statistically significant differences in genetics that express themselves in the phenotype. So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
I agree that clear agreed upon notions of what a ‘bad person’ is would amount to clear and agreed upon notions of morality. But I think we clearly have the latter, and so the former as well. We may bounce back and forth over tricky cases, like your charitable thief, but that doesn’t mean we are in a state of fundamental confusion or disagreement about anything. (EDIT: notice, for example that you didn’t just ask me ‘is a thief a bad person?’)
This last point would follow if intelligence were as irrelevant to moral worth as is a vulnerability for blood diseases. But we evidentially don’t think it is irrelevant. If I told a random black person on the street that I thought him more vulnerable to sickle-cell on the basis of his race, he would probably just agree with me. If I said he was probably stupid, on the basis of his race, he would (rightly, I think) call me a racist in the morally pejorative sense.
So again, it’s an open question as to what exactly the relationship is between intelligence and moral value such that this is different from the relationship between vulnerability to blood-disease and moral value. The fact that this is an open question should leave open the option that intelligence has nothing to do with moral value, as you imply. Yet I think we have substantial intuitive evidence that this isn’t a good way to go.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people’s flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it’s almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.
TL;DR: I’m non-racist in order to be correct. It’s a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it’s users well historically.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn’t correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that “all humans are ultimately the same” doesn’t seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely “all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God”?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing “ultimately the same”, which by reflex I would’ve asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between “source code” and “set values”. For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the “source code” and let our DNA and upbringing be the “set values”. I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, “the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible”.
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don’t hate our freedom, those women aren’t naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren’t really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster’s summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
What do you mean by “really”?
If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean “really” to mean “genetically”, note that my “weak racism” would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, “weak racism” is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.
By “really” I mean exactly what is usually meant: in reality.
Terrorists, as a point of fact, do not see themselves as enemies of freedom. They see them selves as defenders of civilization/morality/Islam,, heroically sacrificing themselves to strike a blow against the dark forces of America. They are willing to give their lives to protect their people from the forces of … well, whatever Bad Thing those dispicable americans did this week. Corrupting our women or spreading AIDS or starting wars without provocation. These are misguided, and any attempt to paint them as evil mutants is incorrect. These are facts.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
You keep stating facts that we all agree on, and straw-manning positions that no one here holds (keywords “enemies” “evil” “mutants” “genocide” “people” “monsters”).
You have failed to answer the weak racist’s position, or even acknoledge it’s existence. In case you missed it, the weak racist’s claim is “There are no inherent genetic differences in intelligence or antisocial behaviour between groups of people, but other heritable factors like culture make the differences between groups worth talking about anyways. Further, we should try to fix these problems (intelligence differences and antisocial behaviour being problems) with compassion and rationality, not hatred or denial.”
I am tapping out of this discussion.
Sorry if I was unclear, that was intended as a clarification of my beliefs, not an attack on yours. I am well aware that you do not hold any of the beliefs referred to; they were selected for their empirical falseness. I was treating them as examples of mistakes my heuristic is intend to prevent, and did not intend to imply that theyw ere held by any participant on this site.
As regards your “weak racist’s position”, as stated it is generally accepted here AFAIK. I have never claimed that culture does not cause “differences between groups worth talking about” and I am puzzled that you would imply I should have. What I have claimed and continue to do so is that we should, based on the current evidence, treat culture and upbringing as screening off race for the purposes of intelligence, violent tendencies etc.
EDIT:Perhaps we are talking past each other. I’m not claiming you can’t get any information from someone’s race, I’m saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It’s the difference between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.
Is that really true, though ? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there are some flaws that are indeed attributable to race. For example, white people suffer from a lack of UV protection as compared to almost everyone else; Asians find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol; etc.
Granted, you are very probably right about intelligence and violence, though.
Sorry, I meant flaws in their personality or whatever. The psychological unity of mankind and all that. Your co-worker kicks his desk because he’s an angry person, you kick your desk because your alarm clock didn’t go off and you had to skip breakfast and then it was raining … or, more to the point, we have to keep on killing Them because those bastards wont stop trying to kill us. And so on.