Suppose scientific racism is correct. How will you react? How will society?

[ApostateAbe]

Information about Bruce Lahn is here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Let me know if you cannot read the full article. Sometimes when I click on the link, I get the full text and other times I get a login restriction. It is another article that accurately depicts the bound and gagged state of the science. Bruce Lahn was driven out of the field of intelligence research because "it's getting too controversial," per that article, but he still works in other fields of human genetics.

Per that article, he chose to work on other topics, apparently because he couldn't handle legitimate criticism of the way he jumped to conclusions that other research showed to be unwarranted. He wasn't driven out - in fact he got tenure, unanimously, while he was still working on it.

Maybe you meant to link a different article? That, or reading comprehension failure.

Since Bruce Lahn's alleged experience seems to accord with the alleged experiences of so many other researchers in this field, I prefer the explanation that he isn't a liar.

Lahn no longer works on the genetics of
race and has urged researchers to have a
more transparent discussion about whether
such studies should proceed at all. “Given
the history of the way race has been used in
this country, maybe the research shouldn't be
encouraged because it touches too many raw
nerves. I’m OK with that,” he says. “But I’m not
OK with being ambushed by political discussions
masquerading as scientific discussions.”​

-- Taboo Genetics: Probing the biological basis of certain traits ignites controversy. But some scientists choose to cross the red line anyway.

 

[bilby]

My ideas are not respected. People are unkind in their criticism, and express disgust and hatred for what I say.

Therefore I am right.

Argumentum ad persecutium. The favourite logical fallacy of conspiracy theorists since Galileo was found to be right despite being picked on by the mean boys in the Vatican.

As Carl Sagan pointed out; They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

You need more than a persecution complex to support an hypothesis.

 

[ApostateAbe]

My ideas are not respected. People are unkind in their criticism, and express disgust and hatred for what I say.

Therefore I am right.

Argumentum ad persecutium. The favourite logical fallacy of conspiracy theorists since Galileo was found to be right despite being picked on by the mean boys in the Vatican.

As Carl Sagan pointed out; They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

You need more than a persecution complex to support an hypothesis.

Absolutely. No disagreement. The body of evidence, not the existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo, establishes the probability of the case for scientific racism. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is relevant because it reflects a corruption of the science and the public's perception of the science, regardless of whether scientific racism is right or wrong.

 

[bilby]

My ideas are not respected. People are unkind in their criticism, and express disgust and hatred for what I say.

Therefore I am right.

Argumentum ad persecutium. The favourite logical fallacy of conspiracy theorists since Galileo was found to be right despite being picked on by the mean boys in the Vatican.

As Carl Sagan pointed out; They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

You need more than a persecution complex to support an hypothesis.

Absolutely. No disagreement. The body of evidence, not the existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo, establishes the probability of the case for scientific racism. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is relevant because it reflects a corruption of the science and the public's perception of the science, regardless of whether scientific racism is right or wrong.

The body of evidence shows that scientific racism is wrong.

Racism involves treating people differently solely on the basis of their race. There is no scientific evidence that justifies doing this - as you have agreed several times, the variation within races is greater than the variation between races, so such differential treatment is unjustified; If you want to select intelligent individuals, you can do so by giving candidates an intelligence test, and get a good result. If instead of directly testing intelligence, you make assumptions based on race, you have a lower chance of achieving an optimal outcome.

Of course, this does not mean that there are no genetic differences between people, or even between races; but the study of genetic differences between races that do not rise to the level of being a useful test, filter or selection criterion is not Scientific Racism; it is just plain old Human Genetics.

Scientific racism is either not scientific; or it is not racism. That is what the evidence tells us. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is NOT relevant; such dogmas are never relevant to scientific truths. They are a meaningless side-show. Sure, they don't prove that the dogmas are correct, or that the taboos are useful or that the distaste for the claims of scientific racists are justified; But nor do they prove the opposite - these things are non-evidence.

You have elevated the attacks on the subject to become a justification for the validity of the subject. That is irrational, just as declaring the subject invalid on that basis would be irrational.

The subject is invalid because the evidence shows it to be.

Nobody opposes the study of Human Genetics; Scientific Racism, on the other hand, is opposed by many people for many reasons. Some people oppose it for emotional or illogical reasons; and others for rational and evidence based reasons; and still others take a little from both column 'A' and column 'B'. That the former group are right for the wrong reason, and are right by luck rather than good judgement, says NOTHING about the topic, and can be ignored; But you can't ignore the evidence, and use the presence of irrational people to muddy the waters.

The evidence is clear. Your position is valueless, because it is wrong.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Absolutely. No disagreement. The body of evidence, not the existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo, establishes the probability of the case for scientific racism. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is relevant because it reflects a corruption of the science and the public's perception of the science, regardless of whether scientific racism is right or wrong.

The body of evidence shows that scientific racism is wrong.

Racism involves treating people differently solely on the basis of their race. There is no scientific evidence that justifies doing this - as you have agreed several times, the variation within races is greater than the variation between races, so such differential treatment is unjustified; If you want to select intelligent individuals, you can do so by giving candidates an intelligence test, and get a good result. If instead of directly testing intelligence, you make assumptions based on race, you have a lower chance of achieving an optimal outcome.

Of course, this does not mean that there are no genetic differences between people, or even between races; but the study of genetic differences between races that do not rise to the level of being a useful test, filter or selection criterion is not Scientific Racism; it is just plain old Human Genetics.

Scientific racism is either not scientific; or it is not racism. That is what the evidence tells us. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is NOT relevant; such dogmas are never relevant to scientific truths. They are a meaningless side-show. Sure, they don't prove that the dogmas are correct, or that the taboos are useful or that the distaste for the claims of scientific racists are justified; But nor do they prove the opposite - these things are non-evidence.

You have elevated the attacks on the subject to become a justification for the validity of the subject. That is irrational, just as declaring the subject invalid on that basis would be irrational.

The subject is invalid because the evidence shows it to be.

Nobody opposes the study of Human Genetics; Scientific Racism, on the other hand, is opposed by many people for many reasons. Some people oppose it for emotional or illogical reasons; and others for rational and evidence based reasons; and still others take a little from both column 'A' and column 'B'. That the former group are right for the wrong reason, and are right by luck rather than good judgement, says NOTHING about the topic, and can be ignored; But you can't ignore the evidence, and use the presence of irrational people to muddy the waters.

The evidence is clear. Your position is valueless, because it is wrong.

It seems like we are roughly on the same page. It is surprising and troubling to me how many people think that the extreme taboo against scientific racism does not exist. I think the line of thinking goes: scientific racism is wrong, therefore there can be no extreme prejudice against it. To me, the extreme prejudice against scientific racism is the plainest thing about the science generally, it is a completely separate question from whether the science is right or wrong, and it is a huge problem regardless of whether the science is right or wrong. It deters even the avenues of inquiry that are tangents to it, such as identifying the genes for intelligence variations WITHIN groups, and it encourages the spread of delusions that affect related fields (such as psychometrics generally or human population genetics generally).

 

[bilby]

The body of evidence shows that scientific racism is wrong.

Racism involves treating people differently solely on the basis of their race. There is no scientific evidence that justifies doing this - as you have agreed several times, the variation within races is greater than the variation between races, so such differential treatment is unjustified; If you want to select intelligent individuals, you can do so by giving candidates an intelligence test, and get a good result. If instead of directly testing intelligence, you make assumptions based on race, you have a lower chance of achieving an optimal outcome.

Of course, this does not mean that there are no genetic differences between people, or even between races; but the study of genetic differences between races that do not rise to the level of being a useful test, filter or selection criterion is not Scientific Racism; it is just plain old Human Genetics.

Scientific racism is either not scientific; or it is not racism. That is what the evidence tells us. The existence of the strong politically-motivated dogma and taboo is NOT relevant; such dogmas are never relevant to scientific truths. They are a meaningless side-show. Sure, they don't prove that the dogmas are correct, or that the taboos are useful or that the distaste for the claims of scientific racists are justified; But nor do they prove the opposite - these things are non-evidence.

You have elevated the attacks on the subject to become a justification for the validity of the subject. That is irrational, just as declaring the subject invalid on that basis would be irrational.

The subject is invalid because the evidence shows it to be.

Nobody opposes the study of Human Genetics; Scientific Racism, on the other hand, is opposed by many people for many reasons. Some people oppose it for emotional or illogical reasons; and others for rational and evidence based reasons; and still others take a little from both column 'A' and column 'B'. That the former group are right for the wrong reason, and are right by luck rather than good judgement, says NOTHING about the topic, and can be ignored; But you can't ignore the evidence, and use the presence of irrational people to muddy the waters.

The evidence is clear. Your position is valueless, because it is wrong.

It seems like we are roughly on the same page. It is surprising and troubling to me how many people think that the extreme taboo against scientific racism does not exist. I think the line of thinking goes: scientific racism is wrong, therefore there can be no extreme prejudice against it. To me, the extreme prejudice against scientific racism is the plainest thing about the science generally, it is a completely separate question from whether the science is right or wrong, and it is a huge problem regardless of whether the science is right or wrong. It deters even the avenues of inquiry that are tangents to it, such as identifying the genes for intelligence variations WITHIN groups, and it encourages the spread of delusions that affect related fields (such as psychometrics generally or human population genetics generally).

Of course there is an extreme taboo against an idea that is both extremely harmful and completely erroneous. Why would you expect anything different?

 

[ApostateAbe]

It seems like we are roughly on the same page. It is surprising and troubling to me how many people think that the extreme taboo against scientific racism does not exist. I think the line of thinking goes: scientific racism is wrong, therefore there can be no extreme prejudice against it. To me, the extreme prejudice against scientific racism is the plainest thing about the science generally, it is a completely separate question from whether the science is right or wrong, and it is a huge problem regardless of whether the science is right or wrong. It deters even the avenues of inquiry that are tangents to it, such as identifying the genes for intelligence variations WITHIN groups, and it encourages the spread of delusions that affect related fields (such as psychometrics generally or human population genetics generally).

Of course there is an extreme taboo against an idea that is both extremely harmful and completely erroneous. Why would you expect anything different?

That brings up some interesting philosophical questions, because there are some scientific tabooisms that I may stand behind. An anti-vax nutter once posted on my Facebook timeline, claiming vaccines can cause autism. At the time I had over a thousand friends living in the Philippines, and the Philippines had a history of anti-vax scares that cost thousands of lives, so I deleted the posts and blocked the anti-vaxxer, because I saw it as a matter of life and death. I valued free debate, but I also valued the healthy lives of the children of my friends. But, what if the anti-vaxxers are somehow correct? Since the anti-vaxxers have all the evidence going against them on the face, I was willing to close the debate for the sake of my other values, even if there is a small chance they are correct.

With scientific racism, I have long seen that their a priori arguments are much stronger. I learned about the theory of evolution in the process of defending the theory of evolution from creationism (I was a creationist as a teenager). Races are apparent to every human observer, they are an inevitable consequence of the theory of evolution, and the attempts to define them out of existence are irrelevant and do not change the seeming reality of race as Darwin understood it. The scientific case against the existence of human races are almost never made without political points to reinforce them, which to me was a red-flag reminder of the creationist style of argumentation. The arguments against race were poor and irrelevant on the face, highly political, and divorced from evolutionary theory, as though humans were somehow a special exception to the theory of evolution. So, I decided to investigate the other side of the debate (which any person normally has to go out of his or her way to find instead of coming across it in the popular media), and, yeah, I found that the case for scientific racism was a slam dunk. Not only that, but I found that it was popular among intelligence researchers, which meant that the claim of "fringe" or "pseudoscience" was merely an illusion, though, to be fair, it remains a minority position among anthropologists. Whether a majority of scientists accept scientific racism depends on which field you examine. Largely because I favored the theory of evolution as the unifying theory of all life, humans being no exception, I favored scientific racism. Races exist among all species with an ancestry of geographic dispersion, not just humans. Without this general pattern, the theory of evolution would be impossible. There is a popular line of thought among the scientific critics (now shared by Bruce Lahn, seemingly), that the science should be ignored even if it is true. It is a tactic that I think will prove disastrous, as the science cannot be stopped everywhere in the world, and the white supremacists will lay sole claim to the science when the genes are identified, popularly promoting themselves as the vindicated Galileos.

 

[bilby]

Of course there is an extreme taboo against an idea that is both extremely harmful and completely erroneous. Why would you expect anything different?

That brings up some interesting philosophical questions, because there are some scientific tabooisms that I may stand behind. An anti-vax nutter once posted on my Facebook timeline, claiming vaccines can cause autism. At the time I had over a thousand friends living in the Philippines, and the Philippines had a history of anti-vax scares that cost thousands of lives, so I deleted the posts and blocked the anti-vaxxer, because I saw it as a matter of life and death. I valued free debate, but I also valued the healthy lives of the children of my friends. But, what if the anti-vaxxers are somehow correct? Since the anti-vaxxers have all the evidence going against them on the face, I was willing to close the debate for the sake of my other values, even if there is a small chance they are correct.

With scientific racism, I have long seen that their a priori arguments are much stronger.

But they are not. If they were, you would have been able to present those arguments. Racism involves treating people differently solely on the basis of their race. There is no scientific evidence that justifies doing this. Therefore Scientific Racism is wrong.

I learned about the theory of evolution in the process of defending the theory of evolution from creationism (I was a creationist as a teenager). Races are apparent to every human observer, they are an inevitable consequence of the theory of evolution, and the attempts to define them out of existence are irrelevant and do not change the seeming reality of race as Darwin understood it. The scientific case against the existence of human races are almost never made without political points to reinforce them, which to me was a red-flag reminder of the creationist style of argumentation. The arguments against race were poor and irrelevant on the face, highly political, and divorced from evolutionary theory, as though humans were somehow a special exception to the theory of evolution. So, I decided to investigate the other side of the debate (which any person normally has to go out of his or her way to find instead of coming across it in the popular media), and, yeah, I found that the case for scientific racism was a slam dunk.

Hardly - you have completely failed to persuade a single person here of the case. That rather suggests that the evidence is not as good as you think it is; Rationalising that this failure to persuade others is just persecution is exactly the kind of non-argument that you must be familiar with from creationist 'arguments'.

Not only that, but I found that it was popular among intelligence researchers,

[citation needed]

which meant that the claim of "fringe" or "pseudoscience" was merely an illusion, though, to be fair, it remains a minority position among anthropologists. Whether a majority of scientists accept scientific racism depends on which field you examine. Largely because I favored the theory of evolution as the unifying theory of all life, humans being no exception, I favored scientific racism. Races exist among all species with an ancestry of geographic dispersion, not just humans. Without this general pattern, the theory of evolution would be impossible. There is a popular line of thought among the scientific critics (now shared by Bruce Lahn, seemingly), that the science should be ignored even if it is true. It is a tactic that I think will prove disastrous, as the science cannot be stopped everywhere in the world, and the white supremacists will lay sole claim to the science when the genes are identified, popularly promoting themselves as the vindicated Galileos.

It doesn't matter what genes are identified; while the variation within races is greater than the variation between races, the concept of 'race' is of no value. Sure, you can say that people from China 'look Chinese', and that people from North West Africa 'look North West African'; but this is not exactly news, nor is it in any way helpful.

If you want to know where a person's ancestors come from, then you study their genealogy, not their genes.
If you want to assess a person's intelligence or ability, then you test their intelligence or ability, not their genes.
If you want to decide whether a person should marry your daughter, you have a chat with them both; no genetic test will give a better answer.

If you want to study Human Genetics, then study Human Genetics. If you want to call Human Genetics 'Scientific Racism', expect a backlash - because 'Racism' has a very specific and ugly meaning.

Racism involves treating people differently solely on the basis of their race.

There is no scientific evidence that justifies doing this.

Therefore Scientific Racism, like all other forms of Racism, is wrong.

 

[ApostateAbe]

bilby, another point that has always been abundantly obvious to me is that "racism" in fact does NOT have a specific meaning. Yes, it can commonly mean treating people differently based on race, but not only that. It also means BELIEVING different things about people based on race. And, such beliefs are by no means limited to either conscious beliefs or expressed beliefs, but also unexpressed unconscious beliefs that may or may not lead to actions. To add to the difficulty of definition and disjoint with rational thought, beliefs that may qualify as "racist" include even established statistical facts, such as that blacks are much more likely than whites to behave criminally or not graduate from school. I decided to accept the description of "scientific racist," in spite of the many nuances of my beliefs that would conflict with the expectations that would follow, because otherwise there would be a needlessly distracting debate about whether or not my arguments are "racist," as though whether or not it is "racist" is the criterion of truth. There would be no dodging that debate. The way I see it, the common highly-emotional dogma and taboo against racism is a central component of the problem, obstructing rational thought, and it needs to be fully confronted first.

 

[bilby]

bilby, another point that has always been abundantly obvious to me is that "racism" in fact does NOT have a specific meaning. Yes, it can commonly mean treating people differently based on race, but not only that. It also means BELIEVING different things about people based on race. And, such beliefs are by no means limited to either conscious beliefs or expressed beliefs, but also unexpressed unconscious beliefs that may or may not lead to actions. To add to the difficulty of definition and disjoint with rational thought, beliefs that may qualify as "racist" include even established statistical facts, such as that blacks are much more likely than whites to behave criminally or not graduate from school. I decided to accept the description of "scientific racist," in spite of the many nuances of my beliefs that would conflict with the expectations that would follow, because otherwise there would be a needlessly distracting debate about whether or not my arguments are "racist," as though whether or not it is "racist" is the criterion of truth. There would be no dodging that debate. The way I see it, the common highly-emotional dogma and taboo against racism is a central component of the problem, obstructing rational thought, and it needs to be fully confronted first.

Well that makes as much sense as taking your own bomb on board an aircraft to protect against terrorist attacks, because the chances of two bombs on board are minuscule.

All of the meanings of 'racism' are distasteful; by claiming that your position is racism, you immediately achieve that which you claim to be trying to prevent.

Given that what you seem to be arguing for is not racist in the first place, that is a spectacularly dumb move.

If your aim is to study human genetics, then you can do so without once mentioning racism. If your aim is to rehabilitate the word 'racism', then either you are monumentally stupid, or you are fully deserving of the disapprobation that is heaped upon you. Racism is ugly, unacceptable to polite society, and - most importantly - bullshit.

If what you are doing is accurately described as 'racism', then it is scientifically invalid, and monumentally unpleasant. If it is not, then you are doing your position no good at all by attaching the vile baggage of racism to it by misnaming it in this way.

 

[ApostateAbe]

bilby, another point that has always been abundantly obvious to me is that "racism" in fact does NOT have a specific meaning. Yes, it can commonly mean treating people differently based on race, but not only that. It also means BELIEVING different things about people based on race. And, such beliefs are by no means limited to either conscious beliefs or expressed beliefs, but also unexpressed unconscious beliefs that may or may not lead to actions. To add to the difficulty of definition and disjoint with rational thought, beliefs that may qualify as "racist" include even established statistical facts, such as that blacks are much more likely than whites to behave criminally or not graduate from school. I decided to accept the description of "scientific racist," in spite of the many nuances of my beliefs that would conflict with the expectations that would follow, because otherwise there would be a needlessly distracting debate about whether or not my arguments are "racist," as though whether or not it is "racist" is the criterion of truth. There would be no dodging that debate. The way I see it, the common highly-emotional dogma and taboo against racism is a central component of the problem, obstructing rational thought, and it needs to be fully confronted first.

Well that makes as much sense as taking your own bomb on board an aircraft to protect against terrorist attacks, because the chances of two bombs on board are minuscule.

All of the meanings of 'racism' are distasteful; by claiming that your position is racism, you immediately achieve that which you claim to be trying to prevent.

Given that what you seem to be arguing for is not racist in the first place, that is a spectacularly dumb move.

If your aim is to study human genetics, then you can do so without once mentioning racism. If your aim is to rehabilitate the word 'racism', then either you are monumentally stupid, or you are fully deserving of the disapprobation that is heaped upon you. Racism is ugly, unacceptable to polite society, and - most importantly - bullshit.

If what you are doing is accurately described as 'racism', then it is scientifically invalid, and monumentally unpleasant. If it is not, then you are doing your position no good at all by attaching the vile baggage of racism to it by misnaming it in this way.

Yeah, thanks for those thoughts. It is not an easy decision, but I think it is the best choice out of my limited evil choices. From my experience, the "scientific racist" title provokes a lot of immediate hatred from the beginning, but it is a position of willing vulnerability, and it is preferable to a position of seeming dishonesty or the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of people who try to dodge the taboos by changing the words (like the HBDers). I have had some good conversations this way--it starts with shock or hate but it develops into a little more understanding, sympathy and mutual agreement.

 

[bilby]

Well that makes as much sense as taking your own bomb on board an aircraft to protect against terrorist attacks, because the chances of two bombs on board are minuscule.

All of the meanings of 'racism' are distasteful; by claiming that your position is racism, you immediately achieve that which you claim to be trying to prevent.

Given that what you seem to be arguing for is not racist in the first place, that is a spectacularly dumb move.

If your aim is to study human genetics, then you can do so without once mentioning racism. If your aim is to rehabilitate the word 'racism', then either you are monumentally stupid, or you are fully deserving of the disapprobation that is heaped upon you. Racism is ugly, unacceptable to polite society, and - most importantly - bullshit.

If what you are doing is accurately described as 'racism', then it is scientifically invalid, and monumentally unpleasant. If it is not, then you are doing your position no good at all by attaching the vile baggage of racism to it by misnaming it in this way.

Yeah, thanks for those thoughts. It is not an easy decision, but I think it is the best choice out of my limited evil choices. From my experience, the "scientific racist" title provokes a lot of immediate hatred from the beginning, but it is a position of willing vulnerability, and it is preferable to a position of seeming dishonesty or the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of people who try to dodge the taboos by changing the words (like the HBDers). I have had some good conversations that way--they start with shock or hate but they develop into a little more understanding, sympathy and mutual agreement.

Well I think your approach is crazy; And I think the response you have had here supports me in that.

 

[fromderinside]

Yeah, thanks for those thoughts. It is not an easy decision, but I think it is the best choice out of my limited evil choices. From my experience, the "scientific racist" title provokes a lot of immediate hatred from the beginning, but it is a position of willing vulnerability, and it is preferable to a position of seeming dishonesty or the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of people who try to dodge the taboos by changing the words (like the HBDers). I have had some good conversations that way--they start with shock or hate but they develop into a little more understanding, sympathy and mutual agreement.

If you want to be a racist be a racist. Don't try to justify it in some meaningless wrapper. I'm never going to have sympathy for a racist. The only extent to which I want to understand him is to develop ways to minimize or eliminate him from access to the speaker.

 

[ronburgundy]

When some view is an "--ism" that typically denotes that the part that comes before the "ism" is considered not only be a real thing but THE or among the most important things.

In the case of racism, that means that racial categories not merely have some descriptive utility but that knowing a person's racial category is the or among the most important, informative, and predictive things you could know about them, and its importance and relation to other variables does not hinge upon changing contexts.

As bilby said, if you are not arguing that science supports racial categories as among the most explanatory and predictive things to know about people, then you are not really arguing for scientific racism. If you are arguing that, then you are completely wrong, are contrary to the science, and couldn't plausibly believe it unless you had a strong ideological bias to want to distort the science to support your faith (the latter part being the source of hostility by people angered by the immorality of such motives).

Focusing on your preferred trait of general intelligence, the science clearly shows that about 90% of the variability in intelligence is independent of race, and that is only when comparing races that exist within particular contexts where variability in typical experiences between the races is highly confounded with racial category. That reduces the contribution of race itself to differences in g to a high-end estimate of 5%, with 0% still being perfectly plausible.

In sum, whatever biological features covary with race categories are at best responsible for only 5% of the variance among people in their IQ scores, and could just as easily be responsible for 0%, since all of that 5% could be due to experiential factors confounded with those biological factors.
IOW, in predicting and explaining why people differ in IQ, race is not very important. Thus, there is no scientific support for "racism" in relation to IQ. That said, there is scientific support for there being reliable differences in average IQ that so far cannot be accounted for by any available measure of differential experiences (i.e., SES and related variables). But since there is more overlap than separation in these distributions of IQ (meaning many whites with lower IQs than many blacks), this doesn't qualify as racism (not all recognition of group-level differences is racism or sexism, etc..).

It is also true that their is a major contribution of biology to IQ score variance overall, though the possible range is very wide and could from 20%-60%. The current science simply does not allow for fully distguishing biological from experiential causal pathways. The genetic studies provide compelling evidence for some notable degree of biological pathways, but you are misinterpreting them if you thinks that statistical "variance explained" can be treated as the % of causality due to direct impact of genes.
More importantly, none of that research speaks to the cause of racial differences. It is a logical fallacy to assume that the relative contributions to overall variance in something holds constant for all comparisons. Group-level differences that are only a small portion of the total variance in IQ could have a completely different ratio of influences than the total overall variance. It is just like the fact that if the amount that one smoked explained 20% of the variance in lung cancer, that doesn't mean that your uncle got 20% of his lung cancer from smoking. IF your uncle was a non-smoker and huffed asbestos every day, then he got 0% from smoking.

The science tells us that experience and environment are at least notable contributors to IQ overall (40% is still notable). They could easily be 100% contributors to racial differences and only 40% to the total variance, because racial differences are a small % of the total variance.
Even if a portion of the race differences were biological, that would not qualify as scientific racism, because it would still be the case that people's race explains and predicts little of the variance in their IQ, most of the variance being a product of non-racially tied factors, whether those be biological or experiential.

Another place you go wrong is in arguing as though various policy issues hinge on accepting scientific racism or even just biological basis for racial differences. Your thread on college admissions and graduation is an example. Most of what is in your OP in that thread is valid science. Minorities score lower on entrance exams. Those exams have strong correlations with IQ. Those exams predict GPA and graduation. Students admitted with very low scores that predict more than likely drop out are very disproportionately black, due to affirmative action policies. This can almost fully explain the widening gap in graduation rates that has paralleled the closing gap in admissions. All of that has scientific support. But there is nothing in there that implies or requires that the lower entrance scores of blacks be due to genetics. Yet you try to insert that as a core feature of your argument about whether those affirmative action policies should exist.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Yeah, thanks for those thoughts. It is not an easy decision, but I think it is the best choice out of my limited evil choices. From my experience, the "scientific racist" title provokes a lot of immediate hatred from the beginning, but it is a position of willing vulnerability, and it is preferable to a position of seeming dishonesty or the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of people who try to dodge the taboos by changing the words (like the HBDers). I have had some good conversations that way--they start with shock or hate but they develop into a little more understanding, sympathy and mutual agreement.

If you want to be a racist be a racist. Don't try to justify it in some meaningless wrapper. I'm never going to have sympathy for a racist. The only extent to which I want to understand him is to develop ways to minimize or eliminate him from access to the speaker.

Right. For reasonable people, I have at least a little hope of establishing a connection of mutual understanding and civil disagreement, regardless of the words chosen. For zealots, I have no such hope, regardless of the words chosen.

 

[skepticalbip]

It seems that the debate here is over terms used and possibly political correctness pressure.

I doubt that anyone (other than the most politically correct) would deny that, any time you divide humanity into groups by some trait common to the specific groups, the mean for the groups with respect to other traits will be found to vary. e. g. Divide male and female and the mean for height, life expectancy, etc. of the two groups will vary.

This would seem to me to hold for any arbitrary grouping by some common trait such as ethnic heritage. Why is the mean intelligence variance for some arbitrary grouping an issue, other than political correctness? OTOH, a big deal shouldn't be made of that variance because it isn't really that meaningful.

 

[ApostateAbe]

When some view is an "--ism" that typically denotes that the part that comes before the "ism" is considered not only be a real thing but THE or among the most important things.

In the case of racism, that means that racial categories not merely have some descriptive utility but that knowing a person's racial category is the or among the most important, informative, and predictive things you could know about them, and its importance and relation to other variables does not hinge upon changing contexts.

As bilby said, if you are not arguing that science supports racial categories as among the most explanatory and predictive things to know about people, then you are not really arguing for scientific racism. If you are arguing that, then you are completely wrong, are contrary to the science, and couldn't plausibly believe it unless you had a strong ideological bias to want to distort the science to support your faith (the latter part being the source of hostility by people angered by the immorality of such motives).

Focusing on your preferred trait of general intelligence, the science clearly shows that about 90% of the variability in intelligence is independent of race, and that is only when comparing races that exist within particular contexts where variability in typical experiences between the races is highly confounded with racial category. That reduces the contribution of race itself to differences in g to a high-end estimate of 5%, with 0% still being perfectly plausible.

In sum, whatever biological features covary with race categories are at best responsible for only 5% of the variance among people in their IQ scores, and could just as easily be responsible for 0%, since all of that 5% could be due to experiential factors confounded with those biological factors.
IOW, in predicting and explaining why people differ in IQ, race is not very important. Thus, there is no scientific support for "racism" in relation to IQ. That said, there is scientific support for there being reliable differences in average IQ that so far cannot be accounted for by any available measure of differential experiences (i.e., SES and related variables). But since there is more overlap than separation in these distributions of IQ (meaning many whites with lower IQs than many blacks), this doesn't qualify as racism (not all recognition of group-level differences is racism or sexism, etc..).

It is also true that their is a major contribution of biology to IQ score variance overall, though the possible range is very wide and could from 20%-60%. The current science simply does not allow for fully distguishing biological from experiential causal pathways. The genetic studies provide compelling evidence for some notable degree of biological pathways, but you are misinterpreting them if you thinks that statistical "variance explained" can be treated as the % of causality due to direct impact of genes.
More importantly, none of that research speaks to the cause of racial differences. It is a logical fallacy to assume that the relative contributions to overall variance in something holds constant for all comparisons. Group-level differences that are only a small portion of the total variance in IQ could have a completely different ratio of influences than the total overall variance. It is just like the fact that if the amount that one smoked explained 20% of the variance in lung cancer, that doesn't mean that your uncle got 20% of his lung cancer from smoking. IF your uncle was a non-smoker and huffed asbestos every day, then he got 0% from smoking.

The science tells us that experience and environment are at least notable contributors to IQ overall (40% is still notable). They could easily be 100% contributors to racial differences and only 40% to the total variance, because racial differences are a small % of the total variance.
Even if a portion of the race differences were biological, that would not qualify as scientific racism, because it would still be the case that people's race explains and predicts little of the variance in their IQ, most of the variance being a product of non-racially tied factors, whether those be biological or experiential.

Another place you go wrong is in arguing as though various policy issues hinge on accepting scientific racism or even just biological basis for racial differences. Your thread on college admissions and graduation is an example. Most of what is in your OP in that thread is valid science. Minorities score lower on entrance exams. Those exams have strong correlations with IQ. Those exams predict GPA and graduation. Students admitted with very low scores that predict more than likely drop out are very disproportionately black, due to affirmative action policies. This can almost fully explain the widening gap in graduation rates that has paralleled the closing gap in admissions. All of that has scientific support. But there is nothing in there that implies or requires that the lower entrance scores of blacks be due to genetics. Yet you try to insert that as a core feature of your argument about whether those affirmative action policies should exist.

ronburgundy, thank you for your thoughtful criticisms. They help.

As bilby said, if you are not arguing that science supports racial categories as among the most explanatory and predictive things to know about people, then you are not really arguing for scientific racism. -- One common way to roughly rationalize the acceptance of the taboo with rational thought is: If it is reasonable, then it isn't racist. I think the all-or-nothing mentality is misleading, and I think we need to change our habits of thought. Race identity does not need to be the MOST explanatory thing about a person for race to have a very large effect on populations. If the average intelligence differences are biological, then it means one race on average will be poorer, have less educational attainment on average, less capable of valuable productive on average, and so on. It makes a big difference for politics and the economy, even if each person is an individual with a large array of influences besides race. It is also the essence of racist thought, so there is no dodging it. The theory has the most predictive power for populations, but even for individuals it has troubling relevance. Even with we completely ignore genetics, a realistic examination of the data implies that a random black American has a 68% chance of having an IQ of 85 plus or minus 15, whereas a random white American has a 68% chance of having an IQ of 100 plus or minus 15. If we integrate the data of biological heritability into this, it means that there is likely not so much we can do to narrow the gap.

It is also true that their is a major contribution of biology to IQ score variance overall, though the possible range is very wide and could from 20%-60%. The minimum is 40% and the maximum is 80%, of the IQ differences explained by genetic differences within groups. Nobody goes as low as 20%, as far as I am aware. It would be an extreme value, but the extremists who ignore or dismiss the heritability studies would either go directly to 0% or a position of complete uncertainty. The heritability studies do not prove that racial intelligence differences are genetic, but it is a core part of the background knowledge that significantly increases the prior probability.

Group-level differences that are only a small portion of the total variance in IQ could have a completely different ratio of influences than the total overall variance. -- Yes, and I argued in another thread that genetics likely plays a large role in race differences. In addition to the background knowledge of the genetic component of within group differences and the diversity of genetic differences between races providing for prior probability, there is the more direct evidence of a global pattern of a single racial intelligence hierarchy, transracial adoption studies, brain size hierarchy, and very strong negative correlation between average skin color of populations and average intelligence (each seemingly linked to the ancestral climate). I don't think we will ever get exact values reflecting HOW MUCH of the racial intelligence variances are due to genetic variations and how much are due to environmental variations (it would require some very bizarre twin studies), but I do think that a comprehensive review of the evidence makes the conclusion unavoidable: the genetic component of the racial intelligence differences are very strong. The within-group genetic component of intelligence variations is undoubtedly high (60%), but the between-race genetic component is likely to be even higher (Templer and Arikawa would likely claim 90%).

"Another place you go wrong is in arguing as though various policy issues hinge on accepting scientific racism or even just biological basis for racial differences." -- I don't think so. If you review what I said in the OP of that thread again, I think you will see that I claimed that the causes of the racial differences in intelligence scores were irrelevant, nor did my argument hinge on the causes in any part, biological or not, genetic or not. It is true that a lot of people read it as though I said no such thing, but most people don't read the whole thing, though they pretend to. They merely glance over it and fill in the gaps with their fallible expectations. It is normal. Many people do not seriously think about the racial intelligence test score gaps because it very uncomfortably resembles thinking about BIOLOGICAL racial test score gaps, which is taboo. It is easier to just ignore the facts completely and think about the related issues as though such facts do not exist, which I think is the reason why the policies of affirmative action gained traction among college campuses. People generally refused to think about the consequences of lowering admission standards without lowering graduation standards, because they pretended that the admission standards were irrelevant or fluid and generally non-predictive.

 

[ApostateAbe]

It seems that the debate here is over terms used and possibly political correctness pressure.

I doubt that anyone (other than the most politically correct) would deny that, any time you divide humanity into groups by some trait common to the specific groups, the mean for the groups with respect to other traits will be found to vary. e. g. Divide male and female and the mean for height, life expectancy, etc. of the two groups will vary.

This would seem to me to hold for any arbitrary grouping by some common trait such as ethnic heritage. Why is the mean intelligence variance for some arbitrary grouping an issue, other than political correctness? OTOH, a big deal shouldn't be made of that variance because it isn't really that meaningful.

It is meaningful. The illustration you have may approximate the gap between whites and northeast Asians: 5 IQ points, or a third of a standard deviation. Not much, but probably enough to explain the educational gaps and income gaps. For the gap between Ashkenazi Jews and whites, you must double the gap, maybe even triple it (Askenazi Jews have an average IQ between 110 and 115). It may not seem like much, but it becomes especially relevant when you look at the right tail ends of the distribution: when you move the the distribution to the right, it means increasing the width of the right tail end many times, which would explain the Jewish dominance in science, business, literature, celebrity, anything with a strong intellectual component, far out of proportion to their share of the population. The top 1% income earners are about 20% Jewish, despite being less than 2% of any nation except Israel. The gap is about the same between American blacks and American whites, but blacks have the disadvantage. The disadvantage is especially perverse when looking at black Africans, with an average intelligence fully two standard deviations below whites. It means there would be a large chasm between those two distributions and only a small overlap. It matters.

 

[ApostateAbe]

This figure illustrates the 1-standard-deviation difference and 2-standard-deviation difference.

 

[skepticalbip]

It seems that the debate here is over terms used and possibly political correctness pressure.

I doubt that anyone (other than the most politically correct) would deny that, any time you divide humanity into groups by some trait common to the specific groups, the mean for the groups with respect to other traits will be found to vary. e. g. Divide male and female and the mean for height, life expectancy, etc. of the two groups will vary.

This would seem to me to hold for any arbitrary grouping by some common trait such as ethnic heritage. Why is the mean intelligence variance for some arbitrary grouping an issue, other than political correctness? OTOH, a big deal shouldn't be made of that variance because it isn't really that meaningful.

It is meaningful. The illustration you have may approximate the gap between whites and northeast Asians: 5 IQ points, or a third of a standard deviation. Not much, but probably enough to explain the educational gaps and income gaps. For the gap between Ashkenazi Jews and whites, you must double the gap, maybe even triple it (Askenazi Jews have an average IQ between 110 and 115). It may not seem like much, but it becomes especially relevant when you look at the right tail ends of the distribution: when you move the the distribution to the right, it means increasing the width of the right tail end many times, which would explain the Jewish dominance in science, business, literature, celebrity, anything with a strong intellectual component, far out of proportion to their share of the population. The top 1% income earners are about 20% Jewish, despite being less than 2% of any nation except Israel. The gap is about the same between American blacks and American whites, but blacks have the disadvantage. The disadvantage is especially perverse when looking at black Africans, with an average intelligence fully two standard deviations below whites. It means there would be a large chasm between those two distributions and only a small overlap. It matters.

It "matters" only because of the way you divided the population into groups. If the point is to shift the mean intelligence to the right (and you are assuming genetics as the root determinant), then the "problem" is people (in all groups) in the tail to the left having too many children and the people (in all groups) in the tail to the right having too few children. Why would having "whites and Asians", in the tail to the left procreate move the mean intelligence to the right?

Since you are concerned with the mean intelligence of humanity then you should group people by intelligence rather than by race. Forget race and group each individual into one of the IQ quintiles.