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brazil84 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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The problem with discussing racial differences is that when people say "black", they're already making inherent assumptions about genetics. "Black" incorporates an incredible amount of genetic diversity, far more than the label "white". The common error in these debates is that an awful lot of the population will see the label "black" and fail to distinguish between all people labelled as such. People distinguish between, say, east Asians and south-east Asians and Indians, but they say "black" as if all of Africa are the same.
Look at the performance at the Olympics running races. Would you note the fact that "100m winners are always black"? Would you be willing to make the statement that "black people are naturally better sprinters"? How about distance runners? As it turns out, the good sprinters are usually Jamaican or African-American, with little success from Africa itself. The good distance runners almost entirely come from the Nandi area of Kenya - hardly representative of Africa as a whole. Plenty of areas of Africa have fewer good runners, and probably lots of areas have just the same proportion as European countries.
I'd venture to say that there might be black ethnicities which are on average less intelligent, or have behavioural differences - after all, there are black ethnicities that average around 4ft tall. But will that difference makes any meaningful average when you're talking about "black" people? There are for more genetic variations within racial groups than between them, if you're willing to count "black" as a racial group. I personally don't like generalising in such a non-meaningful way. Compare to people of a specific ancestral origin, if you must compare. Comparing with the average of every ethnicity in Africa, without concern for your sampling bias giving you an inaccurate average (by using statements like "blacks are..." or "blacks have..."), does seem a bit, well, racist.
I don't see why this is necessarily a problem. For example, if I observed that generally speaking, the South is warmer than Minnesota, I would be correct even though the South incorporates a lot more geographic diversity than Minnesota.
For purposes of this discussion, it's a reasonable category. If there were a large subgroup of blacks which was highly intelligent, then it might be appropriate to use different categories.
Generally speaking, yes.
Probably not, since sprinting ability seems concentrated in a subgroup of blacks. (Relatively) low intelligence does not seem to be this way.
Perhaps more importantly, either way you look at it, it doesn't change the fact that genetics is partly responsible for the black/white sprinting gap.
I would say "yes" in the same way that the South is generally warmer than Minnesota. Put another way, I'm not aware of any subgroup of blacks which stands out in terms of intelligence. But even if there were, it would not change the fact that there is a black/white IQ gap and genetics is responsible for a lot of it.
Assuming that's true, so what?
It means that there are few contexts where you might ask me "are blacks less intelligent than whites on average" without me saying anything more than "insufficient data: error bars too big".
And any scientist who researches the issue (or indeed anyone taken seriously who discusses the issue) and uses the term "black people" without considering whether or not they really mean "all black people" or even "a representative average of all black people" are being very misleading if they report it using that wording, considering the biases of the general public.
I'm not sure I understand this. Are you denying that there is a statistically significant difference in intelligence (as measured by IQ) between blacks and whites?
So you are saying that special rules need to apply when discussing race and intelligence?
I think the point is, such a statement is not useful, considering the huge number of different groups that can be classed as "black" and "white."
Well when reporting findings, its important to do so in a way which conveys the meaning correctly to the intended audience. And Sarokae did originally say
Does this principle apply just to statements concerning intelligence? Or does it apply to any perceived racial difference which may be due to genetics, in part or in whole?
Also, does it apply only to human racial groups? Or does the same thing apply to all biological groupings?
Perhaps, but I think that when discussing things on this discussion board, the statement "Group X is more Y than Group Z" can be reasonably understood to mean that if you measure quality Y, then in general and on average, members of Group X have a higher measurement for Y than members of Group Z. Further, it doesn't imply that every last member of each group has been measured.
Certainly that's what I mean.
I reckon the principle applies in general - there's too much diversity within the classification "black" for it to be particularly useful, I reckon. Perhaps if it was geographically specific, it might be more useful.
It applies to all biological groupings that are sufficiently broad.
So the same reasoning would apply to the categories commonly referred to as "worms," "birds," "penguins," "bears," "elephants," "baboons," "chimpanzees," "rats," and "mice," Agreed?
I see your point but I'm not sure I agree. Perhaps I'm just reluctant to think in those terms, but I don't think that's it. I'm not thinking of this in terms of PC, just in terms of usefulness.
I'm having trouble thinking up an analogy to explain my point; I'll think about it and see if I can. If not, guess I need to start over.
EDIT: Actually, if we replace "intelligence" with a less loaded or emotive quality, say "height", I think I'd still be inclined not to consider it useful. But as I say, I'll have a think about this.
Just to add a note here: using the "height" example, suppose I told you that research has shown black people were on average shorter than white people. Then, it turns out, that my sample of "blacks" was from the area with the pigmy ethnicities, and if I excluded those from my definition of "blacks" then they were on average taller than white people. This is an extreme example, but here the statement "the mean height of black people is less than the mean height of white people" might be TRUE, but it won't be USEFUL.
This is because your sample of black people contains within it many separate distributions for the same attribute, and simply taking their mean is not helpful. I'm merely saying that in an unhomogeneous group, averages are more likely to be misleading.
Sure, a set of equal numbers of mice and elephants are on average bigger than a set of guinea pigs, but that's not a useful statement. And a generalisation from that particular sample to "short-haired animals are bigger than long-haired animals" would be outrightly unjustifiable from your data.
His point isn't actually very good -- "worms" isn't a single category about which you could make many meaningful statements on average either (well, you try coming up with many non-vague true statements that universally apply to platyhelminths, polychaetes, annelids, nematodes...).
Linneaus coined the taxon vermes to hold any non-arthropod invertebrate. Later, cladistics came along and demolished the idea that it was ever a useful biological group.
Whereas "elephants" consists of just a handful of living species in two genera, so we shouldn't be surprised that they have a lot in common -- and even then, if you over-presume on those similarities when making theories, you'll wind up wrong because you didn't realize the ways in which they can differ.
Fundamentally, the point is that reasoning about race should be subject to the exact same standards as reasoning about any other kinds of categories.
In regular life, and even in science, people readily accept categories which are somewhat arbitrary; which are difficult to define around the edges; which contain pairs of elements more different than some pairs of elements, only one of which is contained in the category; and so on.
I think that for various emotional reasons, people tend to get wound up over the categories "black" and "white" but such considerations should not affect rationalists.