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Jandila 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.
Nailed it. Racial groups are an idea a few centuries old; we've had a functional understanding of genetics for less than a hundred years.
Long before we had any ability to group people by ancestry in a reliable way, a bunch of distinct populations were grouped by the people of a tiny corner of the globe according to nothing more salient than skin color, and by the fact they often lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles (viewed by the Europeans as unconscionably primitive no matter how happy and prosperous the people themselves were) or low-tech agricultural and pastoralist ones (viewed similarly, insofar as industrializing European populations considered those lifestyles representative of ancestral, earlier times). A whole bunch of these peoples wound up colonial subjects; any intergroup strife between them or conditions they considered normal but Europeans found backward was used to. These marginalized, conquered, exploited peoples did pretty much what marginalized, conquered, exploited peoples anywhere and anytime have done in that situation: their cultures, lifeways, institutions and so on fragmented under the strain, existing tensions amplified, resources became increasingly scarce for the majority, and access to health and wealth plummeted as they went from their own former economies to the bottom rung of another civilization's.
The Europeans with decisionmaking power largely looked at all this and concluded that the members of this group were a sorry lot and perhaps conquest was better for them than leaving them to their own devices. In some places throughout the greater colonial Eurosphere, they were still legal to own as property until relatively recently.
Then, long after their marginalized status had had centuries to take root, someone discovers the basis for genetic inheritance, and a comparitively short time after, that the populations grouped as "black" (which includes a huge number of quite-distinct groups in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia as well as their descendant diasporas elsewhere) are the single most diverse human subgroup on the planet. Oops.
sarcasm Well, no matter -- they clearly haven't done as well on the world stage as European-descended whites, and why are you getting upset that we'd want to ask why? It must be genetic, we've got centuries of evidence that these people just don't do as well! /sarcasm
I'm not sure I agree with your view of colonialism. Europeans did not uniformly judge all of the non-white peoples they encountered so it's not just a matter of ethnic chauvinism.
More importantly, none of what you said changes the facts that (1) there is a group of people in the world known as "blacks"; (2) there is a group of people in the world known as "whites"; (3) there is a large an intractable difference in intelligence between these groups; and (4) it's reasonable to ask whether genetics might play a significant role in this gap.
What specific historical details do you contest?
But they did pretty-uniformly judge the peoples they grouped into the category "black", which just to be clear is the group I specified and the group you're talking about too.
Who were originally grouped long ago, on the basis of the exceedingly superficial detail of skin color, a trait that turned out to be a red herring since they don't form a "natural group" in the sense that was assumed originally.
(2) there is a group of people in the world known as "whites";
See previous, with the added note that this level of grouping didn't take as thoroughly or as readily outside the colonies.
Disagreed. There is a large, thus-far intractable difference in performance on IQ tests between these groups; we do not concur as to what IQ tests are measuring, let alone the reasons for that.
But, given what we now know about the genetics of the groups in question, it's privileging the hypothesis to treat "blacks" as a natural group as opposed to a socially-constructed one, and given the many other plausible hypotheses not contradicted by evidence (and the data about historical power asymmetries in their interactions) it's hardly as primarily or all-consumingly interesting to focus on genetics, when there are so many other relevant factors that turn out not to be undermined by biology.
Just because the genetic evidence has come in does not mean that centuries of racism vanished overnight, and the idea of blacks as a natural group and the differences between them and whites as attributable to genetic factors are quite a bit older than our understanding of what genetics even was. It's no surprise they're still kicking around, influencing white intellectual types who've never personally been on the oppressed side of the equation and can't easily understand what all the fuss is about and why people might get so angry that they're still trying to talk about it in those terms...
I agree that the idea of skin-color defined races as the units you should look for genetic variation between is unhelpful in the context of pure science, but if you politically define all sub-par outcomes compared to the privileged group that are not caused by genes (or something else politically defined as untouchable) as needing to be fixed you need to know about genetic differences between politically defined groups to make sensible decisions.
I apologize, I thought you were referring to non-whites all over the world when you talked about distinct populations being grouped by skin color.
Well what is the criteria for deciding if a group of people form a "natural group"? And what difference does it make if they are a "natural group" or not?
For example, I could divide the world into 3 races as follows:
(1) Ethnic Swedes plus anyone who was born in Maine;
(2) Ethnic Japanese plus anyone who was born in Sri Lanka; and
(3) Everyone else.
Now one could observe that members of Race 1 are more likely to have blue eyes than members of Race 2 and ask whether the difference is genetic. The answer would be yes even though the races have been defined in a completely arbitrary manner.
I disagree, I think it's pretty clear that IQ tests measure intelligence. But perhaps it's not something which needs to be resolved, because one can simply ask whether the IQ gap between blacks and whites is due in large part to genetic differences.
Again, what is the criteria for deciding whether you have a "natural group" or a "socially-constructed one"?
"Black" has been used to refer to indigenous peoples of Subsaharan Africa, many parts of Asia, and Australia. Even some South American groups were once classed as "black."
Genetic relatedness, which I hope you'll agree is kind of relevant when discussing genetics.
Irrelevant; I'm talking about how different groups were actually defined in history, not about the many arbitrary ways which one could choose to split up the world's human population.
One could also observe that members of Race 2 in your scheme are more likely to eat a lot of rice than members of Race 1, and ask whether the difference is genetic. The answer would be no, even if the answer to some other possible question might be yes. People in Sri Lanka plus ethnically Japanese people tend to eat more rice due to history and local circumstances (the agricultural civilizations that most influenced them were rice-farming ones), not innate characteristics that predispose them to a diet high in rice.
You disagree that we disagree? I'm afraid I have to disagree with that.
Right, as I said: we disagree on that point; if you continue to assume it in your arguments with me you will not be inherently more-convincing because I believe your argument rests on flawed premises. I might be wrong about that, but my own priors do not concur with yours, and you won't get me to update mine by merely reasserting yours.
I really recommend you look through the discussion on this subject from Spring 2010 (the ancestors and distant cousins of this thread) to make sure that a) the people you are going back and forth with are likely to argue honestly and productively on this subject and b) your contributions aren't repeating facts or myths that have already been covered many times before.
For obvious reasons, comments on this subject should be in the upper 10-20% of Less Wrong comments in terms of evidence cited, intellectual honesty, tone, grammar etc.
I don't understand this response. I am asking how one decides if a group is a "natural group" or a "socially-constructed" group. Simply answering "genetic relatedness" doesn't answer the question. I prefer not to guess at what you mean.
Then I don't understand your argument. I thought you were arguing that (1) the group known as "blacks" are defined in an arbitrary manner; and therefore (2) it's not legitimate to claim that the black/white IQ gap has a large genetic component.
What exactly are you arguing?
I agree 100%. The point is that it's possible to define a "race" in a completely arbitrary manner; observe that 2 races are different; and reasonably ask whether the difference might be caused in whole or in part by genetics.
I disagree with your claim about IQ tests and intelligence, but it's a separate issue.