Morendil comments on More thoughts on assertions - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Yvain 25 March 2010 01:39AM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 26 March 2010 10:59:49AM *  4 points [-]

What about casual use of poorly chosen examples reinforcing cultural concepts such as sexism? I'm referencing this paper. Summary: Example sentences in linguistics far more often have males verbing females than females verbing males.

There are a lot of questions which (to the best of my understanding) are still up in the air. Yvain's casual use of the controversial race/intelligence connection as an example at best glosses over these questions, and at worst subtly signals presumed answers to the questions without offering actual evidence. (Just like the males verbing females examples subtly signals some sort of cultural sexism.)

Questions like: Is intelligence a stable, innate quality? Is intelligence the same thing as IQ? Is intelligence a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is intelligence strongly correlated to IQ? Is race a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is IQ strongly correlated to self-identified race? Is race strongly correlated to genetics? Is the best explanation of these correlations that genetics strongly influences intelligence? Is the state of the scientific evidence settled enough that people ought to be taking the research and applying it to daily lives or policy decisions?

My take on it is that intelligence is a dangerously fuzzy concept, sliding from a general "tendency to win" on the one hand, to a simple multiple-choice questionaire on the other, all the while scattering assumptions of that it's innate, culture-free and unchangeable through your mind. Race is a dangerous concept too, with things like the one-drop rule confusing the connection to genetics and the fact that (according to the IAT) essentially everyone is a little bit racist, which has to affect your thinking about race. Thirdly, there's a very strong tendency for the racist/anti-racist politicals to hijack tentative scientific results and use them as weapons, which clouds the waters and makes everything a bit more explosive.

The post has an overt message (regarding assertions) and a covert signalling message, something about the putative race/intelligence connection. My sense of the lesswrong aesthetic has been wrong before, but I think we would prefer one-level to two-level posts (explicitness as a rationalist virtue).

Comment author: Morendil 26 March 2010 02:46:32PM 1 point [-]

and a covert signalling message, something

Something: what, exactly? Show, don't tell us, that the post has a covert message.

Comment author: Johnicholas 26 March 2010 07:02:31PM 1 point [-]

There's two different questions in your post: First, you ask what the covert message is. Second, you ask me to show has the post has a covert message. One's own writing always reads apparently clearly, but I thought I offered sufficient evidence that the original post has a covert message, even though I wasn't picking out any particular covert meaning.

I believe the covert message is "Intelligence is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by IQ/a useful concept for theory-building/probably innate/probably stable/probably genetic. Race is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by self-identification/strongly correlated to genetics. There is scientific evidence that the genetic component of race is a significant causative influence on intelligence."

Comment author: Morendil 26 March 2010 08:15:27PM 1 point [-]

So, you seem to be saying that Yvain is using Watson as an example, at least partly (and significantly so) in order to convince others of (not to put too fine a point on it) the racist IQ hypothesis.

I had a different reading of the post, which was that even for someone who disagreed with the racist IQ hypothesis, Watson's pronouncements should carry more weight than a random person's. I actually agree with Yvain - though I also note that looking into Watson's actual argument in even a little more detail was enough for me to dismiss it.