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Jayson_Virissimo comments on More thoughts on assertions - Less Wrong
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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).
I wonder if you would be willing to bet against a person that held such beliefs. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you bet on the IQ of randomly selected Americans by looking at their picture. Presumably, you would guess close to the mean for each picture since you think a concept like race is too fuzzy to make use of and your opponent would adjust his guess according to the perceived race of the person in the picture. Do you believe you would win such a contest?
Downvoted for what looks like willful misunderstanding of the grandparent. (Will withdraw the downvote if it turns out to be a honest misunderstanding.)
The dispute concerns the causal origins of the so-called "IQ gap". The fact of the "IQ gap" isn't itself in dispute (or if it is, it is a different dispute than the one Yvain refers to), so the bet wouldn't settle anything, besides being in extremely poor taste. Racism and discrimination compete with genetic explanations to explain that fact, and the grandparent provides some detail on why settling the issue isn't trivial.
Nothing in my post was directed at the grandparent. It was direct at Johnicholas comment:
If he doesn't think race is a rigid enough concept for coming up with theories, surely he wouldn't mind betting against someone who used it explicitly to make predictions? If it helped people make predictions that were more accurate than his own, how could he maintain the claim that they are too fuzzy for inclusion in theories?
The way that you slipped easily between intelligence and IQ is exactly the dangerous fuzziness that I was referring to.
I won't vote you down, but if you reread my comment you will see that I never used the word "intelligence" at all. I was trying to see how strongly you believe that race is too fuzzy a concept to include in predictive theories (nothing about intelligence per se).
This is true, but it appears the problem was that you responded to a discussion about intelligence by talking about IQ.
No I didn't. The comment I responded to said this:
This is about IQ and Race, which is exactly what my reply was about.