Comment on Rationality Quotes September 2013

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:27:02 GMT

It is the accepted consensus of polite society today - that xenophobia is wrong and immoral and destructive, that non-"white" people aren't, as a group, cognitively inferior/inherently antisocial/undesirable - that they accuse of being ideologically corrupt pseudoscience.

One helpful tactic when discussing views you dislike is to try and be as precise as possible about those views. One unpleasant result of interaction between factual matters and social dynamics is intellectual hipsterism, where different tiers of engagement with an issue seem stacked so as to maximize the difference with the previous tier. But a tier above you and a tier below you are unlikely to be similar, even though both feel like The Enemy.

In this particular case, there are a couple parts of your comment that comes off as an "invisible dragon," where you know those two groups are different but want to pretend they aren't. Everyone agrees that racial purists like Ploetz aren't right that the Nordic race is the master race. Everyone includes Razib and Mike, except you're still calling them racial purists. In order to do so, you need to put scare quotes on "white" or put "insufficiently" in front of white.

Why that looks like an invisible dragon to me is you know that Razib and Mike don't particularly care about skin color. It's just cosmetic. What they care about is what's inside skulls, and every scientific racist will agree that the IQ progression goes roughly Jews > East Asians >= Europeans > Hispanics > Africans. (I'm using >= because there are some subtleties in the comparisons between Asians and Europeans, but there are several large groups who seem to do noticeably better than Europeans. Also, Nordics do score higher on IQ tests than southern Europeans- but the difference is tiny compared to the difference between Jews and Africans.)

Now, everyone knows that color is just color, and ascribing moral value to it does little. But the claim that smarts is "just smarts," and that it shouldn't have any impact on our decision-making, is contentious (and I would go so far as to call it silly). The claim that some people are "insufficiently white" doesn't fit with modern societies, but the claim that some people are "insufficiently smart" does, and so the association of "white" with "smart" looks like a rhetorical trick at best.

Discuss