What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?

For someone who claims an IQ of 168 you asked, frankly speaking, a stupid question.

For a moment there, I feared you'd speak of genetics and eugenics

By the way, do you have a rational argument for why we shouldn't speak of genetics and eugenics?

Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers' inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?

For starters we can stop concluding that an outcome that correlates with race means that the process was racially biased. In particular, eliminate affirmative action and disparate impact.

White-Asian

That's an interesting moniker.

So, you think that the humanity is divided into Whites and Blacks, it's just that there are White-Caucasians, White-Asians, etc...?

Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers' inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?

It's not even that we would need to use it, just that denying it would be harmful.

Without taking sides on the object-level debate of whether it's true or not, let me sketch out some ways that, if scientific racism were true, we would want to believe that it was true. In the spirit of not making this degenerate further, I'll ignore everything to do with eugenics, and with partisan issues like affirmative action.

(1) Racial differences tend to show up most starkly on IQ tests. This has led to the cultural trope that IQ is meaningless or biased or associated with racism. This has led to a culture in which it is unacceptable (borderline illegal depending on exactly how you do it) to use IQ tests in situations like employment interviews. But employers continue to want highly intelligent employees.

This encourages credentialism - the use of prestigious college degrees as a marker for intelligence. This means everyone needs to get a prestigious college degree. This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.

This decreases social mobility since poor people aren't going to be able to get into Harvard at the same rate as rich people.And it leaves everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, forcing them to optimize for high-paying jobs like finance rather than socially productive ones. And it sticks our economy precariously on top of an even bigger mountain of debt than before.

(2) If scientific racism is true but everyone insists violently that it is false, we can't explicitly describe this state of affairs: "Psssst, all that racist stuff we're attacking is actually true, but you're not supposed to talk about it. Pass it on."

But we would expect smart and intellectually honest people who study science and understand statistics to eventually figure out it is true. For whatever reason, smart and intellectually honest people seem unusually bad at picking up non-explicit social norms, so they're likely to respond with "HEY! GUYS! ALL THAT SCIENTIFIC RACISM WE'VE BEEN VIOLENTLY ATTACKING AS ACTUALLY TRUE! WEIRD, ISN'T IT?" Everyone will then violently attack them as racist and they will be traumatized.

The end result is that a lot of the smartest and most intellectually honest people hate the rest of society and are hated by them in turn. The dumber and less intellectually honest you are, the more likely you are to remain unostracized and end up being a "thought leader".

(3) If scientific racism were true, we would expect the fields of academic intelligence research and population genetics to know about it and generally believe it. We would then expect those fields to either be loathed and discredited by the general population for this reason, or else retreat to a hedgehogesque defensive posture, or else exist in a constant low-grade civil war.

All of these things seem to be true to a degree. Just to give one example, Arthur Jensen, whom everyone including his enemies agrees was smart and nice and intellectually honest, who helped pioneer the intelligence research field - got literally burned in effigy, had people threaten to kill his children, and eventually had to hire bodyguards just to go around campus. This seems like it might disincentivize people to study intelligence.

But I think intelligence research and associated areas are some of the most important fields that exist! These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt! These are the people who noticed that lead decreases IQ and very likely also executive function and so probably was responsible for like the entire giant crime wave of the latter half of this century which we successfully reversed by banning lead. These are people so awesome that I strongly suspect if we took a billion dollars away from the physicists and gave it to the intelligence researchers, then in thirty years we would have more intelligence research and probably also more physics.

And so we should be trying encourage them to continue doing good work, and one way we might do this is by not threatening to kill their children.

If scientific racism is true, then believing it is true will make us less likely to do things like threaten to kill the children of intelligence researchers because they are engaged in disproving it.

(You may say "But we could argue with them without using violence!" But how exactly do you think you are going to prevent a true thing from coming out, for all time, without using desperate measures?)

(4) Tiny advantages in mean or variance magnify with every standard deviation you go from the center of the bell curve. So if scientific racism were true, we would expect high-IQ communities to come from disproportionately high-IQ groups. The Southern Baptist Church would be laudably diverse, but the atheist community would be full of nerdy white/Asian/Jewish/Indian men, easily abbreviate to "nerdy white dudes".

If it is assumed that all differences in group membership are because groups are racist, exclusionary, or bullying, this means that all high-IQ groups will be accused of racism, exclusion, and bullying and be considered bad people. No doubt there will be some genuine incidents of such in these groups (as there are in all groups) and these will be seized upon as proof.

So high-IQ groups will once again end up either loathed by the general population, in defensive hedgehog postures, or in a state of low-grade civil war (cf: the modern atheist movement)

But presumably high-IQ groups are smart and have ideas worth listening to. When they get ignored and marginalized, that either gives comfort to false or harmful ideas like evangelical religion, or creates this really creepy situation where very powerful people who help shape the world are suspected by, and suspicious of, everyone else (like what seems to be developing with Silicon Valley tech culture).

(5) If scientific racism is true, then we need to use dark side epistemology to deny it.

For example, a lot of people's chosen strategy is to just deny that race exists or that genes can differ systematically across human populations. But the drug carbamazepine is a safe and effective anticonvulsant in white and black people, but has a significant risk of causing a fatal skin reaction in Asian people.

So we have to manage this complicated balancing act where we must get everybody to intone that Genes Cannot Differ Systematically Across Human Populations, except doctors, whom we tell For God's Sake Genotype All Your Asian Patients Before Giving Them Carbamazepine. One hopes this works.

Other people's chosen strategies to deny scientific racism are to make bringing up problems involving certain races taboo. For example, my experience (is it yours?) is that if someone talks about "inner city crime" or "urban decay", someone else will interject "You're just using 'inner city' and 'urban' as euphemisms for black people, you racist!"

But inner city crime and urban decay are real problems, and ones that disproportionately victimize poor people and minorities.

The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like "the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed", which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.

One final Dark Side strategy people use is to say "If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations, which we don't want to do."

Never mind that this wouldn't actually happen. Think about people with Down Syndrome.

Our culture's not perfect at tolerating them, but it's as good as it is at tolerating any other group, and this success didn't require claiming they had exactly equal IQ or were exactly equal along any other dimension except basic human dignity, which is not and shouldn't be a scientifically testable claim.

The truth is robust. Lies are flimsy. If we go with lies, we might accidentally back ourselves into a corner where our stated position commits us to thinking people with Down Syndrome are inferior human beings without any basic human rights.

If we honestly and openly declare we really think - "We can leave the field of small population differences to the scientists, but everyone deserves to be treated compassionately regardless of what they find" - then we are freed from the complicated task of keeping our lies straight, and we might find it has some knock-on benefits somewhere down the line.

The main reason is the people and culture of those countries.

Both Koreas are ethnically and culturally the same. What makes one a SF near-utopia and the other a starving disgrace is the accident of having fallen within opposite spheres of influence during the Cold War and the subsequent development of radically different political systems. One could argue something similar happened with pre-unification Germany. I've read somewhere that the relative poverty in rural Southern Italy and wealth in industrial Northern Italy mirror the North-South dynamics of Reconstruction USA.

Notice that this argument assumes nothing about the role of nature versus nurture.

Well, if productivity and proneness to commit violent crimes depended only of nurture, the children of those people would resemble people from the country where they're growing up, rather than their parents, so the problem would only exist for first-generation immigrants.

I had to read your comment about three times before it became clear to me that you're not talking about inborn racial inferiority. You might want to put that last sentence in bold or something.

Fair enough. I would still contest that the "nurture" component of these outcomes is smaller than is commonly suggested (Ashkenazim in particular) and that I too would bet money on it.

(Also I'm sorry if I came off as rude before)

Yeah that's the tricky part that I forgot to add, we don't know the variance. I used sd=15 but for all I know it could be smaller or larger. Edited to amend.

(I'm using the anonymous account (Username and password are "Username" and "password") since I just want to make a statistical point and not associate myself with scientific racism.)

Oh. I always assumed that was a pseudonymous account of one specific individual.

Besides enabling my enemies to call me a racist in much the same way a segregationist would call MLK a criminal,

So you don't like having low status true beliefs?

well except without the mental anguish you seemed to have about it.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest reading this Tim Wise essay. It isn't entirely compatible with modern-rationalist epistemology, notably in that Wise seems to reject (or at least resist) the idea that science has much to say about ethics. But Wise does make a strong case for distinguishing the possibility of biological racial differences from a defense of racial inequality.

No, the "just world fallacy" is a belief that the world always reaches morally "fair" outcomes. So "better" here has to mean that they deserve such outcomes in a moral sense.

Ok, so which moral theory are we using to make that determination?

Someone who behaves more rationally is more likely to achieve his goals. Do you consider this a "fair" or "unfair" outcome?

I feel like those articles are very weak counterevidence to my argument. They're more like token, limp-wristed right-leaning contributions that the Crimson has to trot out every now and then to give the impression that they're impartial.

Okay, your model is better than I thought. Sorry for nitpicking your hyperbole :-)

Since "politically incorrect" in this context basically means "most views that liberals disagree with", it's hardly surprising that they're repulsed by views in that category.

I thought the research was that liberals didn't have purity axis of morality (Haidt, is it?).

liberals find "politically incorrect" views disgusting.

I would guess this approach is much more female than male.

1) How do you reliably measure potential? You could have leagues based on ability (similar to the way major/minor league baseball works today). But notice that no one cares about the minors.

2) You do realize the practical effect of this in most sports would be that all the levels above amateur would be massively male dominated?

3) In more violent sports you'd have to deal with the cultural taboo against male on female violence. (You could eliminate that taboo, but somehow I'd don't think the feminists would be happy with that outcome.)

4) The feminists are likely to cry bloody sexism over (2) and (3) above.

I believe you're thinking of medieval Italian universities.

Yes, fair enough. I was being hyperbolic about "can't imagine" -- I should have said, "a university run purely for the preferences of the students would be very far from modern American universities, which are accountable to accreditors and donors, and which have a long tradition of faculty governance.."

But by your theory, they should still be able to go to work, maintain all their relationships, and otherwise behave exactly like a non-depressed person in every way. In practice this seems very hard for depressed people and a lot of the burden of depression is effects from not being able to do this.

I think you missed my point, or I threw it by you poorly. I don't think they "should", I think they sometimes can. I sometimes can, and though I know from LW that not all minds are alike, it's safe to assume I'm also not wholly unique in my depression.

As you go on to point out, there is some baseline threshold for which people cannot will themselves out of depression or other psychological issues, just as there are weight loss diets and exercise programs they cannot succeed at.

To your analogy of the marathon: There is a right answer to whether you can run X miles in Y minutes and not physically injure yourself. I'd imagine the majority of people never come close to knowing that answer because they do not posses the ability to refrain from rationalizing themselves out of the optimal result as discomfort begins during their run. I'm aware that I'm personally really bad at this—my first .5 mile I'm telling myself I'm Usain Bolt; by mile 2 I'm coming up with manifold reasons to stop pushing. No doubt some are good and rational reasons, but others are bullshit that I need only train my mind to recognize as such in order to push through and be successful.

The answer to your second question is that their body would become upset because it's not getting the calories it needs...etc...

That's not really what I was asking. Maybe I asked poorly.

Can you instead imagine a scenario where a controlled calorie deficit was administered to a person where they received a balanced diet with all the nutrients they needed? 300 kcal was arbitrary. Pick any number. Isn't there some number that would be negligible in terms of the utility of its nutritional value and yet provide a calories deficient sufficient to lead to weight loss?

My point was that depression seems to have no such scenario. You cannot engineer a situation to "make" people be happy. Without excess food, or alcohol, you cannot get to obesity or alcohol addiction, right? Depression has no such outside variable.

I think we have a misunderstanding in regard to the definiton of "simple". Likely my fault for adding this aside:

(It also happens to be a pretty integral part of life—so it makes sense for people interested in "winning" and optimizing their rationality to have a solid understanding of how to maintain a top-flight diet.)

I'm not saying actually executing a good diet is easy. I'm saying understanding what needs to be done to lose weight is simple.

Consuming fewer calories is very challenging—it can lead to fatigue, mood changes, etc., etc. Likewise, exercising consistently is easier said than done.

Add to that that some people have slow metabolisms, the fat-shaming that overweight people deal with in many cultures, the availabity of superstimulus foods everywhere. Maintain a healthy weight isn't easy.

But the fundamental causal mechanism at play is very simple.