Ritalin comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: eggman 19 February 2014 12:57PM

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Comment author: Ritalin 22 February 2014 05:01:59PM *  1 point [-]

the causes of violent crime are biological in nature and then suggest biological interventions

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

(someone on LessWrong recently suggested fish pill oils to correct for micronutrient deficiencies)

if you mean something as prosai as dietetics, I can totally get behind that; I find it easy to believe that crappy food induces cranky mood (and that, in the US, crappy cheap food is remarkably deleterious).

If you could acknowledge that culture problems and social multipliers have huge effects on adult criminality and success, and make policy decisions based on that (although this problem is very difficult) how many more lives could be saved?

Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?

If the political climate only allows you to say that different outcomes are the result of the discriminatory schooling system, those nasty racists and the prejudiced authorities

Putting the full blame on them is as absurd as fully absolving them. What insane political climate do you live in, that you'd have to settle for either fallacy?

if it describes the way the world is then its just science

I remain unconvinced that this is exactly the case, and, even though I can accept its provisional validity, with many caveats and reservations, I'm pretty sure the actual reality is more interesting than "blacks and latinos are born dumber, White-Jews and White-Asian nerds are born smarter, and White-Christians are born a little bit smarter than average".

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?

Comment author: Username 22 February 2014 07:59:03PM 21 points [-]

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.

Comment author: James_Miller 23 February 2014 02:12:19AM *  6 points [-]

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.

"About 92% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom and Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome are terminated. In the United States termination rates are around 67%" Wikiepdia

Comment author: Username 23 February 2014 11:45:49AM 1 point [-]

So what would be the analogous behaviour w.r.t. races?

Comment author: James_Miller 23 February 2014 04:32:18PM 1 point [-]

No analogy with respect to voluntary (via the mom) abortions, but one with many members of society being comfortable with significantly reducing the population size of the group.

Comment author: pragmatist 23 February 2014 01:33:53AM *  5 points [-]

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.

The lead-crime link was brought to public attention by a prominent liberal journalist, writing in a prominent liberal/progressive magazine. As far as I'm aware, there was no huge outcry about this. In fact, the article was widely linked and praised in the liberal blogosphere. I am pretty sure that Drum and the editors at Mother Jones would denounce scientific racism quite vigorously if asked about it. So I think you are overestimating the "chilling effect" produced by a taboo against scientific racism.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 23 February 2014 01:24:32AM *  3 points [-]

Your comment seems to make many good points. However, I identified a few evident falsehoods in areas I know something about, which leads me to suspect a similar laxity with the truth in areas I know less about.

For instance:

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.

If you want to practice law, you're best served by studying lab sciences, math, or government in undergrad. (Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.) Then you go to law school, which is where you incur the goatloads of debt.

The fact that you can't get admitted to the bar (in most of the U.S.) without going to law school is not a result of anyone's ideology about intelligence. This policy change was adopted explicitly by states in response to pressure by the American Bar Association beginning in the 1890s. IQ testing didn't even exist then. (And for what it's worth, scientific racism was at that time deemed progressive.)

Comment author: epursimuove 04 July 2014 04:31:33PM 0 points [-]

(Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.)

Does this control for different average IQ (or SAT, if you prefer) among different majors?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 01:37:56AM *  0 points [-]

The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity.

That's one explanation, I'm curious why you find it the most convincing.

Edit: if it is just lead, how come the correlation between race and IQ seems to persist across countries?

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2014 09:56:39AM 1 point [-]

Various explanations aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 12:22:30AM 3 points [-]

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...?

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 01:26:15AM *  0 points [-]

Hardly. I myself change colour all the time, depending on how much sun I get. But it would appear that the races "scientific racism" as I understand it classifies as smarter, are all of paler disposition overall; "whites" in the traditional sense, european jews, and east asians. Calling them all White-X is a way of drawing attention to this strange fact. Is there something about sunlight deprivation that sharpens the mind?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 03:45:28AM 4 points [-]

East Asians (and specifically Han Chinese) were never called White.

Is there something about sunlight deprivation that sharpens the mind?

No, but I suspect that the necessity to survive the winter led to increased evolutionary pressures.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 04:14:15AM 4 points [-]

Perhaps, on the other hand the places where civilizations first developed, i.e., Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Central America, don't have harsh winters; I'm not sure about the Yellow River, but my brief Googling suggested their winters aren't that harsh either.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 04:45:39AM 10 points [-]

The best geography/climate to develop a civilization is not necessarily the best geography/climate to produce high intelligence. Early civilizations arose in places where agriculture was productive enough to generate significant surplus.

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 10:40:25AM 1 point [-]

I would hardly consider places like the valley of the Congo or Australia or the Sahara to be evolutionarily soft.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 04:37:04PM 7 points [-]

I would hardly consider places like the valley of the Congo or Australia or the Sahara to be evolutionarily soft.

Evolution can push development into different directions. Winters promote long-term thinking and planning. The Congo basin probably promotes resistance to parasites and infections....

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 03:52:51AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure about that. I don't have statistics, anecdotally dark skinned Indians appear to be comparable to East Asians.

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 10:56:53AM -1 points [-]

Indians have very varied skin tones, ranging from the very very dark all the way to the very very pale.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 01:47:34AM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 02:03:29AM *  0 points [-]

What's desperate impact? And not all affirmative action is racial. The kind I'm familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background. And women's parity quotas, which are a clumsy-as-heck-policy that annoys everyone, women included. What kind are you familiar with?

Comment author: asr 23 February 2014 03:27:22AM 8 points [-]

The kind I'm familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background.

In US political debates about affirmative action, the term usually is meant to imply an overt lower admissions or hiring standard for the group that the affirmative action is supposedly helping.

Scholarships for smart kids from poor families are uncontroversial, and therefore don't come up much in political discourse.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 02:17:35AM 3 points [-]

What's desperate impact?

Sorry, typo. I meant disparate.

And women's parity quotas, which are a clumsy-as-heck-policy that annoys everyone, women included.

Good, I'm glad you see that this is a bad idea.

What kind are you familiar with?

The kind where universities admit unqualified minority kids in order to have a "diverse student body".

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 02:20:36AM *  1 point [-]

Do they get qualified along the way, or do they actually prove themselves to be persistently and irredeemably incompetent?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 02:23:46AM 4 points [-]

They tend to wind up dropping out.

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 02:26:04AM *  0 points [-]

Regardless of why this is so, wouldn't this outcome make the policy ineffectual and not worth continuing?

Also why in the world did that comment get a down-vote? Is there someone here lurking, down-voting my posts on principle?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 02:33:03AM *  2 points [-]

Regardless of why this is so, wouldn't this outcome make the policy ineffectual and not worth continuing?

Yes, but if they were to admit the policy was ineffectual, they'd have to admit that there aren't as many qualified black students as white students and that would be racist and evil.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2014 10:01:07AM 0 points [-]

Doesn't that mean that the ones who don't drop out aren't that less ... than ... ?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 12:23:41AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2014 09:36:46AM 3 points [-]

The question he literally asked may well be stupid, but I think it's charitable to interpret it as asking what practical use we have for scientific racism that wouldn't violate some ethical injunctions. Likewise, if someone asked how to kill all the fleas on a cat I'd assume they mean that the cat must remain alive and in good health (example taken from here).

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 04:43:35PM 3 points [-]

The question he literally asked may well be stupid, but I think it's charitable to interpret it as asking what practical use we have for scientific racism that wouldn't violate some ethical injunctions.

It would be a long stretch.

In any case, I would have normally let it slide if not for a particular sentence in a {grand}parent post...

...we're talking about differences in average IQ between 95, 105, 110, 115. For one such as I, who's got an IQ of 168, this degree of difference seems unimpressive, and, frankly, worth ignoring/not worth knowing.

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 01:22:21AM 0 points [-]

I never shied away from those; they tend to be useful.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 February 2014 03:52:03AM 2 points [-]

Not this kind -- ones to which a variety of answers become apparent after spending a minute thinking about it...

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 01:48:22AM *  0 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 01:59:59AM 0 points [-]

Generics are great. We need more of those. Patented drugs are way overpriced.

As for eugenics, depends on what we're talking about. Is it "eugenics" as in "let's genome-test embryos for horrible congenital diseases" or is it "eugenics" as in "let's castrate every physically and mentally handicapped person whose disease is inheritable"? When I said "I feared you'd speak of genetics and eugenics", I meant "I feared that you'd suggest the latter as policy".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 February 2014 02:02:44AM -2 points [-]

Is it "eugenics" as in "let's genome-test embryos for horrible congenital diseases" or is it "eugenics" as in "let's castrate every physically and mentally handicapped person whose disease is inheritable"

Isn't the latter the "right thing to do" (tm) according to a utilitarian calculation? (Disclaimer, I am not a utilitarian.)

Comment author: Ritalin 23 February 2014 02:07:36AM *  1 point [-]

I wouldn't know; neither am I. I tend to find that utilitarian calculations are above my competence. As Dr. Manhattan said to Ozymandias, when he asked him if he did the right thing in the end; "Nothing ever ends."