Comment on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 19:59:03 GMT

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.

Discuss