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Lumifer comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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For a moment there, I feared you'd speak of genetics and eugenics, but then
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).
Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?
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?
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?
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...?
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?
East Asians (and specifically Han Chinese) were never called White.
No, but I suspect that the necessity to survive the winter led to increased evolutionary pressures.
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.
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.
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....
I'm not sure about that. I don't have statistics, anecdotally dark skinned Indians appear to be comparable to East Asians.
Indians have very varied skin tones, ranging from the very very dark all the way to the very very pale.