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AmagicalFishy comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong
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Comments (186)
I don't think this is a stupid question, but everyone else seems to—that is, the immediate reaction to it is usually "there's obviously no difference." I've struggled with this question a lot, and the commonly accepted answer just doesn't sit well with me.
If different races have different skin, muscle/bone structure, genetics, and maybe other things, shouldn't it follow that different races could have different brains, too?
I know this is taboo, and feel the following sort of disclaimer is obligatory: I'm not racist, nor do I think any difference would necessarily be something drastic or significant, but the existence of a difference is something that seems probable to me.
Edit: Though it's obviously included, I'm not talking specifically about intelligence!
They do. Even if you don't want to go into IQ measurements, different races have different brain volume just for starters. See e.g. Cochrane:
Given that various mental disorders are heritable, it's not clearly impossible for psychological properties to be selected for.
However, unlike dark or light skin (which matters for dealing with sunlight or the lack of it), mental ability is generally useful for survival and success in all climates and regions of the world. Every physical and social setting has problems to figure out; friendships and relationships to negotiate; language to acquire; mates to charm; rivals to overcome or pacify; resources that can be acquired through negotiation, deception, or wit; and so on. This means that all human populations will be subject to some selection pressure for mental ability; whereas with skin color there are pressures in opposite directions in different climates.
So why is this such a troublesome subject?
The problem with the subject is that there's an ugly history behind it — of people trying to explain away historical conditions (like "who conquered whom" or "who is richer than whom") in terms of psychological variation. And this, in turn, has been used as a way of justifying treating people badly ... historically, sometimes very badly indeed.
Classifications don't exist for themselves; they exist in order for people to do things with them. People don't go around classifying things (or people) and then not doing anything with the classification. But sometimes people make particular classifications in order to do horrible things, or to convince other people to do horrible things.
"Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors, and never invite them round to dinner." —Douglas Adams
There is a tradeoff between energy consumption and intelligence (where the optimum has moved toward a focus on intelligence with our species). Your second paragraph doesn't eliminate the possibility that this optimum might have landed at different points in different ancient locations.
The fact that selection pressure for mental ability is everywhere present is an excellent point; thanks. As to why it's a troublesome subject, I always maintain "If there is a quantitative difference, I sure as hell hope we never find it."
I think that'd lead to some pretty unfortunate stuff.
Even though intelligence helps everywhere,* both the benefit and cost from increased intelligence can vary. For example, brains consume quite a bit of calories--and turn them into heat. Everyone is going to have to pay the caloric cost of powering the brain, but the cooling cost of keeping the brain at a healthy temperature is going to vary with climate. Foresight is going to be more useful the more variable local food availability is.
* Well, actually, this should be poked at. The relationship between intelligence and reproductive success could easily be nonlinear, even among early hunter-gatherers and farmers. It's not genetically favored to be smart enough to outwit one's genes! (The effects of widespread female education and careers are too recent to be relevant for this conversation.)
? We can already measure intelligence, and have good estimates of heritability from cross-generational intelligence testing. We've found the quantitative difference. All that's left to find out is how it works under the hood, which is knowledge we could use to re-engineer things to make them better. Why stop at discovering that piece?
You may want to practice reciting the litany of Gendlin.
So have false beliefs about equality.
It's far from clear that it's "false beliefs about equality" that were responsible for the massacres committed by the communist states you refer to.
And given the context, it's maybe also worth pointing out that the communists' distinctive "beliefs about equality" were not beliefs about racial equality[1], or beliefs about equality of intelligence[2], so bringing them up here is something of a red herring.
[1] E.g., under the Khmer Rouge, you really didn't want to be ethnic Chinese.
[2] Opinions on that point in, e.g., the USSR seem to have been highly variable.
Did Khmer Rouge really care about ethnicity, or that was just a convenient marker for a particular social class?
Taboo 'care'. They did kill people just for looking Chinese.
That doesn't change much, I can taboo "care" easily enough. Did they kill all Chinese-looking people because looking Chinese was an imprecise but a good-enough marker for a particular socio-economic group?
It looks to me as if they really cared about ethnicity, but I'm far from being an expert and could be wrong. The case seems to be clearer for the Vietnamese than for the Chinese.
Evidence that that was why they did what they did?
[EDITED to add: Also: if this is meant to be an example of an atrocity arising from a "false belief about equality": evidence that in fact the Chinese were better off than the Khmer on account of racial inequality?]
That's ... rather broad. Can you point to some specific thing indicating that the Khmer Rouge did what they did for reasons that resemble the ones you described?
Thank you for alerting me to an interesting phenomenon of which I was not previously aware. On the face of it there are other explanations besides racial superiority; for instance, different social traditions can make one group succeed "against" another without anyone being better than anyone else (example: consider a toy model in which people have prisoner's-dilemma-type interactions; one group, the "natives", plays always cooperate and does very nicely until another group, the "immigrants", comes along and plays cooperate with other immigrants, defect against natives and thereby outcompetes the natives by being slightly meaner and slightly more prejudiced). Is there an obvious reason why the racial-superiority explanation should be preferred?
We do know the average IQs of the populations involved.
Mine was a little ill-thought out comment.
When the relevant experts, Anthropologists, say that the concept of race is a social construct with no basis in biological fact they aren't just bowing to some ivory tower overlord of political correctness. We would do well to consider their expertise as a starting point in any such inquiry.
Start anywhere on a map of the Eastern Hemisphere and trace what the people look like in any geographic area relative to the regions beside them and then consider why the term "race" has any meaning. sami, swede, finn, rus, tatar, khazak, turk, kurd, arab, berber, ethiopian, tutu. Or Han, mongol, uiger, kyrgir, uzbek, khazak, pashtun, persian, punjabi, hindi, bangali, burmese, thai, javanese, dayak. Where exactly do you parse the line of Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid? And why?
Historically, in the cultures from which our culture was derived, skin color, and later eyelid morphology, has been used to define three races (conveniently ignoring the pacific ocean and western hemisphere), for no reason other than the biases of the people in those cultures. If you actually look at facial structure (and why not, no less arbitrary) you'll find the people of the horn of africa have more in common with central european populations in terms of nose and lip shape than they do with more inland African populations. It is our bias to see skin color as more relevant than nose morphology that causes us to group Ethiopians with Hottentots and Biafrans as a single race. We could just as easily group them with Arabs, Berbers, and Kurds. An albino from the Indian subcontinent could claim without fear of contradiction to be an albino of just about any heritage in south asia or europe. Burmese and Japanese have vastly different average skin color but we arbitrarily group them together because of eyelid morphology.
So your question becomes "If different people..." to which the answer is: Of course.
The question you think you are asking, I think, is best rendered "Are those morphological features our modern society arbitrarily associates with membership in three arbitrary sets of humanity also associated with specific brain variations?" Which is exactly as arbitrary a question as "Is foot length/ back hair/ bilateral kidney symmetry associated with specific brain variations."
So there exists a Pure Caucasian, a Pure Mongoloid, and a Pure Negroid out there? Can you identify them? Can you name a rational basis for those morphological qualities by which you know them? Is it a coincidence that the qualities you have chosen coincide perfectly with those that were largely developed by bias-motivated individuals living in Europe, Australia, and North America over the past few centuries? Why not back hair, toe length, presence of palmeris longus muscle, renal vein anatomy, positon of the sciatic nerve relative to piriformis muscle? Among the "grey" how do we know which individuals can be characterized by what (oh let's say percentage) of membership they can say to have in each category? Is such a thing useful? What is your motivation for believing so?
Which has been the greater source of error: the fairly recent hyper-vigilance so seek out sources of bias and error in research seeking so-called racial differences? Or the unconscious tendency to be blind to one's own cultural norms as the arbitrary choices that they are, and to more readily accept the value of the self-like?
As to black, white, and grey, my eyes and visual cortex zero out relative to local contrast and past a certain point will default the lightest colorless shade to white and the darkest to black. With photo-sensors, I can read the result identifying the wavelength and intensity, which will tell me if the light is black or white.
And how do you know that? Social science academics are very skewed politically.
I don't think AmagicalFishy specified the number of races. In common usage "race" is a fuzzy term and the number of races has historically varied from two (us and barbarians) to the traditional European four (white, black, yellow, and red) to many.
It might be useful to taboo "race" in this discussion. The question then becomes "Do genetically similar large groups of people have different distributions/frequencies/averages of certain qualities of interest?" and the answer is, of course, "Depends on what you're interested in, but often yes".
For example, IQ tests have been administered to a lot of people of different genetic backgrounds and of different cultures. The picture is diverse, but there are clear patterns.
"Social science academics are very skewed politically." So shall we discount any concept of expertise based solely on our biases towards the suspected biases of others based on their reported political affiliations? I don't have the time to get my own PhD in every subject. I don't claim they have the gospel truth, but, as I said, it's a good place to start, from which a cursory examination of geographic population variations pretty much puts the the idea of race to bed with very short work.
Tabooing race, I think your paraphrasing doesn't quite capture his question, because inherent in the use of "race" is not simply "genetically similar" but rather the specific arbitrary morphological features traditionally used to define race. Greenland Inuits are further removed genetically from Siberians than Somalis are from Yemenis, yet a photo line-up would be greatly skewed in favor of the former being of the same race and the latter being of different races.
As to the entirely separate question of validity of IQ testing (leaving aside whether IQ captures a genetically-mediated aspect of intelligence), I am not an expert in the field of cognitive science or psychology but I am aware of significant expert-level controversy over the reliability and validity of their application cross-culturally in the past and present, and would therefore be even more hesitant, selective, and dependent upon expert review of study methodology than I generally am before I wholeheartedly accepted a published finding as established fact.
I don't know about concept of expertise, but yes, I will certainly discount (which is different from discard) politically charged conclusions by those biased others. Incentives matter and publishing politically incorrect results is usually a career-damaging move. Especially if you don't have tenure when it could easily be a career-ending move.
I disagree, but in the sphere of rights I generally favour colour-blind solutions. So, sure, lets' put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action. You're good with that?
They are not "arbitrary", of course, but who are you arguing against? If your point is that popular usage of the word "race" is fuzzy and not rigorous, sure, but no one contests that. I think that the real point of this conversation is about useful classifications of people and, in particular, about the real underlying differences between large genetically similar groups of people.
I am not so sure of that. Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all.
One of the big ideas underlying the culture of this site is that truth is not necessarily binary and that you can change your beliefs in whether something is true by degrees instead of oscillating between "this is a complete nonsense" and "this is obviously correct".
You don't need to "wholeheartedly accept", but you should update, to use a local expression.
You say this as if someone who thinks common notions of "race" don't correspond to any biological reality ought to be happy to "start with killing affirmative action", and are convicted of inconsistency if not. It seems to me that that's wrong for at least two reasons.
First: "start with". Someone might very reasonably hold that all forms of racial discrimination are bad but that it would be a terrible idea to start by killing affirmative action. (E.g., because the people that would help are, on the whole, less in need of help than the people who would be helped by addressing other kinds of racial discrimination. Same principle as donating to malaria-net charities rather than saving cute puppies with unpleasant diseases in rich countries.)
Second: I don't in fact see any way to get from "race is biologically unreal" to "there should be no discrimination on the basis of race". What it does get you to is something like "there should be no discrimination on the basis of alleged racial superiorities or inferiorities". But it leaves entirely alone possibilities like these: (1) Membership of race X is basically equivalent to membership of culture X, which has traditions that make its members much better or much worse prospective employees; so when you have to make a hiring decision on limited information you should take account of (non-)membership of race X. (2) There has for years been discrimination in favour of / against members of race Y on the basis of that race's alleged superiority or inferiority, and you now want to correct this injustice; so you institute preferential treatment that goes the other way. (3) Members of race Z are systematically mistreated in ways that make them perform worse in school and university, which means that if treated well by an employer they are likely to outperform members of other races whose examination results are similar.
I think there is in fact no reason why thinking that "the idea of race" is all wrong should lead to wanting to kill affirmative action.
Affirmative action is racial discrimination, in a very blatant way.
If you believe that race is just an arbitrary label, there is no particular reason to provide affirmative action to people with the label "black", but not, say, to people with the label "inbred redneck from the boondocks".
I don't quite understand you here.
Your possibilities, by the way, are all testable.
To quote Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts, "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Nothing I said either explicitly denies nor implicitly contradicts that. If you think otherwise, I've failed to communicate; could you let me know what gives you that impression, so that I can clarify?
I'll make a first attempt at clarifying right now, just in case it helps. Suppose you're arguing that Saudi Arabia should improve its religious tolerance, and someone points to an obscure case where someone in Saudi Arabia somehow managed to discriminate against Muslims and says "yeah, let's improve religious tolerance; we'll start by fighting discrimination against Muslims". Discrimination against Muslims is religious intolerance, but making it a priority in Saudi Arabia would be nuts because most religious intolerance in Saudi Arabia is of a very different sort.
I am suggesting that someone might reasonably think that "yeah, let's reduce racial discrimination in the US; we'll start by getting rid of affirmative action" is a bit like "yeah, let's reduce religious intolerance in Saudi Arabia; we'll start by getting rid of discrimination against Muslims".
(Would they be right? I don't know. Perhaps they underestimate the scope of affirmative action or overestimate the amount and impact of other racial discrimination in the US. But I don't think they'd be crazy.)
Your argument (in so far as you made one) appears to rely on the idea that if someone holds that "race" as generally understood is a biological unreality, then they should think there should be no discrimination on the basis of "race" as generally understood. I think that idea is incorrect; someone might hold the first of those positions but not the second, because discrimination on the basis of "race" as generally understood doesn't need to be based on (real or imagined) biological differences between "races". I gave some examples of kinds of discrimination with other bases.
Good.
First: thinking that "the idea of race" is all wrong is not the same thing as wanting to stop discrimination on the basis of race.
(In two ways. 1: one of those things is an opinion about matters of fact, or possibly definition; the second is a preference about what happens; the two obviously can't be the same. 2: someone opposed to racial discrimination may none the less prefer a combination of two opposed discriminations that kinda-sorta cancels out a bit, to just one of the two, even if their ideal would be to have neither.)
Second: although "the way to stop X is to stop X" sounds obviously right, if it's meant as more than a tautology -- if it means "the most effective way to make X go away is always to find instances of X that we are perpetrating and stop them" -- then I think it's incorrect. Suppose most X, or the worst X, is being done by other people; then your most effective way of addressing it may be to go after those other people.
Let me lay out my line of thinking.
I am assuming that since you... um, that's going to be confusing so let's invoke Alice instead -- so, I'm assuming that Alice believes that race is a social construct with no underlying biological reality and would like this construct to go away -- the ideal is an entirely colour-blind world.
Given that racial discrimination is bad, Alice would want to get rid of all forms of it, including affirmative action. What makes affirmative action special? The fact that the full force of the state is behind it. That's a rather important point: the government explicitly discriminates by race and if you get in its way, you're are likely to be steamrolled.
Wouldn't you want to start by eliminating the discrimination which the state imposes?
Another issue is values (= optimisation criteria). If Alice's goal is to end racial discrimination, Alice probably just want to eliminate it wherever you find it. But if Alice's goals are more diverse and she is predominantly concerned about other things like, say, electability, or social justice, or money, or cultural domination, etc. etc. then she'll be guided by these goals and ending racial discrimination becomes mostly instrumental. And in such a case it becomes just another social mechanism to tinker with and I start to suspect that Alice will tolerate racial discrimination if it furthers her other overarching goals.
I don't hold that position, for race can clearly be a proxy for culture and people love to discriminate on the basis of culture.
My position is that if race has no biological underpinnings and is an arbitrary label, then it's just one in a long line of such labels and I'm not sure what makes it special. Social labels are also amenable to change with the implication that proper social-engineering efforts can (and some people will say that they should) mold the race concept into whatever shape the engineers desire.
Robert's specific meaning was, I think, that at this point in time you do not fix past racial discrimination (slavery and pre-Civil Rights era) by institutionalising a reverse form of racism. If you want to get to the point where race doesn't matter, you need to stop making the race matter because it literally prevents you from getting to your goal. I don't think he was making any claims about "the most effective way" or anything like that.
That seems to me to be assuming more than is actually called for here, but never mind.
If that means that Alice's ideal world would have no racial discrimination anywhere ever (and, in particular, no affirmative action) then yes, I agree, she would. If it means that given any hypothetical world she would consider removing affirmative action from it an improvement then no, I don't see any reason why that should be her position.
Affirmative action generally takes the form of preferential hiring or enrollment practices by employers and educators. It has "the full force of the state" behind it only in that it's generally government departments and state-run universities that do it. It's not like you're going to have the US military mounting a shock-and-awe campaign against your house if you speak out against it.
It seems to me that there are other things that distinguish affirmative action from most other forms of racial discrimination.
Do these really make a difference? Good question. But you can't possibly argue in good faith against affirmative action while pretending they aren't there, which is what you seem to be doing so far.
OK. It looked to me as if some position along those lines was the most likely justification for the inference you seemed to want to foist on Usul.
In regard to affirmative action? What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself claiming that race is an arbitrary label; I'm not sure Usul would either, but you'd have to ask him. But even if it were the fact of past and present discrimination on the basis of that arbitrary label would be a sufficient explanation (though not necessarily a justification) of the existence of affirmative action.
It's too late to fix anything that happened in the past. It might not be too late to fix some of its residual effects. And it's not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the "Civil Rights era" began. The stuff affirmative action advocates hope to counterbalance isn't all decades ago -- some of it is still happening now.
It is clearly true that if there is a path to a world where race simply doesn't matter, then it needs to end up with race simply not mattering, and that will mean no affirmative action. But that doesn't mean that the best available path to such a world begins with ending affirmative action.
(Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that in fact there is any way to get such a world, nor that it would be a good world if we did. The question is: if someone wants a colour-blind world but doesn't agree that we should start by ending affirmative action, does that indicate hypocrisy?)
"So, sure, lets' put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action. You're good with that?"
This is the point where I say "politics is the mind killer" and discount all of your politically charged conclusions, then?
"Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all."
My point exactly. Yet they are universally considered "black" by people in your and my culture because of the arbitrary (which word I do mean quite literally) choice to see skin color as one of the two supremely defining qualities by which we "know" race. If certain facial features were (just as arbitrarily) selected, Somalis would be in the same race as Samis.
Another example: By standards of race, Native Australians are morphologically black (show an unlabeled photo of a black haired Aboriginal to a North American- he will say "black" if asked to assign a race) as are Kalahari Bushmen. I can not think of two more genetically divergent populations. Yes, human genetic diversity exists. However, current ideas of race have so little genetic basis as to be useless, and are mired in bias and produce bias in our modern thinking (mine, too). It is foolish to cling to the primitive beliefs of your ancestors to address problems or inquiries in the modern world.
I use the term "wholehearted accept" in the context of isolated scientific findings. In other words: do I accept that this individual study proves or significantly suggests that it says what it's authors say it does? I have expertise in perhaps 5-6 highly specific areas of study to the extent that I can competently evaluate the merits of published research on my own. Outside of those areas I would be a fool to think I could do so without some recourse to expert analysis to explain the minutia that only years of experience can bring. Otherwise I might as well join the young earthers and anti-vaccinationists.
Not necessarily, but I'm curious whether you're willing to chomp down on bullets.
I am not particularly attached to the strawful "popular" ideas of race that you are so fond of skewering. But are you willing to admit that large groups of humans can be significantly different on the "genetic basis"?
The issue is bias, incentives, credibility, trust. "Some recourse" is different from "defer to the experts whatever they say". I am not a fan of high-priesthood treatment of science.
Height positively correlates with IQ and foot length is a very good proxy for height.
However, "correlated with" is not a transitive relation unless the correlations are fairly substantial. Precisely, if A correlates with B with coefficient c1, and B with C by c2 (both positive or both negative), then the minimum possible correlation of A with C is cos(arccos(c1)+arccos(c2)). E.g. if c1=c2=0.5, then this minimum is -0.5. If c1=c2=0.707, the minimum is 0. In general, a positive correlation of A with C is guaranteed if and only if c1^2 + c2^2 > 1.
googles for "correlation between height and foot length" Uh, I thought that was much stronger than it actually is.
No, not really. That doesn't mean that they don't, anyway, it's just that it doesn't follow from the premise.
We do not know much about individual variability of the genome, and as such we do not know much about what parts of the DNA are affected by individual (a posteriori, ethnic) differences.
A recent experiment, for example, showed that there is more DNA variability within a single ethnic group (subsaharians, probably the most ancient alive today) than within different other ethnic groups.
This depends on how you structure the argument. It is a strong response to "races cannot vary in brains" to say "what generates that fact that would not also generate the fact that races cannot vary in skin, muscle/bone structure, genetics, and maybe other things?", because this is pointing out that the claim that races have identical brains needs complicating features, or else it gets other questions obviously wrong.
What do you mean by 'individual variability of the genome"? You know that we can actually sequence human genomes, right? And that this has been done for people of many different racial groups, and we've identified the areas that people vary, so that you can get your SNPs sequenced and your racial ancestry estimated cheaply?
This is entirely unrelated to the question at hand, and you seem deeply mistaken about its relevance. (If this is true, and it is, doesn't this mean it's obvious that we can tell apart the ethnicities by looking at their DNA?)
I've discovered just now that the original question was "... could have different brains..." instead of "... have different brains..."
That said, the answer is: of course.
If you look at any two people they have different brains. Even if you look at the same person at different ages they have different brains.
If you care about the issue you have to make statements that are less vague.
This does not addresses my question. The implication is "... shouldn't it follow that different races could have different brains—such that these differences are generalizable according to race?"
I think this implication was obvious. For example, if someone were to ask "Do different races typically have different skin colors?" I don't think you would answer "Different people of the same race have different skin colors. No two skin colors are exactly the same. You have to make statements that are less vague."
Edit: If, in fact, that is the way you would answer, then I'm mistaken, but I don't think that's necessary.
Judging only by skin color, most Korean hands would be indistinguishable from most Caucasian hands, and most Arabic hands would be indistinguishable from most Latino hands.
Likewise, judging only by brain function, no EEG-visible or MRI-visible differences appear between ethnic groups.
Brain volume is often calculated from MRIs, and varies between racial groups. (MRIs also give you brain volume of different regions of the brain, which also vary between racial groups.)
If you have any good (academic for preference) sources for the latter statement, I'd love to see them, mainly to add to my 'Collection of X-refuting hyperlinks' I have easily accessible when browsing the Internet At Large.
In highly politically charged subjects it's very important to be explicit about your questions and not hiding your meaning in implications of your statements.
But apart from that it's not clear what the notion of generalizable differences that are not significant is supposed to mean. The standard way you would declare that a difference is generalizable is showing a stastically significant effect.
It's part of scientific reasoning to make claims that are in principle falsifiable. To do that you actually need to be precise over what you mean. There are contexts where it's okay not to practice high standards but if you want to discuss a topic like race differences that's politcally charged I think you have to practice high standards.
I guess I don't think that the meaning of my question was hidden in any significant way. This is leads me to interpret your response less as a genuine concern for specificity that lead to constructive criticism, and more as "I don't like this subject—therefore I will express disagreement with something you did to indicate that." It feels to me as if you're avoiding the subject in favor of nitpicking.
I know you knew what the actual question is because you pointed out vagueness. You knew the question you answered [Literally: Do different races have different brains?] was not the question I intended. Regardless, you didn't attempt to answer the question or really address it at all. Instead, you pointed out a way it could be misinterpreted if someone took the effort to avoid all context and assume I was asking a nonsensical question (which people do not usually do, unless there's some political-esque intent behind it).
My apologies if you have a genuine concern regarding the specificity of my question—but I implore you to try to answer the actual question, anyway.
The subject of LW is
refining the art of human rationality. Telling people to be more precise when discussing political issues is on that subject.This isn't reddit and I wouldn't like LW to become like reddit. To do that it's important to defend a certain level of posting quality and speak up when that's violated.
We have recent discussions about whether to ban political posts. I'm not in favor of banning but I'm in speaking up to have those discussions on a higher quality level. If you would ask the same question on http://skeptics.stackexchange.com it would be closed as being too vague and to have questions like this on LW without being criticized.
You do realize that's a problem with skeptics.stackexchange not with AmagicalFishy's question.
That's a matter of perspective/values. I agree with Christian on this one.