gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: elharo 01 January 2016 04:00PM

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Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 02:29:18PM *  1 point [-]

No, it means he's saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren't actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable. The stupidity and obnoxiousness of that doesn't depend on a comparison with animals.

In any case, one reason why people use metaphors is precisely the fact that the literal sense of the metaphor produces an effect. You call someone a "dancing bear", and your readers are going to get a mental image of a dancing bear and (in so far as they accept what you say) associate it with the person you're talking about. You don't get to do that and claim you're not comparing the person to an animal.

[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]

Comment author: bogus 25 January 2016 02:48:52PM 1 point [-]

No, it means he's saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren't actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable.

In all fairness, this describes a lot of lists of "achievements of minority X in field Y". To some extent, it's a natural result of looking for "achievements" from a tiny minority (e.g. Turks or whatever) in a field where they don't really have a comparative advantage.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 25 January 2016 03:58:57PM 0 points [-]

Eugene is saying not that "they don't really have a comparative advantage", but that they have a comparative disadvantage so strong that any purported great achievements should be dismissed as fakery, exaggeration, or, if it seems that one of them really has achieved something, "exceptions". In Eugene's view, they're still nothing more than performing dogs, they've just managed the miracle, despite their intrinsic inferiority, of doing it as well as the best real people.

Comment author: Vaniver 25 January 2016 05:07:37PM 1 point [-]

I think it's possible to make the same point, drained of malice. To take Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example, he's a PhD physicist, but when compared to other popularizers of science I'd say he's closer to Bill Nye than he is to Carl Sagan when it comes to scientific productivity. (All three of those are people I like and respect, so this isn't meant as a slur against any of them; if only there were more Nyes and Tysons and Sagans!)

Similarly, I remember the three recurring examples of scientists during my time in elementary school being Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. Again, all three are worthy of respect, but it's misrepresenting the mechanics of science to see those three as equally prominent in the history of science, and when comparing groups what matters is not the most extreme member of each group, but the depth of the field.

Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 05:19:26PM 1 point [-]

I agree. But the less hyperbolically you make the point, the more reasonable it is to suggest that the shortage of Einstein-level black scientists is the result of factors other than a fundamental mental inferiority in the black population. And that wouldn't suit Eugine's purposes at all.

(It seems to me, though, that even quite a strong "race realist" position would not come close to justifying Eugine's talk of dancing bears.)

Comment author: Lumifer 25 January 2016 05:30:08PM 2 points [-]

To clarify things, do you believe that there are measurable IQ differences between populations or you think it's all bloody nonsense made up by malicious people?

Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 10:03:31PM 3 points [-]

I haven't looked at the evidence with enough care to have a strong opinion. I certainly don't think the "race realist" position is impossible in principle. (Some versions of it, anyway. I'm sure there are stupid versions that are obviously wrong, but there are stupid versions of everything that are obviously wrong.) On the other hand, I'm not impressed by the quality of some of the research I've seen cited to support it, and the startling rapidity of the Flynn effect seems to me to give good reason to think that performance on IQ tests is more affected by cultural and/or environmental factors than everyone would like them to be. On the other other hand, while the relevant evidence is pretty shitty there does seem to be quite a lot of shitty evidence pointing the same way. On the other other other hand, most of the people making noise about the aforesaid evidence show signs of really genuinely being horrible racists, which is maybe what I'd expect if the evidence were crap and people only believed it because it suits their prejudices. On the other^4 hand, that's also roughly what I'd expect if the evidence were perfectly OK but it were socially unacceptable to say such things, as in fact it is.

So, all things considered, I'm buggered if I know, and getting to the bottom of it seems like it would involve wading into a swamp of horrible racism on one side and kneejerk social justice on the other, filled with research that's crappy because (1) doing decent research on this stuff is really difficult and (2) for very understandable reasons hardly anyone actually wants to work on it. Which sounds like a lot of No Fun.

So I'm reserving judgement and leaving that particular cesspool well alone; it occasionally makes itself slightly useful by encouraging people whose brains have been fried by one sort of politics or another to reveal themselves as such by shouting obnoxiously about it.

(My political prejudices incline me to the "it's all bloody nonsense" side. My prejudice in favour of things with sciency-looking studies backing them up inclines me the other way. I try not to be pushed around too much by my prejudices.)

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2016 03:44:20PM *  2 points [-]

The first interesting question here is in whose interests it it to create a massive ugh field around studies of how humanity is structured and what are the differences between the groups. As a hint, consider from which direction the shit comes when you touch that field.

the relevant evidence is pretty shitty

Is it? That's not my impression and you say you prefer to stay away from the subject, so how would you know?

Yvain wrote a kinda- literature review a couple of years ago and didn't find the evidence problematic. In fact, in his post he inserted a plea for someone to take apart that evidence and show that it's wrong because he doesn't like the conclusions. Yvain, in general, does not have problems taking studies apart and showing their failures. In this case he couldn't.

There is also The Bell Curve book written by Charles Murray (and Richard Herrnstein) who isn't exactly a foaming-at-the-mouth Neanderthal. And before that there's Sociobiology by E.O.Wilson.

You might also find interesting a series of blog posts when a liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan discovered that race is linked with IQ and had an interesting conversation with another (black) commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates -- see e.g. here.

On the other other other hand

At this point I usually switch to tentacles :-D

Which sounds like a lot of No Fun.

Don't you think that the topic is important?

But yes, touching it is perilous to your social and professional reputation. I probably wouldn't recommend honestly discussing it from an account easily linked to your Real Name. The Islamic practice of taqiyyah is relevant here :-)

Comment author: gjm 26 January 2016 04:40:34PM -1 points [-]

The first interesting question here is in whose interests is it [...]

That's an interesting question, but I'm not at all sure it's the first. Making it the first question seems like the same intellectual failure mode as Bulverism. In a hypothetical world (which may or may not be or resemble the real world) in which there are absolutely no systematic differences between "races" in anything other than superficial appearance, it seems to me there could still be all the same strong pressure against such research. (In particular, I don't think it's credible that the people generating such pressure have all already evaluated the evidence, realised on some level that "race realism" is definitely right, and started objecting to the research just for that reason.)

how would you know?

All I know is that the bits of evidence I've looked at -- which, indeed, may be unrepresentative for some reason -- looked bad to me. E.g., estimating that some country has an average IQ of 80ish on the basis of interpolating values from other nearby countries and treating that estimate as data; estimating national IQs on the basis of small and probably-unrepresentative samples.

Yvain wrote a kinda- literature review a couple of years ago

I had a look and failed to find it. Got a link?

The Bell Curve

Whose reliability is pretty controversial.

liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan

My recollection is that one thing he was notable for was being a gay Republican. I'm not sure "liberal" is a great one-word description of him. (For the avoidance of doubt, "not best described in one word as 'liberal'" is not a criticism in my idiolect.)

At this point I usually switch to tentacles.

Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.

Don't you think that the topic is important?

Depends on what "important" means. I'm pretty sure that whatever the truth is on this issue, knowing it with more confidence would make rather little difference to my life.

I probably wouldn't recommend honestly discussing it from an account easily linked to your Real Name.

It's not hard to link this one to my real name, and I have already honestly discussed it here in this thread. I don't anticipate any terrible personal or professional consequences, but we'll see.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2016 05:00:45PM *  3 points [-]

Got a link?

It's in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there ("biological hypothesis" is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):

I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way. I will mention that it leaves a lot unexplained ... For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article. I will add that I am extremely interested in comprehensive takedowns of that article (preferably a full fisking) and that if you have any counterevidence to it at all you should post it in the comments and I will be eternally grateful.

Getting to The Bell Curve,

Whose reliability is pretty controversial.

Since we're quoting Yvain, let's continue:

Meanwhile, The Bell Curve was lambasted in the popular press and by many academics. But it also got fifty of the top researchers in its field to sign a consensus statement saying it was pretty much right about everything and the people attacking it were biased and confused. Three years later, they re-issued their statement saying nothing had changed and more recent findings had only confirmed their opinion. The American Psychological Association launched a task force to settle the issue which stopped short of complete agreement but which given the circumstances was pretty darned supportive. There are certainly a lot of smart people with very strong negative opinions, but each one is still usually met by an equally ardent and credentialed proponent.

As to

Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.

I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)

Comment deleted 25 January 2016 11:18:43PM [-]
Comment author: gjm 26 January 2016 01:16:23AM 4 points [-]

calling their opponents vaguely defined negative terms, like "horrible racists"

Curious. I say I have no position on the question, and immediately some words I use are exemplary of how bad the people on the other side from you are.

Anyway, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not call all "race realists" horrible racists. For instance, I think Lumifer and Jiro right here on LW are on record as believing that there are genuine racial IQ differences, and I do not think either of them is a horrible racist. (I don't know either of them well enough to be sure they aren't, but they haven't given me that impression so far.)

The people I call horrible racists are the ones who seize every available opportunity to rant about how awful black people are, how stupid people who aren't "race realists" are, etc.; whose negative comments about black people go well beyond anything that could be justified by halfway-plausible versions of "race realism"; who, in short, behave as I would expect someone to behave who seizes on the (alleged) scientific evidence with glee because it suits their pre-existing prejudices.

It is perfectly possible to believe that black people have lower average IQ than white people without being a horrible racist[1]. It is perfectly possible to believe that black people have higher average IQ than white people while being a horrible racist[2].

[1] Not necessarily without being a racist, depending on the definition of that contentious term.

[2] A position similar to this, but with a very different racial group in place of "black people", has been pretty common for a long time.

Comment deleted 25 January 2016 05:42:51PM [-]
Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 10:09:46PM 1 point [-]

I have no idea whether anyone to speak of actually does consider George Washington Carver an important scientist, though the available evidence suggests he was a very clever guy. Neil deGrasse Tyson, so far as I know, isn't considered important as a scientist by anyone, including himself, but he seems to me very obviously an outstanding popularizer of science on his own merits.

None of which is actually relevant to your remark about dancing bears. The point about the dancing bear, remember, is that it may be an absolutely hopeless dancer by the standards we usually use, and that the only thing interesting about it is that it's astonishing that a bear can dance at all. Was George Washington Carver a hopeless scientist? Nope. Are black people so uniformly unintelligent that it's astonishing that one can be a scientist at all? Nope. (Even on a stronger "race realist" position than seems to me in any way credible.)

Comment author: bogus 26 January 2016 11:00:40AM *  0 points [-]

Was George Washington Carver a hopeless scientist? Nope. Are black people so uniformly unintelligent that it's astonishing that one can be a scientist at all? Nope.

We're not talking about ability to do science, though. The question is which people should be considered notable, or unusually successful due to their achievements. And it's rather obvious that, e.g. Norman Borlaug (considered by some as "agriculture's greatest spokesperson") is a lot more notable than G. Washington Carver. Indeed, if we're looking for someone worthy of being compared with Albert Einstein or even Marie Curie, Borlaug seems especially appropriate.

Comment author: gjm 26 January 2016 12:49:27PM -1 points [-]

I completely agree: George Washington Carver seems to have been a smart and interesting guy but doesn't belong on any list of the world's greatest scientists, and if some school textbook chooses him as one of a small number of scientists to profile then I bet it is indeed largely because he was black.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. It would be bad if they claimed "here are three scientists of comparable greatness" (or "comparable prominence" or "comparable brainpower") and then listed Einstein, Curie, and Carver. I haven't seen those textbooks, but I'm guessing they didn't. If they said "here are three scientists" (subtext: "... whom you might want to use as role models if you're that way inclined") I don't see a problem with that. (Eugine might, if he believes that black people's statistical inferiority is so dramatic that as a group they should be systematically discouraged from getting into science.)

Comment author: bogus 26 January 2016 01:46:29PM *  0 points [-]

I haven't seen those textbooks, but I'm guessing they didn't. If they said "here are three scientists" (subtext: "... whom you might want to use as role models if you're that way inclined") I don't see a problem with that.

Perhaps, but I think this says more about subcultures in the U.S. than anything else. Do you think branco or moreno kids in Brazil would have any problem with adopting Pelé as a role model due to his significant African descent?

Comment author: Vaniver 25 January 2016 07:26:02PM 1 point [-]

When it comes to scientific importance, it's important to separate out popular visibility and scientific visibility. If you're not a string theorist, for example, you might have difficulty sorting the names on this list by impact instead of alphabetically. It's probably easier to recognize who on that list have written books or TV shows targeted at the popular audience that it is to recognize which of them have won Nobels!

(Sylvester James Gates, Jr., on that list, is black. But is he important? I'm not a string theorist, and I only know about him because he taught at my alma mater.)

Comment deleted 25 January 2016 09:54:47PM [-]
Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2016 02:22:32PM *  1 point [-]

I think this comment suffices as an answer.

Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 05:13:26PM -1 points [-]

AIUI, Eugine The Fourth is trying to suggest that there's something more than this going on: that black people are underrepresented in lists of successful people not because there are few of them but because they're mentally inferior for some (presumably genetic) reason.

Black people are not a tiny minority globally, so to first order it would be evidence for that theory if in fact lists of successful black people look like lists of successful Turkish people.

Of course there are other factors; e.g., most of Africa is grindingly poor -- though I expect Eugine would say, or at least imply, that that's because Africa is full of mentally-inferior people -- and while there are quite a lot of black people in the USA they've historically had some difficulties to contend with.

Comment author: Lumifer 25 January 2016 05:20:14PM 3 points [-]

they've historically had some difficulties to contend with

Funny how that worked out for Jews in Medieval Europe...

Comment author: gjm 25 January 2016 09:49:36PM 1 point [-]

So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don't think there would be many Jews there.

Secondly, I take it you have in mind Cochran's theory that European Jews are super-smart because of evolutionary pressure from mediaeval persecution. But Cochran's story isn't simply "they were persecuted, persecution leads to more brains, the end". It depends crucially on the details of the persecution. And the treatment of black slaves in the US is very different in pretty much every relevant respect from the treatment of Jews in mediaeval Europe. The Jews were forbidden to do many jobs but highly lucrative finance was (for bizarre path-dependent reasons) open to them; black slaves in the US were given backbreaking physical labour to do and had no opportunity to choose their work. The Jews were left more or less alone much of the time but subject to occasional slaughter where the best opportunities for survival went to those who anticipated trouble, had accumulated valuable resources for escape, etc; black slaves in the US were subject to constant low-level mistreatment and occasional individual murder, and opportunities for getting the hell out were ... limited. European Jews, Cochran suggests, had very little inward gene flow; female black slaves in the US were routinely made pregnant by their owners, and I'm pretty sure the children were generally (1) also slaves and (2) considered black.

Comment author: gwern 25 January 2016 10:26:28PM 7 points [-]

So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don't think there would be many Jews there.

Depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. From Murray's Human Accomplishment on that topic, pg292:

Jews make their first appearance in the annals of the arts and sciences during the centuries when the Middle East and Moorish Spain were at their cultural peak. When science historian George Sarton set out to enumerate the top scientists across the world, including East Asia, South Asia, the Arab world, and Christian Europe, from 1150 to 1300, he came up with 626 names, of whom 95 were Jews—15 percent of the total, produced by a group that at the time represented about half of 1 percent of the world’s population that was in a position to produce scientists. 5 But few of those 626 are important enough in the broader sweep of scientific history to warrant a mention in histories that are less tightly focused. Of the 10 Jews who qualified as significant figures in the inventories prior to 19C, only 2 are still familiar to the general public, Montaigne and Spinoza, and neither of them was a typical Jew of his time. Montaigne’s mother came from a wealthy Spanish/Portuguese Jewish family, but Montaigne himself was a lifelong Catholic. Spinoza was excommunicated by his Dutch Jewish community for his unorthodox views.

Five of the 8 other Jews who appear in the inventories before 1800 were also part of the philosophy inventory. They were Philo Judaeus from ancient Roman Alexandria, Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Maimonides from Moorish Spain, and Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Herder from 18C Germany. In all of those 26 centuries, the roster of Western significant figures includes not one Jewish artist, scientist, physician, or inventor, and just one writer (Fernando Rojas), one composer (Salamone Rossi), and one mathematician (Paul Guldin).

This sparse representation in European arts and sciences through the beginning of 19C reflects Jews’ near-total exclusion from the arts and sciences. Jews were not merely discouraged from entering universities and the professions, they were often forbidden by law from doing so....I will not try to establish a hierarchy of victimhood among Jews, women, and other minorities, but an uncomplicated point needs emphasis: Until the end of 18C throughout Europe, and well into 19C in most parts of Europe, Jews lived under a regime of legally restricted rights and socially sanctioned discrimination as severe as that borne by any population not held in chattel slavery.

Personally, I would say that a 30x overrepresentation in the 1100s-1300s is rather medieval, and pretty respectable especially considering the constraints they labored under.

And obviously those constraints did make a difference because once the constraints starting being lifted, Jews began overperforming even more to a degree so absurd that if it were a novel, you'd throw it against the wall in disgust and angrily tweet at the author to look up the phrase 'Mary Sue':

This history provides us with a nice example of what social scientists call an interrupted time series. Until nearly 1800, Jews are excluded. Then, over about 70 years, the legal exclusions are lifted and the social exclusion eases. What happens? “The suddenness with which Jews began to appear . . . is nothing short of astounding,” writes historian Raphael Patai. “It seemed as if a huge reservoir of Jewish talent, hitherto dammed up behind the wall of Talmudic learning, were suddenly released to spill over into all fields of Gentile cultural activity.” 8 During the four decades from 1830 to 1870, when the first Jews to live in emancipation (or at least to live under less rigorously enforced suppression) reach their forties, 16 Jewish significant figures appear. In the next four decades, from 1870 to 1910, when all non-Russian Jews are living in societies that offer equal legal protections if not social equality, that number jumps to 40. During the next four decades until 1950—including the years of the Third Reich and the Holocaust—the number of Jewish significant figures almost triples, to 114. I do not show the results for philosophy because the Jewish proportion becomes so high in 1900–1950, when Jews represented 6 out of the 18 significant figures in philosophy (33 percent), that it distorts the other trendlines. The results shown in the graph above are already impressive enough without philosophy, as Jewish representation rises steeply in all the inventories but music, where it had begun at a high rate even in 1800–1850...To get a sense of the density of accomplishment these numbers represent, I will focus on 1870 onward, after legal emancipation had been achieved throughout Central and Western Europe. Only from this latter period can we draw a roughly accurate sense of the magnitude and patterns of Jewish accomplishment—“roughly,” because Jews were still subject to pervasive social and educational discrimination even after 1870.

(I won't quote any more since I know we're all familiar with Jewish performance in the 1900s.)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 25 January 2016 03:49:16PM 0 points [-]

BTW, the original, sourceable quotation uses the image of "a dog walking on its hind legs". Your response still applies.