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RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.)
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?
I don't know enough about Brazilian society to have much idea about your final question. I expect your first sentence is right -- it's not hard to imagine variant societies in which being black is no obstacle to taking Einstein or Curie as a role model -- but if that's meant to make something I've said wrong, I'm not seeing why.
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.)
I think this comment suffices as an answer.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
At this point I usually switch to tentacles :-D
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 :-)
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.)
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.
I had a look and failed to find it. Got a link?
Whose reliability is pretty controversial.
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.)
Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.
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.
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.
It's in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there ("biological hypothesis" is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):
Getting to The Bell Curve,
Since we're quoting Yvain, let's continue:
As to
I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)
Pardon my ignorance, but all the "intellect realism" theories seem like they can be charitably paraphrased as group X:
- has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or
- has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or
- has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve
I've seen claimed IQ means in the 80s for black Americans. Observationally, American public life includes many black people for whom I find it implausible that they aren't pretty smart - eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.
If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn't help - now the successful black folk are explained, but I don't observe enough extreme low IQ folk.
That's why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.
Clarence Thomas is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court justices in memory, and is famously uninvolved, going years without a question; he has also written harshly about how he feels affirmative action cheapened his degrees. Colin Powell's parents are both Jamaican immigrants, similar to Malcolm Gladwell or Barack Obama whose father was African, highlighting how select and successful African immigrants are. Condoleezza Rice, amusingly enough, is almost as white as Obama is (which given the last admixture fractions I read, means she has about twice as much European genetics as the average African-American).
I don't see why you think you observe remotely close to a population sample; ordinary observations are censored in many ways - how many supermax prisons do you visit every day? How many ghettos? When was the last time you saw a retarded person bashing their head against the wall? How many people do you know that are Creationists, anti-gay marriage, depressive, schizophrenic, on probation, demented, alcoholics, or have been sexually abused? What is your score on Murray's high-IQ bubble quiz?
Now, moving on from absurd assertions from anecdotes, we can see that there are a reasonably large absolute number of intelligent black professionals who you might often run into, especially in government circles, by calculating the implications of the gap.
The gap has shrunk somewhat over time: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/01/15/secular-changes-in-the-black-white-cognitive-ability-gap/ It's probably around 0.9 standard deviations right now, so the mean would not be '80s', it'd be 100-(0.9 * 15) = ~87.
The US black population is apparently ~38,929,319. People who strike one as notably intelligent tends to imply >=130 IQ, in my experience, or more specifically the famous 99th percentile, which specifically works out to 2.32SD. We combine this with the 0.9SD gap to get an equivalent selectiveness on blacks of 3.2SDs, which translates back to 0.21% of the black population. And out of 39m people, that's a good
dnorm(qnorm(0.99) + 0.9) * 38929319 ~> 86,000black people who pass that highly stringent bar. So one could arrange to run into more intelligent black people than one could ever keep straight in one's head without any contradiction of the gap.(Incidentally, given a life expectancy of something like 75 implies that there's around 1173 very intelligent young black people each year being fought over by elite universities, which helps explain why they have such ferocious difficulties recruiting and why Harvard can be so thrilled at enrolling 170 black students.)
Why would we have to assume the IQs for groups, when we could just go out and give people tests?
One and two, yes, but I haven't seen data that would indicate some population has a significant skew in its IQ distribution.
Why don't you do the numbers? The purely-black IQ mean is about 85, I believe. A great deal of American blacks have some admixture of whte genes, so I think the IQ average for US blacks is in high 80s, maybe 90. There are about 42m of them. So lets' try three standard deviations above the mean, IQ > 130-135, more or less. That would be about 0.13% of the population, so about 56,700 individuals. You'd actually expect a bit more because many people with a lot of white genes (which would push their expected IQ up) identify as black.
How many do you observe? :-/
You can also look at IQ proxies, like SAT. Here are 2015 scores by race -- LW sucks at formatting tables, but basically scores of whites (average ~530) are consistently about 100 points above the scores of blacks (average ~430). Asians score the highest.
Observing three people isn't observing many people. Blacks like those people aren't in the majority. Most blacks are less successful than most whites.
Note that some forms of the "biological hypothesis" are especially hard to refute. Few people disagree that eating too much lead paint as a child will give you a low IQ. If black kids eat a lot more lead paint than white kids, the end result will be that blacks will on average be rather bad at science, and scholarship in general.
The biological hypothesis pretty much means genetics. There are a lot of environmental influences (from eating lead paint chips to being deficient in iodine to being dropped on one's head as a child) that are well-known to affect IQ.
Gotcha. Unfortunately, the link to that "sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defence" is broken. I don't suppose you happen to know of another source for it?
It's maybe worth saying a word or two about the context for that quotation: Yvain was writing about the tendency to take "someone wrote a decent-looking rebuttal to X" as justification for saying "X has been refuted and debunked". His argument is not "TBC is in fact right because all these people say positive things about it" -- that's just the mirror image of the thing he's objecting to. It's "You don't get to claim that TBC has been refuted just because lots of eminent people trashed it -- look, lots of equally eminent people defended it too." With which I agree. Which is why I called it "pretty controversial" rather than, say, "known to be bad".
Well, the usual...
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.