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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong
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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.
Why would we have to assume the IQs for groups, when we could just go out and give people tests?
More technically, the assumption that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures.
Why would we have to assume that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures? Aren't there experiments we could perform to measure the validity?
It seems like a core assumption of the "intellectual" realists. I'm conceding it to strong-man the opposing argument. If we don't assume IQ is culturally independent, the correlation between IQ and life outcome looks like a hidden-variable measure of social acceptability - i.e. an expected status quo bias if people prefer those they perceive as in-group. That just weakens the realist argument.
This would mean the IQ scores are meaningless for cross-country comparison. And that just aint' so.
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.
African American mean IQ is typically measured at 85 to 90. Sub-Saharan African IQs are difficult to estimate because of a number of factors, but 85 is much higher than typical estimates.
First, 42 million includes children for who I doubt there is a public criteria we can agree on as proxy for intelligence. Second, I'm not sure IQ > 130 is .13%. Wikipedia suggests 1%.
Since those cut in opposite directions, let's pretend they wash out. I am comfortable asserting there are more than 60k black folks in the set of:
- senior military officers (colonel or greater)
- highly successful national public intellectuals (eg Powell, Coates, Rice)
- highly successful lawyers (Clarence Thomas is top 1% of lawyers)
- highly successful MDs & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
- highly successful media/entertainment personalities (Sean "Diddy" Combs, Oprah, etc).
- highly successful technocrats (mayors / police chiefs / school superintendent in large metro areas)
The tail above three standard deviations for a normal distribution constitutes about 0.13% of the population.
Media/entertainment personalities can be oh so very dumb :-)
Otherwise, I am doubting your assertion. Do you have data?
Most IQ scales set the standard deviation at 15 points, not 10 points.
Yes, but we are starting from the mean which is 85 in this particular case.
From personal experience, there are lots of dumb lawyers. When I say highly successful, I mean roughly the level of screening that occurs through promotion from fresh-out-of-academy lieutenant to colonel.
For reference, Clarence Thomas easily clears the bar I'm trying to set, as did Johnny Cochran before he died. For entertainers, it seems clear that talent isn't correlated with intelligence. But I think staying power requires some, so the ultra-successful are candidates.
For my broader argument, the categories I set out are potentially under-inclusive. There are lots of folks (like business people) not included in the categories I explicitly listed. We also haven't included any children, on the grounds that we don't agree on how to identify them.
Yeah, but it's all hand-waving. I see this if I squint this way and you see that if you squint that way...
You originally said
You, personally, observe too many? Is that statement true? Or do you merely expect to see many?
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.)
Thomas is extremely conservative, far out of the mainstream of American legal thought. That said, worse Supreme Court Justice is roughly like worst tenured physicist at MIT. It hardly means he isn't smart. In particular, not-talking-during-oral-argument doesn't mean not involved, and is another arguments-are-soldiers attack by liberal American legal society on someone who is admittedly far out of mainstream legal thought.
Your reference to his position on affirmative action is particularly confusing to me, because his point is a standard, fairly mainstream argument against AA. If that was his most extreme legal position, he'd be the swing vote, not the farthest right (or second farthest, depending on how one counts Alito).
The rest of your post is well taken, and I will have to think on it.
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
As are Rehnquist, Scalia, and others, yet Thomas is by far the least respected, least cited, and least noted. (Of all the people you had to cite as accomplished black people, you had to pick Clarence Thomas...) If Thomas is still so 'extreme' despite his bully pulpit for expounding & enforcing his views, that also says a lot about how good a justice he has been.
Not really. The tenure process at MIT can be trusted a lot more than 'whatever candidate is young, politically expedient, and can be pushed through Congress', especially considering that justice nominations used to be relatively deferential. A candidate has to be as bad as, say, Harriet Miers to get rejected. I don't know how many physicists would make tenure with a similar slate of accomplishments and, to illustrate the relative looseness, highly public accusations of sexual harassment.
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others' opinions (of course, then he'd look less 'extreme' if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn't he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
You misunderstood my point. My point there was that I agree with the criticisms of AA as harmful and pernicious through its effects in promoting people to positions and degrees they are not fully qualified for (the relevance of which should be obvious), and I was noting that far from being a nasty personal attack by me on Thomas, he himself says it played a part in his career, and who are we to disagree?
That's not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don't know about that either - I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that's why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you - we drifted apart so I'm not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
Thomas is the "least respected" because the left has a special hatred for black people who don't toe the line and take the political side that they want black people to take, not because he is actually less worthy of respect than the other conservative justices.
I think this is almost certainly the case, as well as the fact that Thomas is even more extremely conservative than the others. So I found Gwern's comment surprising, since he really seems to be attacking Thomas for his politics alone. As for the fact that he doesn't get involved in the questions, he has said himself that the reason is that he already knows his opinion and it isn't going to change. We have no reason to doubt this assertion, which is arrogant and overconfident, but which does not even come close to proving that he's stupid. As for behind-the-scenes influence, it is very possible that he has had quite a bit, e.g. with the interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Latinos as well -- both Cruz and Rubio have been called "traitors".
You are repeating a Democratic Party talking point as fact. A particularly stupid talking point. One of the reasons I used Thomas as an example is to try to push against this stupid assertion by those who are otherwise my political allies.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1/9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1/9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members. I can't speak to behind-the-scenes influence. As a lawyer, I don't think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court).
Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought. To say Rehnquist and Scalia are as extreme as Thomas is another Democratic Party talking point.
I see a wide range of students in my practice with many different profiles. It would be a mistake to conclude that a student with your profile was representative of all special education students. Given the broad scope of special education coverage, no special education student is truly "typical" of special education in general. At best, one student might be typical of a sub-population of a particular eligibility category, but likely not.
My experience with special education is presented to justify my conclusion that a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces. I'm skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas' path. That's relevant to the argument because the number of "black swan" high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Separately, I'm well aware that an 80 IQ student is not typical of a special education student. In point of law, an 80 IQ by itself is not likely to lead a student to be formally included in special education. At a minimum, student must be within a particular category of need, such as autism spectrum or emotional dysfunction, to be entitled to legal classification as a special education student.
No one's denying that. The "race realists" claim not that all black people in the US have an IQ in the 80-90 range, but that the average IQ of black people in the US is in the 80-90 range. That's perfectly consistent, as gwern said, with plenty of those people being very smart.
Clearly you don't get onto the Supreme Court without being distinctly cleverer than average. For all his negative comments about Clarence Thomas, gwern is not (so far as I can see) denying that.
Yup. But "smart enough to be on the Supreme Court" doesn't seem to me like black-swan IQ, even in a (real or hypothetical) subpopulation with an average IQ in the eighties. Unusual, sure. But well within the range we should expect there to be plenty of.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
Kind of important a thing to leave out in a political role like that of the nine.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Rehnquist and Scalia's opinions actually being more persuasive, as I already suggested?
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas's originalism, as you seem to think; if I had to classify myself, I'd have to admit to considerable sympathy with his positions as I've noted in the past on LW (I think, possibly I argued it elsewhere), originalism is the only position which makes any kind of sense, and the attempts to move away from it and reinterpret it as liberals wish reflects the fact that the Constitution is atrociously outdated and irrelevant because the updating mechanisms have failed completely due to the continual growth of the USA. (When was the last Constitutional amendment which mattered? Do you expect to see another meaningful amendment in your lifetime? I don't.) But the American political system is unable to acknowledge this or come up with any solution, and so we get absurdities like the Supreme Court saying the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage or trying to ban the death penalty, which makes about as much sense as saying the Bible or the Koran protect a right to gay marriage or disapprove of the death penalty.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues, mold or at least influence the thinking of his peers, and influence the majority opinions which matter. A justice who neither is influenced nor influences is a waste of space, and even harmful - like IE6 or Google's neglect of Google Reader. In contrast, I much prefer to read Rehnquist or Scalia's opinions because they were not so blind or irrelevant.
I'm sure they couldn't, at least not without extenuating circumstances like very able aids or an extremely gross imbalance of verbal and other skills. (IQs are just of the general factor, individual skills can be much higher or lower than the mean; someone can write very well even if they wouldn't understand a statistic if it bit them on the arse.)
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1/3 or 2/3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won't get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
As well, the normal distribution is rarely exactly true; for example, when it comes to intelligence, very rare or de novo mutations mean there is an excess of retarded or very disabled people than the calculations would predict, because one mutation in the wrong place can break a mind, and there are a few phenomenon which might create little bumps in the black tail as well - most obviously, given your mentioned examples, immigrants from Africa or the Caribbeans, but a few other things like assortative mating might also happen.
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.
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...
D'oh!
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.
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.