By contrast, here's an article that explores how certain racial groups appear to be more violent, until you control for class and demographic, when they suddenly aren't.
That is to say, violence and class have common causes. Intelligence, self-control, personality, etc., all immediately come to mind as relevant, but let's call this cluster of common causes of violence "harmness". Even though the presence of harmness may screen off the ability of race to contribute to predictions of violence and class, one still observes more harmness in the population of blacks than the population of whites.
For example, regarding heredity of IQ:
I'm sorry, but this test in no way differentiates between the hypotheses of biological heredity of IQ and verbal transference of IQ. As is, this just shows that there's an attribute which is positively correlated with being talked to by your parents and academic success, and negatively correlated with welfare. To quote the newspaper article:
“One thing is to say we can change adult language behavior,” Suskind said. “Another thing is to show that it is sustainable, and that it impacts child outcomes.”
Even among links which are strongly supported- like breastfeeding raising IQ- there are selection effects that are hard to estimate, because almost all of our evidence is observational. (Breastfeeding is still a good idea for most parents, even if we're not quite sure how good it is.) If cleverer parents are more likely to breastfeed because of the purported IQ-boosting link, then in order to start separating out the effects of breastfeeding and the effects of heritability we would need to measure the IQs of the parents of both groups, moving from a simple observational study to a massive project (that would still have possible unmeasured selection effects, like the amount they care about health and cleanliness).
do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less.
Emphasis mine. The probability of this conclusion being made by correct reasoning from the evidence supplied is epsilon, and if you didn't realize that when reading that quote, I beseech you to give that lapse of rationality solemn contemplation.
I can't be confident it's more than 2%.
The probability of an unbiased survey of the literature returning this conclusion is epsilon. I suggest updating.
meaning even if you can keep these thoughts separate in your head, they can be dangerous memes to spread, because self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.
I think it is worth considering the mirror of this concern. "Anyone who says X must mean Y" is its own self-fulfilling prophecy, which can only be counteracted by saying X and not meaning Y.
LessWrong has been having fun lately with posts about sexism, racism, and academic openness. And here just like everywhere else, somebody inevitably claims taboo status for any number of entirely obvious truths, e.g. "top level mathematicians and physicists are almost invariably male," "black people have lower IQ scores than white people," and "black people are statistically more criminal than whites." In my experience, these are not actually taboo, and I think my experience is generalizable. I'll illustrate.
You're at a bar and you meet a fellow named Bill. Bill's a nice guy, but somehow the conversation strayed Hitler-game style to World War II. Bill thinks the war was avoidable. Bill thinks the Holocaust would not have happened were it not for the war, and that some of the Holocaust was a reaction to actual Jewish subterfuge and abuse. Bill thinks that the Holocaust was not an essential, early plan of the Nazis, because it only happened after the war began. Bill thinks that the number of casualties has been overestimated. Bill claims that Allied abuses, e.g. the bombing of Dresden, have been glossed over and ignored, while fantastic lies about Jews being systematically turned into soap have propagated. Bill thinks that the Holocaust has become a sort of national religion, abused by self-interested Jews and defenders of Zionist foreign policy, and that the freedom of those who doubt it is under serious attack. Bill starts listing other things he's not allowed to say. Bill doesn't think that the end of slavery was all that good for "the blacks," and that the negatives of busing and forced integration have often outweighed the positives. Bill has personally been the victim of black-on-white crimes and racism. Bill is a hereditarian. Bill doesn't think that dropping an n-bomb should ruin a public career.
Here's the problem: everything Bill has said is either true, a matter of serious debate, or otherwise a matter of high likelihood and reasonableness. Yet you feel nervous. Perhaps you're upset. That's the power of taboo, right? Society is punishing truth-telling! First they came for the realists... Rationalists, to arms!
Or.
We can recognize that statements like these correlate with certain false beliefs and nasty sentiments of the sort that actually are taboo. It's just like when somebody says, "well science doesn't know everything." To this, I think, "duh, and you're probably a creationist or medical quack or something similarly credible." Or when somebody says, "the government lies to us." To this, I think, "obviously, and you're likely a Truther or something." Bill is probably an anti-Semite, but Bill doesn't just say, "I'm an anti-Semite," because that really is taboo. He might even believe that he shouldn't be considered something awful like an anti-Semite. Bill probably doesn't think Bill so unpleasant.
That's the paradox: "taboo" statements like black crime statistics are to some extent "taboo" for sound, rationalist reasons. But "taboo" is not taboo: it's about context. People who think that such statements are taboo are probably bad at communicating, and people often think they're racists and misogynists because they probably are on good rationalist grounds. If you want to talk about statistical representatives on the topic of race, be ready to understand that those who are listening will have background knowledge about the other views you might hold.
All this is the leadup to my question: what highly probable or effectively certain truths are genuinely taboo? I'm trying to avoid answers like "there are fewer women in mathematics" or "the size of my penis," since these are context sensitive, but not really taboo within a reasonable range of circumstances. I'm also not particularly interested in value commitments or ideologies. Yes, employers will punish labor organizers and radical political views can get you filtered. But these aren't clear matters of fact. I also don't mean sensitive topics like abortion or religion, nor do I mean "taboo within a political party."
Is there really anything true that we simply cannot say? I have the US in mind especially, but I'm interested in other countries as well. I'm sure there are things that deserve the label, but I've found that the most frequently given examples don't hold water. I think hereditarianism is a close contender, but it's not an "obvious truth." Rather, my understanding is that it is a serious position. It's also only contextually taboo. If it were a definitive finding, it could perhaps become taboo, though I think it more likely that it would be somewhat reluctantly accepted.
Any suggestions? If we find some really serious examples, we might figure out a way to talk about them.