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gjm comments on There is no such thing as strength: a parody - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (70)
This sort of analogical reductio ad absurdum only succeeds in so far as whatever makes the parody arguments visibly bad applies to the original arguments too.
This is more or less true for your arguments when they are parodying "no such thing as intelligence" (though I don't think the conclusion "there is no such thing as strength" is particularly absurd, if it's understood in a way parallel to what people mean when they say there's no such thing as intelligence).
But it's clearly not true, e.g., for #4. If you divide the human species up into races and look at almost any characteristic we have actual cause to be interested in, then the within-group differences do come out larger than the between-group differences. Whereas, e.g., if you divide people up into those who can and those who can't lift a 60kg weight above their heads, I bet the between-group differences for many measures of strength will be bigger than the within-group differences.
#5 is interesting because what Toni Morrison actually calls "a social construct" at the other end of the link is racism, not race. It's true, though, that some people say race is a social construct. But so far as I can see the things they mean by this don't have much in common with anything anyone would seriously claim about strength.
#6 takes a not-very-convincing argument from authority against belief in race and turns it into a completely absurd argument from authority against belief in strength, because in fact there are good scientists saying that race is an illusion or a social construct or something of the sort, and there aren't good scientists saying the same thing about strength.
It seems to me that your parodies of arguments in class A are consistently less successful than those of arguments in class B -- which is entirely unsurprising because intelligence and strength are similar things, whereas race and strength are much less so.
[EDITED to fix a weird formatting problem. I think start-of-line octothorpes must signify headings to Markdown.]
Er, I realise that I am confused about #6. Its first paragraph seems like exactly the sort of thing someone might say about race, but then the second paragraph is pointing at a study concerned more with intelligence than with race (though it might have implications for inter-racial IQ comparisons).
Actually, it seems like an interesting study (though the press-release description at the other end of the link is a bit rubbish). What they did was to give (nonverbal) IQ tests to two culturally and racially different groups of people, along with lower-level and perhaps more objective tests of neurological functioning. Then they ran regressions to try to figure out what lower-level characteristics predict IQ scores in the two groups, and found that the results were quite different -- suggesting that people in the two groups are attacking the IQ test problems in fundamentally different ways. I think this is the actual published study.
Of course, the state of psychology research being what it is, they did it with a total of 54 people, and if they did any actual statistical analysis of the difference in regression results between the Spanish and Moroccan subgroups beyond displaying some of the numbers and saying "look, they're different!" then I haven't found it. So I wouldn't bet too heavily on it. But it's suggestive, at least.
(I am not claiming that if it were correct it would demonstrate that either race or intelligence is unreal. It could be, e.g., that there are racial differences in how well people's brains "choose" how to attack problems, and that this leads to systematic racial differences in cognitive ability. But prima facie it seems more likely that, as the researchers conjecture, these differences are a matter of culture and education more than of brain structure. If they're real at all, of course.)