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Brillyant comments on Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, you can probably go about it in the following way. IQ is and was a controversial concept. One of the lines of attack against it was that it is meaningless, that the number coming out of the IQ test does not correspond to anything in real life. This is often expressed as "IQ measures the skill of taking IQ tests".
To deal with this objection people ran a number of studies. Typically you take a set of young people and either give them a proper IQ test or rely on another test which is a decent IQ proxy -- usually the SAT in the US or one of the tests that the military gives to all its drafted or enlisted men. After that you follow that set of people and collect their life outcomes, from income to criminal records. Once you've done that you can see whether the measured IQ actually correlates to life outcomes. And yes, it does.
I don't have links to actual studies handy, but you can easily google them up, and you can take a look at a not-fully-rigorous description of the various tiers of IQ and what do they mean in real-life terms.
Basically what these studies give you is the cost of an IQ point, cost in terms of a lot of things -- income, chance to end up in prison, longevity (high-IQ people are noticeably healthier), etc.
Given this, you can calculate the expected outcomes for the US black population. If their average IQ is 10-15 points lower, you can translate this into expected income (lower than the US mean), expected chance of a criminal conviction (higher than the US mean) and other things you're interested in. Once you've done that, you can compare your expected values with ones empirically observed. Any remaining gap will be due to something other than the IQ differential.
On a macro level it does not. There are smart people, there are stupid people, and the correlation to some outwardly visible feature like the colour of the skin doesn't matter much. I am not a white nationalist, I do not think the Europeans should re-colonise Africa for the natives' own good, etc.
On a micro level it does. For example, I find affirmative action counter-productive. For another example, I don't believe the claims that inner-city schools (read: black) lag behind suburban schools (read: not black) because of lack of funding or because of surrounding poverty. Throwing money at the problem will achieve nothing.
How do you mean? You're saying you believe it to be true that, generally, people with black skin color are more likely to have a significantly lower IQ than people with white skin color... And you believe that IQ is correlated with life outcomes. How can this not matter much?
I also have the sense this may be true in many instances. The theory seems solid, but I'm not sure it works as intended in practice.
Why do they lag behind? Is it because of the IQ difference you believe exists between black and whites?
...
You say you're not a white nationalist...I'm curious about your reaction to those who are? In regard to segregation, for instance... You say you don't think the Europeans should re-colonise Africa for the natives' own good—Why not?
Stupid people are still people. They have rights. Their propensity to make stupid decisions is not sufficient to take away from them the power to make decisions.
Yes.
Is a shrug :-) People have all kinds of political beliefs, I don't find the white nationalists to be extraordinary.
As to re-colonising Africa, see the first paragraph :-)
Hm. These views seem very likely to lead to racism.
I've read Breitbart frequently since Steve Bannon was added to Trump's campaign because I'm fascinated with how Trump (an obvious hustler/fraud/charlatan in my view) has managed to get this close to the Oval Office. It's been illuminating (in a disturbing way) in understanding where I now believe a lot of the Trump support is coming from.
I'm confident a portion of his support is just Red-Team-no-matter-what Repubs. And some are one issue Pro-Life Christians. And some are fiscal conservatives who are sincerely just concerned about the debt and spending. And some are blue collar workers in areas (Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.) where the global economy/technology caused manufacturing to dry up decades ago and they are mad as hell about the facts of the world and will just keep voting to change something, anything until they day they die...
But there is also this (disturbingly large) element of the movement that think non-white people are less than white people. Like, this group of Trump supporters are literally white supremacists—they believe white people are better suited for civilization. And, of course, no one can say that and politically get away with it in 2016, so they use all sorts of dog whistle-y language to imply it—including the main Trumpian slogan, "Make America Great Again™"
LOL. "Could lead to dancing".
Under a common definition of racism as belief in meaningful differences between races, these views are racism. So?
I mean "racism" in a way that is significantly consequential for those who are discriminated against. An active racism.
If there truly are meaningful genetic differences between races, then so be it. But that seems to be the justification for the portion of "white supremacist" Trump supporters I mentioned above. It's an angry racism that seems likely to be problematic.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
Well, as compared the hypothetical problems this "racism" or "white supremacism" might supposedly cause in the future; the type of "police and all whites are racist" anti-racism you are promoting is having problematic consequences right now, in the form of anti-police and generally anti-white rioting by blacks in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, etc. Not to mention that we'll never solve the problem of large amount of black-on-black crime if we can't admit it's cause.
That's actually Sino-Judaic supremacism, you white gweilo untermenschen!
What is it's cause in your view? How do we solve it?
A combination of low IQ and the fact the the political will to properly police black neighborhoods doesn't exist due to the type of "anti-racism" you support.
How does low IQ directly cause crime?
What does this entail?
What do you mean by "racism". If you mean "the belief that people of different races differ in ability", then yes. Of cource, in that case being "racist" is in fact rational.
As Eliezer likes to say "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be".