It is known that human populations separately evolved for at least 15000 years, facing different selection pressures that have produced many differences in physiology, appearance, size, prevalence to deseises, even what foods are edible. It would take some serious reasoning to postulate that these differences are magically limited to things that don't affect people's abilities and quality of life.
It is generally accepted that ethiopians (or is it kenyans?) are good at marathons, and that ashkenazi jews have higher average IQ scores and win more nobel prizes. There's two well accepted racial differences in desirable traits right there, so we know it's possible. Unless there's some way to explain ashkenazi genius that removes the correlation with race?
Further, there's quite a variety of IQ surveys, life outcome data, and other such that seems to self-correlate really well and hold up under various controls, and correlates quite mysteriously with race.
So there's a-priori reason to believe in racial differences, and such differences are in fact observed.
If I left it at this, what would your response be? Would it be to dispute that such differences are innate and caused by genetics, as opposed to cultural forces? Forgive me if that's not your response; it's usually a good bet. If that is your response, note that the conversation is now about the details of the corellation, not whether it exists.
That is, the whether question is resolved in favor of racism. The open question is now how:
But whether some kid is smart because his ancestors are smart, or because he caught a memetic smartness in childhood, or because society tells him he should be smart because of his skin color, is irrelevant to someone who is simply wondering if a sample of kids who have the same background will be smart or not on average.
So why reject the above racism-1; that different races have different prevalence of desirable traits, so that learning about race can tell you about such traits? Racial differences are an observation to be explained, not even a question that could go either way.
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.