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What would you consider to be sufficient factual evidence to shift your views on HBD in various directions?
In order for the question to make sense, it is probably helpful to think of one's position on HBD along two axes, as in the Political Compass test, and one discrete parameter that would make less sense on an axis. You're also welcome to point out omitted positions.
x-axis, ranging from 0 to 10, where moving right indicates agreement with the statement: Human populations have significantly different average levels of intelligence, and this becomes far more pronounced in the right tails of the distributions.
y-axis, same range as the x-axis, but measured as 10 * perceived percentage of genetic contribution to the difference above. If you attribute some of the difference to the interaction of genetic and environmental influences, give that half the weight for simplicity.
Parameter z: How does intelligence correlate with the moral worth of a person? This can take on one of a few values:
(-1) Negatively
(0) Not at all
(1) Positively
(i) The moral worth of a person is dependent on their actions or beliefs, and intelligence only provides bounds on their culpability or merit.
The question is, I think, a little bit misleading, because humans don't live in a vacuum - they have real desires and needs that require other humans, or some kind of human society, to meet. That's the real challenge, not questions of human worth so far abstracted away from the actual problems we face as to be irrelevant.
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I mean I think near zero on the z-axis? While my x and y answers are probably non-zero, and I do think maybe a rough 60% genetic contribution to individual heritability of g, for lack of a better term (I don't know how exactly to mathematically adapt this to populations in a fair way) but I appreciate z being its own axis. In essence, I don't think it's of any worth to spend a ton of work to evaluate x at all. Like, let's say there are in fact large but not enormous population differences. What am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to be aware that I treat some populations differently than others, and do nothing about that? That's just stereotyping, which I think is morally wrong. Even if say 2/10 of Green candidates for a job are suitable vs 8/10 Blue people, individual respect and concepts of fairness matter more. I'm not gonna toss all 10 Green candidates to save time. Even if the job is important.
It's just stereotyping with extra steps, and is frequently the case. In practice many racists I see are using correlated but generally only semi-accurate indicators to judge group affiliation, and then do little follow-up. Like name, dress, skin tone, things like that. Sure, maybe they make sense on average, but on an individual level? Forget about it. I lived in Miami for a while, and I can tell you first-hand that a lot of people are far more than their upbringing, but more to the point, there's a huge difference in someone from Argentina vs Brazil vs other part of Brazil vs Peru vs Colombia vs Puerto Rico vs Mexico vs Cuba and somehow I'm supposed to believe that either they are all the same, or that other groups happen to be special and uniquely stupid, or something like that? Or that the only thing that matters is the exact percentage of some vague notion of "whiteness"?
And then even going along that note, genetic groups do NOT correlate 1-to-1 with skin color, for example, not as neatly as many would have you think. It brings to mind the craziness of one-drop policies in the antebellum South. What if someone is half-Blue half-Green? Their skin doesn't always average out or something. Africa is a big continent and not all of them are Black and not all Blacks are from Africa and again for the love of God genetics literally doesn't have a notion of race as these neat, immutable boxes, and history doesn't either. (Ancient) Egypt is a great example of how modern looks at racial groups and skin tone are often anachronistic. Maybe the whole white vs Black as a dichotomy or single slider is a straw man, but that tends to be the actual end result of a lot of this discussion.
In fact, someone just last week said on this very forum and I quote word for word:
Which I don't even know where to begin. I love reading and talking about history, and this just reeks of presentism. Look it up. On top of implying some one-dimensional scale of whiteness. Like, if you're going to use it that way, at least say WASP or something. And he didn't stop there, oh no. Of course, a discrimination step comes next. We didn't mention Hispanics or Asians, but that's another often awkward conversation rarely brought up because there isn't a clean and clear answer.
Anyways the end goal of this whole (disorganized, sorry) rant is basically, the whole HBD discussion is orthogonal, almost completely, to morally permissible practical applications. I apologize if I dragged both orthogonal arguments into the same thread. The whole idea of human rights and human dignity fundamentally involves the idea that a person's worth and treatment should, within reason, not depend on instant snap judgements. Were the American Founding Fathers hypocrites for writing words about equality and God-given innate rights when they didn't want poor people to vote, or enslaved people, or non-landowners, or certain foreigners, or women? Yes, at least a little bit. But that didn't make their words and ideas wrong.
Edit: edited intro to address OP's axes more directly.
The current explanation for disparate results is disparate treatment even if we can’t find it on the premise that races are equal outside of how races are treated. But if you prove no races are different, then you’d be foolish to accept disparate results as prima facie evidence of racism.
Stereotyping makes sense when the cost of being wrong is high and the ability to obtain information is low (either there is a high cost or timing won’t permit it). For people who want to reduce stereotyping, the goal should be to make information easier to obtain. But frequently we do the opposite. For example, we don’t allow companies to provide IQ tests.
Point 1 is a good point. Personally my philosophy is that we should be looking for disparate treatment more independently of results, though I understand and suppose I agree that a more thorough and complete understanding of underlying facts and mechanisms could be helpful to figuring things out, at least in theory. Fundamentally I don't like dismissing arguments simply because many make them in bad faith, you can use a true thing to make a bad faith argument. Still, it certainly seems to be true that a good chunk (certainly not all) of the HBD stuff seems to just be Eugenics 2: Electric Boogaloo rather than "let's just follow the science". Not that this is unique to one particular political group, of course. So I guess overall, I think looking at disparate treatment alone and independently is often sufficient, so it doesn't necessarily follow that we need to do a deep dive into HBD theory stuff. I'm open to being wrong. Do you have some examples where it wouldn't be?
I mean there are parts of point 2 that are I think fairly self-evident, and you summarize it well, but I think you overlook that sometimes we actually have a vested interest in fairness even if outcomes are objectively worse. I think these cases are actually few and far-between, rather than super common -- I'm not naive enough to say that diversity is always a strength. I think it often has hidden benefits. I think that sometimes a desire for societal fairness and respect is greater than the need for some super-optimized result, if the cost is introducing a disproportionate amount of stereotyping.
Of course you do make a good point that the equation isn't always immutable. As I myself said in a longer comment just barely, gathering other, better information is really the best case. We don't allow companies to provide IQ tests, but some other forms of testing are allowed. I do think some of the restrictions need to be loosened on what's allowed for recruiters. Jobs are important enough that I think a lot of people in power aren't giving them the policy care and attention they need.
A couple of responses:
Now this is obviously slightly tongue in cheek but I am making an earnest point. I do think there are other things we can and should do (eg blacks didn’t always have super high single family rates). But a belief in tabooing HBD will have a kind of “false” Noticing effect. If we could just taboo the whole discussion on disparate impact on different populations maybe it would be more optimal but who knows.
Following along in your thought experiment, I don't see why that's so bad. My perception is that as a matter of actual fact we are not currently in a position where we have successfully equalized "outgoing" kind of measures of equality, the "disparate treatment" in and of itself. I guess my general train of thought is, there's every incentive to vigorously explore and work on explanations other than HBD and if we do pretty well on outgoing, treatment measures and at that point there's still some unexplained gap, sure let's go there, fine. Until then, we have tools that work just as well that are less controversial and can theoretically do the same thing, so let's pursue those. So sure, at some point maybe we do get in a situation where we are faced with only gaps-based bashing our head against a wall, or the HBD stuff. That's fine! I have faith if that were to happen we would in fact seriously consider HBD stuff, certainly more so than now. I simply don't think we've reached the point of "we've done enough" to merit having the discussion yet. I realize reasonable people might disagree.
That's why I'm actually quite curious downthread to if the other user answers my honest question about when they think we already reached a tipping point where we've "done enough" for racial equality and it's time to throw in the towel, so to speak.
I elaborated also downthread about the dark street thought experiment, but more specifically, the "potential cost" I was referring to was actually "how does the group young blacks feel if someone crosses the road to avoid them". I don't think they would be that broken up about it, and I don't think it would make them feel particularly victimized (and even if they did the material impact on their life is approximately zero). So in that sense, it's a stupid example because both the overall societal cost and the impact on the discrimination recipient are low and also the potential cost to the discriminator is very high. This is, by all accounts, an abnormal rendering of a typical discrimination moral dilemma.
I guess that’s where I disagree. We’ve done a lot to try to remedy disparate treatment. In fact we have de facto discrimination in favor of blacks.
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People stereotype all the time, it is so ubiquitous that people hardly notice. I find it hard to believe you never stereotype.
If you are walking home at night in an isolated area, you would not be more cautious if you encountered a man vs a woman? If you need to move some heavy object, you would not be more likely to ask a man vs a woman? If you are trying to find the best local sushi restaurant, you would not be more likely to ask your Japanese friend vs others? If a customer walked into your place of work speaking Spanish, you would not be more likely to ask your Hispanic coworker for help vs others? If you are looking for a healthy lunch, you would not be likely to ask your fit coworker vs your fat coworker for a recommendation?
I find it hard to believe that your (implied) answer to 'not stereotyping is hard' is 'give up', much less 'give up on purpose'! Especially when it comes to something important. If you have something to say, say it. Don't imply it.
Obviously asking someone for lunch recs is much lower-stakes than deciding on a job hire. Obviously there's also a risk-reward component that I think is just common sense, but we need to be careful about how much we allow this to be stretched. Avoiding someone on the classic dark road, it's kinda no harm no foul, we don't have a duty to talk to strangers there. Avoiding someone in broad daylight in a crowd by blatantly deviating your course might be more legitimately offensive. I think the dark road example is an incredibly bad faith argument.
But sure, I'd ask all or several of my coworkers for recommendations. A fat coworker has eyes and also a brain, and might take a different driving route to work that drives past different restaurants. They also might go to restaurants more often than fit coworker. All very plausible reasons to ask, that could have good outcomes, that I'd rob myself of if I didn't ask. Plus, you know, the respect aspect.
I worked selling flooring for a while and I tried to make it a point when someone came in to not pigeonhole them into a certain price point. Of course this would vary, and of course (I spoke Spanish better than some of my theoretically native-speaker colleagues) you notice patterns, like who is more likely to be a renter vs owner vs businessperson vs tradesperson. But I will say that it wasn't uncommon for me to talk to someone like a neutral adult, and it turns out their financial or job status was far different than my initial guess would have been. I do feel like this helped build an overall environment of respect, and also 100% got me at least a few sales that if I had instantly stereotyped, I would have missed. I think even someone with a limited budget would appreciate me not talking down to them and giving them all the options, and we have a conversation for the literal and explicit purpose of narrowing it down and finding something for them. Use your words, gather data via a conversation, and base your opinions on that! Don't excessively allow background judgements to apply to individuals. It's hard, but not totally impossible, and a basic societal building-block of respect. I'm sure I wasn't perfect, but effort counts. How is that even a point of debate?
Besides, half your examples are not actually stereotyping. Negative stereotyping is when you make an assumption about someone based purely on physical appearance, rumor, etc. and act on that in such a way it impacts your treatment of them in a bad, disrespectful, etc way (as an individual). Asking an established-as-Japanese coworker about sushi is not a stereotype. Visible muscles are not a stereotype. Asking a known Spanish-speaker for help is not a stereotype and is fine. Pointing a customer toward a Hispanic-sounding name coworker in hopes they speak Spanish is bad. Asking said Hispanic-sounding-name coworker directly if they speak Spanish is probably fine and expected, but there are variants on how you ask that might be more or less respectful and don't overtly make the same assumptions.
That's kind of what politeness and respect is all about. No one ever said that you had to genuinely 100% have true respect for everyone around you, but you are obligated in a general social sense to play the game of respect and politeness, and eventually some of that actually bleeds through into actual attitudes. Like the Good Place book title, it's all about "What We Owe to Each Other", a phrase that really stuck with me. Golden-rule type shit. Treat others how you want to be treated!! Is that so strange?
Yes, "stereotyping" was probably the wrong word for the concept I had in mind, "discrimination" is probably a better term. And by discriminate, I mean - to infer something about an individual based on the base rate characteristics of a group identity that he/she belongs to. I am interested in when, and when not, it is okay to discriminate.
I will return to the dark road example, I apologize if you think it is a bad faith argument but I think it is illustrative. In the days following the man/bear meme question, I saw many women say that they would much rather run into a woman rather than a man if walking alone in the woods because the risk of physical/sexual assault is higher with a man. This was considered good/smart/wise risk assessment as this perception is based in reality and backed by crime statistics. It was not considered sexist to treat this individual man based on the statistics of his group (men).
Now compare the same scenario except swap in asian man / black man. We apply the same statistical reasoning yet now it is considered unacceptable and racist. Can you explain why?
The other examples I listed in my previous comment were included merely to point out additional instances where it seems okay to discriminate. I could of course list many more where it is not. I remain unclear on what the underlying principles/rules are for how society arrives at this determination.
No, I'm going to stick to my guns and I absolutely refuse to use a dark road analogy. It's legitimately one of the worst possible hypotheticals/thought experiments for this discussion.
If you can't come up with a better example, it's probably because you don't have one (sorry).
Like, my actual real-world example of being a flooring salesman is much more typical. Some might defend giving disproportionate attention to perceived-as-rich people as a salesman because you do in fact have limited time, and you can get commission from higher sales, etc. I might even be wrong about being fair leading to more albeit less visible success/opportunities and maybe wasting time with poor people would hurt my sales. In either case, I'd defend the the moral requirement to treat people with a fair shake, and also defend the societal imperative to do and encourage the same.
Edit: Think I wasn't succinct enough in point #5. Made this description upthread which elaborates more:
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If a country in Sub-Saharan Africa or any other region with reportedly lower intelligence ever catches up economically to the west without natural resource shortcuts such as oil or rare metals I would see that as proof either that we are not measuring intelligence correctly or that intelligence differences between populations are not relevant to things I actually care about.
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I’m somewhere near neutral on the question and I think most of it is due to confounding factors— education access, nutrition and health care, environmental factors, and culture. It’s almost impossible in my mind to get a pure genetic signal when there are so many factors that we also know affect intellectual capacity that I don’t think we have a smoking gun here. As a minor factor, maybe, but not with the importance some HBD types give it. You’d almost have to have a large cohort of swapped babies raised by other populations to really tease out the genetics. I don’t see anyone willing to do that.
As far as moral worth, I’m firmly in the equality camp. A human should have all the rights that go along with being human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
Isn't this kind of it?
I mean yes, but I’d consider a 10-15 IQ test differential to be fairly minor, it’s one σ at best. It’s there, but unless you’re doing high level stuff, I don’t think most people would be able to tell the difference at a glance between IQ 115 and IQ 100. At lower IQ it makes a difference sure, but for average IQ levels it’s not that much.
Right but it feels like you're assuming that somehow white people have no gains to be made. I think that assumption would fail on the same grounds you would fail those who presume that blacks have no gains to be made.
I'd argue that in the developed world, nobody has any gains to be made. We've removed lead from gasoline, famine and malnutrition are distant memories. In terms of IQ, we've picked all the low-hanging fruit. If there was a way to actually increase a child's IQ beyond avoiding stressors like malnutrition or poisoning, the tiger mothers and educational establishment would have found it by now.
I don't disagree. I just think it's easier to argue the point that there is no stated upper limit given by folks that argue what MaiqTheTrue argues. Since their position, in my experience of arguing against similar ones, is ultimately not based on objective thinking or anything related to the real world but rather moral preference.
When you push motivated egalitarians far enough they will simply resort to impossible to prove theories and assumptions, be that prenatal environment, systemic racism or whatever else. It's much quicker to simply ask them why they expect all of their confounding factors that can never be tested to only be able to affect black people. It helps highlight how the proposition that we could possibly increase IQ doesn't do much for equality.
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x: 10 as stated, but with the caveat that differences within populations matter more than differences between populations - I'd rather work with 99th percentile white person than the average jewish person.
y: 7, rising to 9 at the tails, but the difference in eg income or achievement is somewhat less because there are other factors in between intelligence and outcomes.
z 1, if you take anything resembling a materialist or consequentialist approach to morality, even if it's also religious, smart people are capable of having more valuable experiences / contributions to society than less smart people
What evidence would change my mind:
If the next generation of the best writers, startup founders, scientists and mathematicians, programmers, et cetera had significantly higher black and hispanic representation, that would pretty quickly change my opinion. Or a change in my observation that, in general, any area with a high 'skill ceiling' in terms of intelligence seems to have asian/jewish overrepresentation and hispanic/black underrepresentation. The fact that that's currently not true is a bigger factor in my belief in HBD than any science or statistics right now. And the claim that various forms of racism cause this just doesn't add up, and here are a few more things that, if I was wrong, would change my opinion: Jews and asians with poor or average backgrounds are more likely to rise up into that cognitive elite than black people with rich backgrounds. And top people who are self-taught, top people in hobbies that require a lot of intelligence, or just the smartest people in internet communities I'm in, have just as much asian/jew overrepresentation and black/hispanic underrepresentation, even though you'd expect 'implicit bias' and 'systemic discrimination' to matter less for something entirely driven by personal interest. Gifted children who score high on tests show the same racial patterns. "Okay, but, uh, environmental racism, poor children have worse diets and this stunts their growth, lack of representation prevents them from achieving their dreams, epigenetics..." One of my favorite programming bloggers "grew[sic] up in a household that spent so little money that [he] was regularly lightheaded from hunger because I was actively starving", and yet has gained a significant following and is clearly very smart. He is, of course, asian. And leaving aside races, my personal experience also very strongly suggests that there's some 'general factor' of intelligence that some people just have a lot more of, that it's almost impossible to increase, and that is heritable. Every alternate explanation for differences in IQ or achievement between races just feels like a 'god of the gaps', and doesn't fit the whole picture nearly as well.
Even if we cordon that all off, start from an uninformative prior, and just look at the science and data, HBD still wins. Arguments for the validity of IQ and individual heritability of IQ are very strong, and the arguments for genetic IQ differences between races are pretty strong. There are sophisticated arguments against all of that, eg gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/, but if I dive into any individual technical argument usually either the HBD side wins or both sides have bad arguments. If that changed - if I changed my mind on the strength of the scientific evidence, or factual claims by hereditarians that I currently believe in ended up false - I'd become significantly less certain, but it'd move me less than the above observations changing.
This is very good. I recommend reading it for everyone who wants to learn more about population genetics.
Oh I thought I linked to a subsection, it's very good generally but the section about IQ is misleading imo http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.u5i4y14hya4j
This is a good demonstration of how the science genuinely is complicated though, all it takes is the wrong starting point or a bit of motivated reasoning for someone very capable to take the wrong position (even if sasha is right, it's still true bc there are smart people on the other side), and it's part of why I put more weight on holistic observation than data here
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Rigorous statistical evidence that demonstrates the lack of heredity in all mental and physical characteristics. You'd have to be able to demonstrate that the intelligence of the parents has no impact on the intelligence of any children they have, across both humans and animal populations - so you're going to have to demonstrate that all animal breeding/domestication has actually just been a series of increasingly improbable coincidences. You'll need to conclusively demonstrate that familial similarity is actually a coincidental artifact of human perception with no basis in fact or reality.
I don't think you've adequately defined the moral terms you're using so I'm not going to touch that scale at all. HBD has nothing to say on matters of morality - you may as well ask whether someone's moral worth is dependent upon how good their skin is at conducting electricity.
I believe this is correct. I do believe there is data that would change my mind on HBD. I do not think there is any probability it exists.
Do I think white people just don’t want to be running backs or cornerbacks in the nfl but do have a desire to be tight ends and lineman? No. And the distribution of people who perform those jobs are so extreme that it’s mathematically impossible it’s not coming from genetics. (Current best RB in nfl is probably white and potentially best CB drafted this year is white but those are rare).
I’m not even sure if this would disprove hbd but selective breeding I guess could make the races equal across abilities. You would just need Christian McCaffrey to have a million kids and Clarence Thomas to be the sperm donor for all black kids. In 3-5 generations of doing that abilities would equal out.
But I guess that would just mean hbd is real. Environmental pressure pushing traits in groups leads to differences in groups when they were largely seperated because of geography culture (Ashkenazi separation was culture).
And we sort of see this in white people. Now that the Balkans play basketball with average male height of 6’4 they produce as high of rate or higher rate of nba players than Africans. Though they play in a different way.
One thing I have discovered in adult life is I have a lot of traits like my father - the good and the bad. That seems statistically impossible.
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8, 8, 0.
The first two, I think there's fairly solid evidence, so more confidence would require isolating and editing the specific genes involved. Less confidence would require a demonstration of successfully raising IQ through environmental factors.
The third factor is axiomatic, and is supported by what appears to me to be a very large amount of evidence. It does not seem to me that there is a shortage of intelligent evil people.
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You're asking a lot of people. This feels like it could be an effort to shame people for having politically incorrect beliefs.
At a minimum, you should lead with your own scores and defend them.
That’s a completely fair request. I’m at (8,6,?), where my gut and more conscious intuition are in conflict on the last coordinate.
The best people I know in person are a local religious congregation, who span quite a ways in intelligence.
OTOH, I’m can’t help but look up to people significantly sharper than myself (in math, or Ilforte and selfmadehuman here, for example).
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This is a weird compass, but okay, sure.
I'd probably put myself at X 8, Y 1 to 3, Z i. I can't imagine anything shifting me on the Z axis, and that being the case, I might be shifted on the X or Y axes with new evidence, but it ultimately wouldn't make much difference in my answer to Z.
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