This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Seems pretty stupid. It wasn't Asian empowerment that put someone like Ketanji Brown-Jackson on the Supreme Court - it was good old-fashioned American racial patronage. The idea that black Americans are so incompetent that they can't partake in political patronage is just wildly uninformed and ignores the masterful play of figures like Jim Clyburn, who is likely responsible for Biden's promise to pick a black woman for the court, regardless of merit.
To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.
Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.
Let's talk about pattern recognition. According to the progressive viewpoint, we're supposed to believe that the correlation between IQ scores and life outcomes is some sort of coincidence. We're supposed to believe that IQ tests are somehow biased against blacks and in favor of whites, and just sort of ignore how people from India and China score.
We're supposed to believe that tech companies are thick with a form of white racism that loves those Indians and Chinese but hates blacks and Hispanics. We're supposed to believe that the differences in development between Asia and Africa are total historical happenstance.
We're supposed to look at the great black uplift project that has spent fifty or sixty years accomplishing practically nothing concrete, and just nod along with those progressives when they assure us that this failure has absolutely nothing to do with those pesky IQ scores. We're supposed to avoid noticing that "structural racism" only really seems to keep those low-IQ races down.
There's an entire litany of convoluted unfalsifiable pseudo-religious argumentation that's required to explain why the world we live in just happens to look and function exactly like an HBD/IQ world but totally isn't really.
But we're the ones not recognizing patterns. Right.
I'm not sure what to say besides 'you have spectacularly failed the Ideological Turing Test at every turn, maybe spend 5 minutes pretending your opponents were human beings and then consider what they would say about each of these topics'.
I think that you're right, and that a progressive would never talk about things like this, but I do think he makes some points, and I'd really appreciate it if you could explain how you interpret them, or think that someone on the left might interpret them, instead of merely saying that if we spent five minutes it would be plain. Because, to me, it's not plain.
Here's what I see:
You're right, this is a strawman. Most people recognize that IQ tests are to some extent valid. Progressives would say something more that variation between IQ scores and life outcomes between groups are both due to the differences in how they are treated. (E.g. structural racism.)
I'm pretty sure this is a thing that is not infrequently believed. Look at all the talk of racist tests. Do I think everyone believes this? Certainly not, Asians have a reputation for being smart in the general population, I think. But I'm pretty sure that this is true of some people, and it is not uncommon to think that there is no IQ difference between groups.
I don't know that I've actually seen any explicit account of why Indians and Chinese do well, but it certainly does seem like if you want to stick solely to a "systemic racism" explanation (which, to be fair, it is by no means certain that a progressive will do), it would seem like you have to do something like this to explain the disparity: if disparities are always and everywhere due to racism, well, here is a disparity. In actuality, I expect most would think something like what I said before—that people think that Asians are smart, or have tiger moms driving them to success, which is, of course, far more accurate than that it's due to racism.
I don't think most progressives think about this much. I'm sure some think it's related to the extent to which they were subjugated by colonial powers and fallout from that.
I think that you're right that progressives would never talk like this, insofar as they would never mention that latter point, but his point stands: eliminating disparities has been a failure, and so it seems silly not to at least consider that the disparities might not be entirely environmental.
Yeah, this does seem like a mis-modeling of how the left think it happens, and you are right that this was a failure for him to model the other side. The left would see both failure and lower IQ scores as a consequence of racism, not as some great unknown.
But I think the overall picture is fairly clear. If you want to deny differences between groups, saying that they are due to racial dynamics in culture, I think something not too far from what @somedude is portraying his opponents as thinking seems like it needs to be believed. Yes, I don't think it's very plausible. But I think a lot of the reason that this sort of thing doesn't come up, but is implicitly believed, is because it's prevented from being considered, and a great many people have an aversion to addressing things like this, because they implicitly think it is a bad (as in, morally) thing to have these sorts of views.
Frankly, I long had the same impulse, and am certainly not convinced that every HBD poster here is a paragon of virtue.
But I don't actually know what you yourself think, @guesswho, and I will have a far better time understanding what your view of all these matters is if you tell me, instead of asking us all to imagine our own version of your views (or that of the typical person on the other side). I would rather learn than fight strawmen. This place is a little of an echo chamber, sadly; a breaking of the monotony would be lovely.
In more detail:
The correlation between IQ and income is real, but IQ and wealth are pretty much uncorrelated. Meritocracy-enjoyers like to focus on income alone, but wealth is generally the better indicator of quality of life and economic influence and political power and etc.
The correlation between IQ and income is strong; according to first google result, IQ explains 21% of the variance in income. That is actually a big correlation for a social science paper, but it still leaves 79% of the variance to be explained by other things. Structural racism being one of the hundreds of those things. (probably someone can find a paper with a higher correlation than that, but it's not going to be 1. There's huge variance over other factors).
Yes, IQ scores are an outcome of a system that involves both heredity and environment.
So the charge here is an attempt to conflate different arguments in order to muddy the waters.
The first argument, where people say the tests themselves are biased, is often a reference to a historical argument. A bunch of the figures Murray cites to show blacks being dumb are from older studies that were very definitely biased against blacks in a bunch of ways, including subject selection and other basic methodological stuff; people can look up those debunkings if they want details.
The second argument, where people say that IQ tests are not neutrally measuring innate potential with 100% accuracy and this is probably affecting blacks more than other groups, is not necessarily based on current testing instruments having the same documented problems with language and cultural context and etc. that old ones have. It doesn't rule that out as a factor, but it's not all the claim is based on; lots of other factors, from worries about childhood lead exposure in black neighborhoods to an intergenerational history of being excluded from academia plus underfunded or just bad schools plus etc leading to poor test-taking skills or low enthusiasm/effort for testing to questions about methodology and subject selection to etc. etc.
There are lots of reasons a social science measure may get confounded by other variables, conservatives agree with that point so hard that they want to throw out social science altogether half the time, except the HBD narrative requires this one single measure is 100% accurate and measures only the one specific thing they want it to measure and no other factors. Basically, no to that, there's still the normal room for confounds and plenty of reason to think black people would be uniquely confounded on this measure for environmental and cultural reasons.
'Believing there's no IQ difference between groups' is an uncharitable framing. The real belief is more like 'Does not believe current levels of evidence are sufficient to confidently conclude there is an innate genetic difference in IQ between groups', plus the assumption that until that is proven the utilitarian-optimal policy is to assume the null and look for other factors behind unequal outcomes.
Gotta go make breakfast, I'll see if there's time to do more later
What makes you think structural racism is more important than other thousands things? If hundred of things explain 79%, and they are equally important, this leaves 0.79% to structural racism.
USA Blacks speak same language as Whites and worship same religion amongst many branches of Christianity. That is unlike South Africa where native languages were different. This alone removes largest environmental factors.
There are none. Blacks seem less intelligent everywhere. In tropical countries. In temperate countries. In landlocked mountainous countries. On ocean shores. In market economy countries. In planned economy countries. In dictatorships. In democracies. In Muslim countries. In Christian countries. Everywhere since we have written history. You're making extraordinary claim, which requires evidence.
you're simply unrolling it to make more verbose. John got email from person who calls themselves a prince and asks John's help to retrieve large sum of money. John says that until there's enough evidence, it's utilitarian to consider email author as a scammer. Would it be uncharitable to say John believes he got email from scammer? (oh bad analogy, lol).
And I think you're liar. Your real belief is "if there are anything which proves significant differences in IQ between races beyond doubt, it should be hidden and denied". Your side (Eric Turkheimer) has said it. https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-ed5850b028d1 You're trying to hide it with many words.
If you were trying to make a serious refinement on helping others to understand your position, you could say which kinds of evidence could make you reconsider subject.
I warned guesswho for getting antagonistic, earlier, and the same goes for you.
Please refrain from accusing other users of lying. If you simply must do so, bring more evidence than academics on “their side.”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On the whole, point taken. I read that "variance explained" can be misleading, in a way that underestimates the importance. Now, I don't actually know whether that applies here, as I don't know enough statistics, but from my epistemic status, it's entirely possible that it does.
While this may be true, (I don't know myself, but I assume you have some idea what you're talking about), people also often say this of modern tests where such a bias would be significantly less plausible.
I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here). I would think a broader answer to some of these questions would be to look beyond America. National IQs do some of that, but not entirely (as subsaharan Africa is not exactly known for being the most functional).
I don't think this is true. There are a great many people who think there is no IQ difference between racial groups. But after explaining, you are right that it would be flawed when applied to your views.
I think the assumption there might be questionable. Racial pressures have clearly had fairly substantial effects on our society, including putting people where they are not qualified to be, even in relatively essential positions. At the same time, this makes it harder to hire for merit in general, as there's some level of explicit racial preferences that's legally dangerous to have, requiring it be laundered through lower standards and more subjective evaluations.
To be fair though, you do only say that it should be that there is no "innate genetic difference," which means you could recognize group differences in merit in practice, and think that the de facto racial quotas are bad.
But more broadly, if differences in groups are due to societally-caused unfairness, vs. that that's just the way things are, that might affect what we want to do with society, so it does have practical implications that we should care about. (Of course, a mix of causes is entirely possible.)
Going back to the "ideological turing test" point, I do think your views are more nuanced than many others who would take a no innate IQ gap stance, so I don't think that he failed as badly as you seemed to be saying. (You didn't contest otherwise in the last post, but just to reiterate.)
I would hope that anyone on this board has more nuanced views than 'many others' on their side.
Not just because we're supposed to be smart and thoughtful, but because 'many others' is such an inane standard in the modern world. It could refer to a collection of a few dozen tweets from anonymous posters, it could refer to some clickbait article writer being provocative for pageviews, it could refer to some idiot politician with no knowledge of the subject repeating slogans for votes, etc.
I think if we accept those weakman versions of our opponent's arguments as the correct thing to engage with and argue against, or especially as in this case if we assign those weakman views to the entire other 'side', we're both committing an intellectual sin, and making any possibility of discussion and learning impossible and pointless.
Also, more to the point: OP wasn't just saying 'some people in the world exist who believe this', they were using that as a framing to make an empirical argument that their beliefs were correct and the other side's were wrong.
If you just want to sneer at the other side or describe why you hate them, pointing at their weakmen and how annoying/dangerous they are is fine.
If you want to argue that your beliefs are right and theirs are wrong, then you absolutely have to engage with the strongest possible arguments in favor of their beliefs, or else you've demonstrated nothing at all.
More options
Context Copy link
Linked article is hilarious in that it says blood lead levels haven't been higher for black people in the last ten years... so throughout the infancy and childhood of the black people currently taking IQ tests.
The fact that they take this as refuting the lead example is a pretty on-the-nose example of how competent/honest I expect the HBD side to be in citing statistics, no offense.
At any rate, yes, lead exposure in poor blacks has been falling for decades, and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades. We'll see what it looks like in another decade or two when the tested population mostly consists of people he's claiming have no differential in childhood lead exposure (though again, that's just one of many possible factors, chosen as a random example).
Yes, but note that it was international tests that had the biggest defects in teh original Murray citations. Note how we said that China was way ahead of us on education for decades, because they tested their smartest kids and we tested everyone. Note how doing these tests in Apartheid Africa or something would have given a big white/black IQ gap, but again with pretty obvious environmental confounds. Every country has a unique history of confounds and a unique testing environment, Africa has been a target of colonialism from all sides for a long time, anyone who's not a real expert in local matters is going to have a hard time interpreting results.
More options
Context Copy link
I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are plenty of progressives who will insist that IQ is just a number with no significant meaning. Reddit is full of them. (There are also plenty of people with high IQ who don't consider themselves progressive who will say the same thing)
Who/whom, as always.
For the Reddit set, IQ is The ScienceTM in select situations such as where antivaxxers are found to have lower IQs*, but racist pseudoscience otherwise.
* And in the anti-vaxx example, they are generally displeased if someone asks whether race was controlled for.
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder how many people who say that believe that and how many just say that because they don't want to get canceled?
For those who don't believe IQ holds any meaning, I bet if you told them that they were smart, or a certain group was smart, they'd lap that up with no problem. But be more precise in your language and suddenly it's a problem (because it can reveal inconvenient truths, such as IQ averages across populations).
These same people will then push EQ as a valid concept even though it's nowhere close in terms of being defined as an actual statistically and scientifically valid concept like IQ. Or will say something like "High IQ people have low EQ."
Just world fallacy, believing that everyone is born with an equal number of skill points but just allocated differently.
If IQ is real and some people have more of it, then there must be another totally real domain, such as EQ, in which those people are deficient.
More options
Context Copy link
"Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow". Force them to hear it without openly disagreeing, force them to say it, and they'll come to believe it. And if they don't the next generation will, and we're there already.
And yes, their beliefs are inconsistent. That doesn't mean they don't hold them. And if you can get them to confront the contradiction, they'll drop the part that isn't socially relevant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link