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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.”
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