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There may be something to the accusation that some jobs have been set up in a way to favor people who are very good at showing up with to the minute timing, writing emails and reports, and other things that are convenient for managers but not exactly about the work being done, such that it's more convenient to manage a small white woman moving a few boxes than a strong black man moving many larger, heavier boxes, because her m in general office skills and agreeableness are higher. This seems to happen a fair bit in government positions, where there might be several support white women writing grants for some minority local agricultural program or something. I've seen it in politics, with full time non-minority positions devoted to "centering minority voices" in marketing materials.
I'm most familiar with education, and do sometimes see this happen. People often talk about the degree barrier, and schools being organized like mid-century factories. Recently, I saw a situation where a minority community is required to hire an art teacher. The specific community is rich in professional artisans, that and views of nature is all they're known for. But they have to hire someone with a college degree, additional education classes for certification, who can run classes that are cleaned up and ready to leave exactly when the bell rings, do a moderate amount of accurate paperwork, and write some reports. So they get an outsider. They are not allowed to exchange this position for a business or finance teacher, which they might be more in need of. This is a bit silly and wasteful. The skills for m, training the next generation of artisans is not the same as m fitting into a tightly scheduled, interlocking education system that's stressed about specials teachers providing "preps" for the homeroom teachers, and the bureaucratic money goes towards the latter.
That isn't to say that I generally agree with the woke take that surely if you removed barriers we could achieve "equity," especially in high education and prestige positions. But the structure of at least some jobs (probably the kinds of jobs the average woke activist is most familiar with) are not very tightly linked to their ostensible goal.
What would you say to someone who answered “yes” to this question? Because it comes down to how you define “racial discrimination.” To discriminate is to make distinctions, to distinguish, “to separate from another by discerning differences.” The examples you give all discriminate by race at the individual level; they treat individuals differently according to their race. But what about discrimination at the group level? If a system produces statistically distinct outcomes between two racial groups, even if no individual is treated different on account of their race, does it not still distinguish, separate, and discern differences between the two groups as groups? Does it not then discriminate between the racial groups?
If you read academic race theory works, you end up finding working definitions, usually implicit, in line with exactly this — “racial discrimination” being defined as the presence of “disparate impact” — regardless of whatever causes it. If blacks do have lower average m scores, then anything that sorts on m will discern that difference between the racial groups (unless you deliberately compensate for that racial difference), and thus discriminate between the racial groups. Thus, lower m scores are not an excuse for hiring fewer blacks, they’re the reason using m scores at all is racist.
Are “having predictive power” and “racially discriminatory” mutually exclusive? They certainly aren’t so if you use the above definition. In fact, given your example, the more predictive power your test has with respect to m, the more racist it is.
Again, no. Even if “general intelligence” is real, if it statistically differs between races as groups, then an algebra test that measures it — or any other test that does so — will be racist for exactly that reason.
It doesn’t matter what sort of racism ordinary Americans hate, it only matters what sort of racism American elites hate. And looking at the people who are the credentialed “experts” in these matters, and how the people who interpret and enforce the relevant laws have been drawing upon their views for decades, they’re very much in line with the “disparate impact = racism” view, in which any system that produces statistical differences in outcomes is definitionally racist regardless of the reason why, no matter what real statistical differences it may be detecting. It doesn’t matter if “general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job”; that just means that a “colorblind* selection for job performance is racist.
I think you meant to respond to @non_radical_centrist directly
Yeah, sorry about that.
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Yes. If (1) races are different, (2) that difference results in one race performing better compared to another race on outcome X, and (3) outcome X is relevant to a company, then (4) you’ll see a different racial mix compared to overall population stats.
The race theorists call this racism and assume it is a bad thing. I don’t think it is is a bad thing and don’t really care whether we call it racism or not.
Except you're not in charge, the "race theorists" are, so what you think or care about doesn't matter, only what they think and care about.
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Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
That's interesting, though not directly related to the community I was thinking of.
One of the things I like least about the current BLM iteration of ethnic strife is the way it read ADOS Black/white dynamics into completely different ethnic histories and interactions in regions very far from the areas affected by slavery. Even entirely different countries are adopting it! European countries, with utterly different ethnic histories! But the American West Coast wasn't centrally racist against blacks more than, say, Chinese for much of its history.
Anyway, I guess I was thinking of crafts and community gardening as a stand in for the kind of traditionally human things that most people who are average for their own group really can do, the community is happy to have, and the government likes to encourage, but for Seeing like a State reasons once they are Jobs, or even just Volunteer Positions, they become administratively complex, such that the people who are perfectly able to do the thing itself cannot administer the permits and grants, where most of the money ends up going.
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As Sailer and others have said, you can’t perfectly compare different groups at the same nominal IQ level because actual social dysfunction, being disruptive and other deleterious things are often tied more to how many standard deviations you are below your population average than they are to the overall population. For example the observation that a white kid of 80 IQ is often a lot more dysfunctional and socially incapable than a black kid of 80 IQ. There are entire populations that are capable of functioning at levels that would render an ashkenazi person fit only for a lifetime of psychiatric care.
I wonder if that correlation isn’t only downward. IQ is correlated with conscientiousness, planning ability, time preference and so on. Is it possible that a black person of 130 is likely higher functioning than a Jewish person of 130? Could be an interesting thing to look at.
Is Ben Carson higher functioning than the average rabbi? Seems entirely plausible.
At neurosurgery? Absolutely. At chinuch? Almost certainly not.
What are we talking about, again?
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I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.
I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.
However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.
Or it could be the same reason women are more likely to stick college out all the way through, whatever that is- probably a willingness to switch their engineering major for psychology where white men would leave and go to welding school.
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Many brain cells are expensed trying to justify WHY some groups must ve 'actively discriminated' against when the intuitive value of the above statement is obvious to anyone who has interacted with other people. If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings. Korean bulge bracket banks are filled with Korean girls because they work hard and don't cause trouble all while being cheaper. Silicon Valley is filled with the obvious Asian (East and South) surplus because of their acretive value. Neither circumstance emerged because of a concerted antidiscriminatory lobby, but because market forces brought them to the fore. Capability tests are discriminatory solely because they are barriers to the value capture efforts of activists. Goldman Korea hires girls because these girls generate more value than their cost, but activists hire minorities because their tribe can parasite the value off the host.
There was a problem with racism in the Jim Crow era where, if you were to be colour blind with your hiring practices and what customers you let in in the South, you could get racists making a lot of trouble for you. I think we're well past that era, but that there was a time when things really were nastily racist needs to be kept in mind.
oh certainly, in those situations then real racism comes to the fore and thats undeniable. It still means there is a resource worth tapping in that case. Why don't agriculture firms get unemployed hicks or 'youth' to go pick their damn strawberries instead of mexicans? Something is at play other than a single line that says 'warm body' and that is what screening exercises are for.
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Given the results of integration I have a hard time calling it (the racism) 'nasty' rather than 'warranted' or even 'prescient'. So many downtown areas, neighborhoods, schools, and communities destroyed. So many lives and livelihoods lost. But at least we're not as mean now, I guess.
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