The Sound of a Dam Breaking
I haven’t posted anything about the whole James Watson fracas, though I’ve meant to, and now William Saletan has massively beaten me to the punch, to accolades from Steve Sailer and a more equivocal response from Ross Douthat. Ross describes Saletan’s 3-part article as brave, and I think that’s exactly right – and the fact that it is brave of Saletan to touch this question is answer enough to those who ask, “why do you bother reading Steve Sailer when he’s such an obnoxious bigot” – the answer being, whether or not that is a fair characterization of Steve, I’ll keep reading him until there are lots of people out there to choose from who are unafraid to touch these touchy subjects. I do think Ross is wrong to refer to an “emerging scientific consensus” about these matters; what would be more correct is that there is a burgeoning scientific debate, a debate that our political and social taboos have tried mightily to stifle, or at least hide from public view. And, like Steve I applaud Saletan for breaking that particular taboo.
But while I applaud its breaking, I still think we should recognize why that taboo exists, and should break it not with glee but with the sober recognition that the advance of human knowledge will leave us no choice, which is very much the spirit in which Saletan engages in doing so. To that end, I think it’s worth engaging a bit more with Saletan’s and Douthat’s conclusions about the matter.
First of all: why is the taboo in place? There are some strong reasons for it; it’s not just a matter of being too sensitive to touchy people’s feelings.
The first of the strong reasons is that science by its nature objectifies and reduces – it has to in order to be science – and so any science of human nature cannot fail to trouble and anger given that what is being objectified and reduced is . . . us. Any science of human nature will reduce our sense of human freedom (and human accountability). That’s why so many of a conservative temperament reacted anxiously to the theories of Freud, Marx and Darwin – or, reaching back further, the psychology of Hobbes.
Closely related to this, science is not a democracy. Ideally, it’s a meritocracy, and where it varies from this in practice it’s because of a necessary institutional conservatism and bureaucratic heirarchy. And any science of human nature would be no different. What follows is that not all are equal in their ability to study human nature. Some humans will be in a better position to say what human nature is than others. In a democratic culture like ours, that’s going to stick in everyone’s craw.
But it gets much worse when the people who have the chops to opine on the science of human nature look noticeably different from the way the people without the chops to so opine. It is not just a matter of “hurt feelings” – it’s a matter of credibility. The kinds of things the hereditarians are saying would be hard to take from anybody, but why would, say, a black lawyer even consider that message credible given the typical complexion of the messenger (and no, razib’s complexion doesn’t count)? By the very nature that the hereditarians and sociobiologists are studying, one would expect these kinds of findings to cause great division.
All of this is true, and all of this is why it is vital that responsible political actors stop trying to suppress this kind of discussion, and start trying to figure out how to discuss it in a way that doesn’t cause great social and political anxiety. Saletan tries his own framing in his third piece, and I’d like to respond to his 10-point plan here.
1. Individual IQ can’t be predicted from race. True – and a good point! But not, ultimately, a very deep one. After all, rationally everyone plays the odds; if you don’t, you’ll just make bad decisions – more bad decisions, probably, than by playing the odds too faithfully.
2. Subgroup IQ can’t be predicted from race. True – and a better point. But, again, very limited; this amounts to advice to calculate the odds better before you make a judgement. I’m not sure this will do much to frame the question better in the big picture.
3. Whitey does not come out on top. That’s right: Jewboy does. Feel better?
4. Racism is elitism minus information. Again, a decent point, but it doesn’t do what he is hoping. This, again, amounts to a plea to people to calculate the odds better before they make judgements. OK – but many (not all) of the judgements will wind up fairly similar.
Here’s the big-picture problem with all of the foregoing: Saletan seems to think the big danger is the rise of white supremacy. I am very skeptical that this is the real danger. Maybe rhetorically fending off this menace is useful, but I suspect that it’s not as politically useful as Saletan thinks – and much less useful than actually trying to figure out how to live in a world of deep racial differences, none of which these points address.
The next few points do more of the latter.
5. Intermarriage is closing the gap. True – but assortative mating may be widening it. It would be very useful to know which effect is more dominant.
6. Environment matters. True – and a vital point. There are likely biological factors that impact IQ that are not congenital, and there are likely congenital factors that are not genetic. It behooves us to pay an awful lot of attention to these things, and we don’t. Whether we can effectively do so with our public health system structured as it is should be one question we ask. But we can’t even ask it until we can talk about IQ without lowering our voices.
7. IQ is like wealth (i.e.: it is not a measure of human worth, and providing a decent baseline is more important than mandating equality).
8. Life is more than g (in both the sense that there is more to life than being clever and that cleverness is not the only important factor in solving real-world problems and being productive).
Both points 7 and 8 are very true, and here, I think, is the heart of what has to be the responsible reaction to the data coming out of the emerging sciences of human nature. But I will note a few caveats. First, the argument about wealth recalls to my mind Mickey Kaus’s early-1990s call for a new, social egalitarianism to replace economic egalitarianism. I’m not clear that we’ve actually made many strides in that direction, and I fear that this call for social egalitarianism to replace cognitive egalitarianism will similarly bear little fruit, unless one can identify strong mechanisms and social and political bases of support for such an egalitarianism. and I haven’t seen that. As for life being more than g – this is very true, but that path could lead in more interesting directions than Saletan maybe realizes, as I’ll get to below. But, at a minimum, thinking about, on the one hand, how to make the modern world more navigable for lower-IQ citizens and, on the other hand, how to prepare lower-IQ citizens to better navigate the modern world, each strike me as extremely important avenues for thinking that we have largely avoided as a society.
9. Children are more than an investment. Yes. But the real question is: what is the purpose of education? If we conceive of the purpose of education as giving every student an equal shot at becoming a Harvard-educated lawyer, there will be a lot of unhappy children. Even if we pursue the more reasonable and noble goal of giving every student an equal opportunity to beome a Harvard-educated lawyer, we’ll probably be misdirecting a lot of resources and leaving a lot of people unhappy. But Saletan is absolutely right that thinking about education in purely economic terms would also be a very bad idea – for democracy, for individual happiness, for pretty much everything except, perhaps, the corporate bottom line. I would be thrilled if the emerging data from the sciences of human nature forced us to start asking how education relates to the responsibilities of citizenship, or a mature apprehension of the good life – and I do think the opportunity is there, for both liberals and conservatives, to take the conversation in that direction. But we have to seize it; it won’t happen on its own, not with our country’s values structured as they are currently.
10. Genes can be changed. Well, count me as one of the skeptics about the prospects for genetic engineering to solve all our problems. I base my skepticism on three broad, general principles. First, the human mind is extraordinarily complex. It will take us longer than anyone thinks for us to understand how to manipulate it safely and with confidence about the outcome. We have, in the past, thought that we could re-make, wholesale, human economies and natural ecologies; we discovered that each was a far too complicated mechanism to be seized and controlled from the center. We have learned things – we’ve tamed the business cycle somewhat, and we’ve gotten better at managing not to wreck the natural environment (global warming notwithstanding). But we are not able to control these complex systems and bend them to our will. Similarly, I don’t expect the wildest dreams of the genetic controllers to be realized. Second, I cannot think of a technological innovation that ushered in utopia. Every technological advance has had its negative side effects. Even when the net impact is clearly positive – the invention of written language, for example, pretty much destroyed the oral epic, but is still net-net a good thing – human history went on, with new social conflicts and contradictions. I don’t see why I should assume that genetic engineering will eliminate whole categories of social misery that were not wiped out by moveable type, the steam engine or the birth control pill. Finally, it is far more plausible to me that genetic engineering will lead to greater genetic differentiation than that it will lead to greater uniformity – unless, of course, there is some controlling authority that ruthlessly enforces the opposite, and the advent of such authority would, I think, be worse than the disease it was intended to cure.
As I say, some of his points are a good start – but only that. I think it is worth thinking, though, about how knowledge of deep differences is likely to impact our society, because I do not believe that all political views are equally consonant with what we may learn from the science of human nature. Charles Murray’s example notwithstanding, those with the most to lose are likely the libertarians, simply because the social basis of libertarianism will not exist if libertarianism leads to permanent racial stratification exacerbated by genetic modification. And this leads me to my final point, about Ross’s conclusions.
Ross is very interested in the question, whether it is the left or the right who will jump on the pro-genetic-engineering bandwagon, and winds up (I think) concluding that the center of both camps will be on that bandwagon with a crunchy coalition of right- and left-wing cranks complaining on the sidelines (at least, I think that’s where he ends up). I think that might be wrong. I actually think the left is in a much better position to embrace the new science than the right is, for a bunch of reasons. The left is already comfortable with the idea of multi-culturalism and race-consciousness. Moreover, it is already comfortable with a certain amount of paternalism. And it starts from a proposition that no one deserves to suffer because of factors that are beyond their control. All of these put the left in a much better position to say: if there are deep, genetic differences in abilities, then public policy has to respond to that in intelligent ways that make the lives of those on the left-half of the bell curve better off. If nothing else, the left is in a much better position to rhetorically handle the emerging science, because it already has credibility with the most important audience.
But there is one other reason why I think the left is more likely to move in the direction of embracing empiricism and abandoning an ideology-driven approach to this science, and Saletan alludes to it in passing. That reason is Iraq. The debacle of Iraq has completely changed the way many at least some on the left talk about foreign policy, has midwifed the birth of a kind of left-wing realism. It is the left (or a portion thereof) that has taken up the mantle of the Reality-Based Community. In the same way that some conservatives (Larry Kudlow, for example) have begun to embrace a kind of unified-theory-of-nonsense embracing neo-creationism, the idea of tax-cuts as revenue-raisers, and the conviction that we are winning in Iraq, I believe there is an emerging group of left-wingers who are going to take empiricism seriously across the board, and not just when it comes to scoring points against the Bush Adminstration. Here’s the key quote from Saletan:
Basically, the debate over the IQ surge is a lot like the debate over the Iraq troop surge, except that the sides are reversed. Here, it’s the liberals who are betting on the surge, while the conservatives dismiss it as illogical and doomed. On the one hand, the IQ surge is hugely exciting. If it closes the gap to zero, it moots all the putative evidence of genetic barriers to equality. On the other hand, the case for it is as fragile as the case for the Iraq surge. You hope it pans out, but you can’t see why it would, given that none of the complicating factors implied by previous data has been adequately explained or taken into account. Furthermore, to construe meaningful closure of the IQ gap in the last 20 years, you have to do a lot of cherry-picking, inference, and projection. I have a hard time explaining why I should go along with those tactics when it comes to IQ but not when it comes to Iraq.
I expect to see a lot more arguments of the form, “I have a hard time explaining why I should go along with those tactics when it comes to X but not when it comes to Iraq” from the left than from the right in years to come, and that’s a major reason why I think we’re going to see more defections to the side of some kind of hereditarianism from the left than we are from the right.
Please check out Eric Turkheimer at Cato Unbound:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/21/eric-turkheimer/race-and-iq/
— Will Wilkinson · Nov 21, 07:19 PM · #
Good points, as always.
It would be nice to see the development of a realist left, but I think you underestimate just how many people on the left have their self-identity bound up into two propositions:
- I am better than other people because I believe in equality.
- I am better than other people because I have a higher IQ than they do.
Any rational discussion of intelligence tends to make them very, very uncomfortable for obvious reasons.
— Steve Sailer · Nov 21, 08:21 PM · #
From the article Will recommended Eric Turkheimer:
“When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.”
In other words, if Eric Turkheimer were ever to discover anything that would support race science realism, he would do what with it, burn it? Couch it in such high-flown philosophical language that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what he meant?
Hasn’t he just wrecked his credibility as an objective scientist? Shouldn’t he be ashamed of that, rather than proud of it?
Turkheimer goes on:
“Why Race Science is Objectionable
“If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups?”
My observation over the last 25 years is that while most of the talk is about the white-black IQ gap, among those who take the lead in demonizing realists, most of angst and underlying agendas are over covering up the Jewish-Gentile IQ gap.
— Steve Sailer · Nov 21, 08:34 PM · #
Will: I read the Turkheimer piece, and found it totally unpersuasive. What he’s saying, in a nutshell is this.
He starts off saying that “innate” is a conceptually flawed concept because every trait is a product both of genes and environment – which is true. But some traits are more genetically constrained and some less so – some require more environmental input to be expressed and some less so – and all traits are somewhere on a spectrum between most of the “information” being in the genes and most of the “information” being in the environment. He and I agree here as well.
Presumably, what would follow from the above is that research on IQ should take great care to be sensitive to the interactions between environment and genetics, and not presume that one or the other is the monocausal explanation. Instead, what he concludes is that any research into this question is inherently offensive because our “intuition” is that behavioral traits are mostly cultural. But the whole reason we have science is that sometimes our intuition is wrong. This is not an argument that he would find acceptable in any other area of enquiry. Moreover, he’s wrong about our intuitions. Stereotypes, after all, are a kind of operation of intuition. Which leaves him, basically, saying that we shouldn’t ask these questions because they are offensive, full stop. Which is, from my perspective, precisely the problem.
Moreover, Turkheimer’s argument is not, structurally, limited to denying the existence of differences between racial groups; he is actually arguing against the existence of “innate” differences between individuals. If, after all, one person can have more of a gift for mathematics or music or gymnastics or what have you than another, then why, inherently, cannot a group of people so vary from another group? The reason would have to be some kind of scientific one; it can’t be that, for individuals, it’s OK for behavioral traits to be “innate” but for groups it’s not. His argument is that attributing any behavioral difference to natural endowments is a violation of our “intuitions.” Well, anyone who has had to suffer through hopeless piano lessons can tell you, some people have an innate gift for playing the piano – and some emphatically do not. And if he accepts that, then the entirety of his argument collapses around him.
— Noah Millman · Nov 21, 09:17 PM · #
Steve: I don’t think the phenomenon you describe is at all limited to, or even especially describes, the left. Rather, what you are describing is the attitude of many “right-thinking” upper-middle-class professional types. Do these people tend to vote Democrat and hold liberal views? Yes. But these people are opinion-takers, not opinion-makers.
What it boils down to, I guess, is: are actual do-gooders and opinion-makers on the left committed to a strong environmentalist position, and will they stay so committed? I think there might be a change in the offing.
— Noah Millman · Nov 21, 09:29 PM · #
Noah: Very well said. I think you should modify your pessimism about genetic engineering, though. Some, at any rate, of the routes from genotype to phenotype are clear and well-signposted; and overall, the comparison of the genome with a human society (i.e. in aid of saying that attempts to improve human nature by tinkering with the one will face the same sorts of difficulties as historically they have with the other) is unpersuasive. A human being—even just his brain—is indeed a complex thing; but a human society is at the next order of complexity up, since it consists of lots of human beings!
— John Derbyshire · Nov 21, 09:43 PM · #
Well, a quick glance at Turkheimer’s critique seems to confirm that the Sailer/Millman extracts of it are indeed reasonably representative.
Therefore, my rebuttal to him would be: “Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!”
— RKU · Nov 21, 09:51 PM · #
“The left is already comfortable with the idea of multi-culturalism and race-consciousness.”
These are not the same thing. To be specific: the Left prescribes multiculturalism for Northern European, and specifically Anglo-Protestant, culture, and race-consciousness for everyone else. This is the summary formula for the destruction of the West. As the growing evidence supports the idea that what we call civilization — liberty, self-government, the rule of law, enterprise, cooperation, and transparency — is a uniquely Northern European heritage, we might be roused to defend ourselves against the claims of the multiculturalists, and this the Left will not abide.
— Ф · Nov 21, 10:01 PM · #
The last time I checked Jews were consider white people. The fact is Jews cannot change races if it suits them. If they do they risk being accused of all of the traits they were accused of during the last centuries save the last fifty years.
thanks
Larry McManus
— lawrence mcmanus · Nov 22, 12:08 AM · #
This is an essentially scientific question, one which you are assuredly right to say involves a scientific debate, rather than a scientific consensus. So why is it an issue that the political bloggers and writers need to be opining on? We’re generally not experts on the subject, and unlike, say, climate change, back before the present scientific consensus, it doesn’t obviously require political action. Why not just leave it be?
I know it’s the nature of blogs to espouse opinions on every subject at the drop of the hat, but this one seems worth leaving be. The science is progressing, it’s not being suppressed, so it seems that the thing to do is let the scientific community sort it out.
— Justin · Nov 22, 12:15 AM · #
Wait . . . this is a political blog? I think I’ve been misinformed. And misplaced.
— Alan Jacobs · Nov 22, 12:50 AM · #
This may seem snarky, but I would ask the “left” types to consider this question. Bill Clinton was born to a widowed mother in the boondocks, who remarried when he was 4. His stepfather was a gambler, an alcoholic and an abuser of his family. In short, his early home environment was anything but peachy.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, is the grandson of a US senator, the son of a Congressman, CIA director and later President. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and probably had the best possible home environment when he was growing up.
Who do you think is smarter? The guy with the best environment, W., or the guy from the boondocks, Clinton?
— JM · Nov 22, 01:02 AM · #
This was an excellent piece on a very touchy subject that I am happy to see starting to come out of the shadows. I stumbled upon this article by accident, but it looks like I may have found a new way to use up my precious time. If all of the discussion here is this interesting, I’ll be spending a lot of time on this site.
As for the actual topic at hand: I have always found it interesting that it is safe to discuss almost any type of genetically-controlled quality as having developed differently (and in some cases, just better) among different racial groups, but not intelligence. In modern society there is such a perceived tie between intelligence and some kind of almost moral superiority, that to even consider the possibility that every racial group doesn’t have the exact same intellectual capability is considered tantamount to endorsing racism. I have known exceptionally intelligent people of every racial identity, but, none the less, it is foolish to think that this would be the one area of human genetic development that just happened to grow in the exact same way in every part of the world.
The key now is to really understand the differences (I suspect that they are much more complex than just smarter-dumber), try our best to remove the judgmental implications, and figure out what this means in a multicultural society. Knowledge, even when it makes us uncomfortable, also makes us stronger.
— Justin M · Nov 22, 02:38 AM · #
First, as a Jew, it was interesting that the article briefly mentioned the Jewish IQ top position, BUT then—kept talking about the superiority of the chinese to whites, and whites to certain blacks.
And, as already pointed out by a poster: This group of jews are a subclass of white people. More interesting to you probably, is that most of the brightest jews are—in fact—liberals. Smart people tend to support equal playing fields—for we know that we have a high chance of coming out well. We are happy to encourage all groups have a chance, because— frankly— we expect to do well in the competition. There is a very simple reason why jews have a slightly higher IQ than every other such group:—for several thousand years, if you were a jewish boy that couldn’t learn to read and do a religious service in a difficult foreign semitic language by the age of 13—then, your children were NOT jews!! It’s called Bar Mitzvah.This removed most of the lowest end genes from our gene pool. Any group could follow the example.
For example, if Celtic Americans ( to pick a group at random) simply didn’t
allow celtic children with an IQ below three standard devs to be considered celts—they would soon have the highest IQ of any ethnic group.
Now, as a person with a four sigma IQ—child prodigy, mathematician—my natural feeling of affliation is not with JEWS, but with smart people!
I don’t care if they are green or have sixteen arms—what is important is their intellect.
Why? Because, I would rather see chess on tv than football or “Gossip Girl”, would rather
see “Physical Review” on a newstand than “Maxim” or “Reader’s Digest”, and would rather talk with people that don’t require me to count to a hundred in my mind between the words. I need people who sharpen my mind—and some of those people are Chinese, some are Jews, some are WASPS, and some are even black! If some were Martians—fine with me. One brilliant mathematician, that I know, is a woman who is a full blooded Aussi Aborigine—who works in hyperdimensional geometry and partial differential equations—a former prof at Princeton! Her husband—also a brilliant mathematician—is a Norseman.
Finally, it was written here that:
// As the growing evidence supports the idea that what we call civilization — liberty, self-government, the rule of law, enterprise, cooperation, and transparency — is a uniquely Northern European heritage, we might be roused to defend ourselves against the claims of the multiculturalists, and this the Left will not abide.
//
I think you will discover that this tradition comes from semitic and related cultures LONG before Europe—think Athens, think Code of H, think
As the jewish comic Sam Lev used to say: “My ancestors were kiting checks, when your ancestors were painting themselves blue—and living in trees!”Sargon, etc. It didn’t come from Europe!! Funny, how it is called, by some:
“The Western Tradition”.
How about some credit?—-we gave Europe its culture—even its major religion. Not to mention the alphabeta ( Aleph Beth)!
Good thing too! A rising tide raises all ships. We got Maxwell’s Equations
( from a Celtic Scot), Whitney’s embedding theorem ( from a WASP),
and Gauss’s Number Theorems ( from a German).
We returned the favor with Einstein’s equations, Lise Meitner’s nuclear fission reaction, G.P’s proof of the Poincare conjecture.
It has a name: It’s called…….Multiculturalism!!!!
For, there are smart people all over the place—who will create a greater human culture if given half a chance!!
— penny · Nov 22, 03:33 AM · #
Some people here may say—in response to my comment—that it is the conservatives —and not the liberals, who support equal playing fields.
“ Some of us came here as slaves, some as indentured servants, some in steerage, and others were told:‘Mr Penn, all the land to the horizon and beyond is yours by Kingly decree—we will call it Penn’s Woods— aka, Pennsylvania’; The reactionaries have a name for this: They call it :…..” The equal playing field.”—-PennyBut, historically, this is false—it was the consevatives who supported the illusion of equal playing fields—while keeping ethnic ( aka antijewish) quotas at Ivy League universities etc.
— penny · Nov 22, 04:11 AM · #
Oops, Alan, I’m sorry I typecast the American Scene (do not take any typecasting to reflect lack of regard)! I do take it that whatever sort of blog this is, it ain’t a psych or biology blog.
I was more concerned about Saletan and Douthat in any case—people who make their living writing about politics, not science.
— Justin · Nov 22, 05:14 AM · #
I agree with everything except the politics which is pure bunk. The Left is deeply committed to a coalition of the elite/nobility — i.e. rich liberal whites, and the various ethnic shock troops used against the ordinary white working/middle class. “Insulting” the Black and Latino coalitions is simply not in the cards for the Left.
While the Right being by degrees populist is more likely to appeal to the sense of the white middle class that they are the bedrock / foundation of the nation.
As for Iraq, it might or might not turn out a “winner” though I suspect letting Saddam bluff us into impotence after 9/11 would have been quite costly. But it’s mostly irrelevant and unimportant. Pakistan’s nukes, Iran’s nukes, who has them and uses them is likely to be more important. As would what to do in the aftermath of losing several US cities in a surprise nuke attack by “deniable” proxies.
If Osama and company can fly planes into skyscrapers (a month and a half after “expert” and Lefty CIA Agent Larry Johnson wrote “The Declining Terrorist Threat” mocking the idea of mass casualty attacks in the US) why not a nuke or two from Pakistan or Iran in downtown DC and/or NYC?
THAT challenge is unlikely to require high IQ. Rather will and determination and wisdom. Qualities largely lacking from a pampered and socially isolated political class.
— Jim Rockford · Nov 22, 05:54 AM · #
no need for germ line modification. just do preimplantation screens and selective abortions. that could do the trip of closing any innate gap.
— razib · Nov 22, 08:42 AM · #
“it was the consevatives who supported the illusion of equal playing fields—while keeping ethnic ( aka antijewish) quotas at Ivy League universities etc.” – penny
And if they did keep Jews or anyone else out, what of it? The universities were private and founded by their ancestors, after all – they could do whatever the hell they wanted with them. One wonders whether those in control of the Ivies today haven’t done the same thing, just using different roadblocks for different people (summer internship for planned parenthood? great service project! boy scouts and rotc? back of the line.)
It’s funny to look at all the ethnic rahrah groups that exist and are supported by groups who demand that white protestants open our orgs to one and all.
The disparity is real. The NYT recently did an article on the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn – a putative “religion” that excommunicates any member who marries a convert or one who does not pass a genealogical purity test that would’ve make Hitler proud, except it’s for keeping out gentiles and the “gentile characteristics” its membership despises.
Christians used to have such groups. Mormons used to ban blacks from the priesthood, and Bob Jones University used to ban interracial relationships, until the IRS threatened to remove the Mormon Church’s tax exemption and DID remove BJU’s tax exemption. Somehow I doubt the IRS will be knocking on the doors of the SY community demanding they pay their taxes.
No, Penny, multiculturalism is pretty much anti-white racism. But as they say, multiculturalism is like rape – as long as it’s inevitable, lay back and enjoy it, white boy.
— Bill · Nov 22, 09:15 AM · #
The reason why getting the IQ of groups important is that assuming that they are equal leads to assuming that lack of equality in results is due to improper teaching or to prejudice. Hence resources are misdirected.
The correct allocation of resources will be directed to ensuring that each individual reaches his/her desired goal which is among those consistent with their innate ability.
The result will be that groups will be distributed differently, but there will still be black physicists, just a smaller proportion than among whites. There may be more black politicians because they seem to be good leaders.
— Robert Hume · Nov 22, 04:13 PM · #
John Derbyshire is right in one sense, changing one human being is less risky than changing a whole society of human beings. But adopting a policy of genetic tweaking is equivalent to changing a society of human beings. What if we went from an American level of average IQ to, say, a German or Japanese level of average IQ in just a generation or two? Remember the first half of the 20th Century? Or, to take another example, remember the1960s, when a whole generation of children was given vastly better nutrition, education, living standards and life choices than their parents had?
Of course, there is the argued Flynn effect and the fact that Western societies have nevertheless remained democracies and continued to grow economically. So I am not saying that lifting, especially, lower IQs would be a bad thing. Just that there are risks to and could be surprises with rapid upside changes in demographics, as Derbyshire understands there are with downside changes in the case of uncontrolled immigration. And saying you are just altering humans, rather than rearranging society, does not get you out of the complexity thicket.
— Henry Canaday · Nov 22, 04:27 PM · #
So the Left (broadly speaking) has been firmly committed to some version of environmentalism at least since Rousseau (though he did suggest we ignore “facts”). Am I reading Noah right in thinking he’s suggesting Iraq will turn that tide?
— Michael Simpson · Nov 22, 04:36 PM · #
Interesting to see conservatism, supposedly the ideology of personal responsibility, falling all over itself to embrace genetic determinism.
— Freddie · Nov 23, 05:51 PM · #
Noah says,
“I believe there is an emerging group of left-wingers who are going to take empiricism seriously across the board, and not just when it comes to scoring points against the Bush Adminstration.”
Anything is possible, of course, but it’s hard to see where this group would come from, or how it would obtain much influence on the left. I wonder what Larry Summers and James Watson would say about this putative emerging group.
In a larger sense, it seems like a sort of moot point – human beings always filter facts and data to fit their preconceived notions, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. There will always be plenty of people, right, left, and center, who ignore or rationalize away inconvenient data.
— Mike S. · Nov 23, 08:35 PM · #
Personally I think Saletan is brave to forge ahead and ignore such basic methodological issues in interpreting statistical associations as the ecological fallacy (drawing inappropriate and unjustified causal conclusions from broad population or geographical associations) or the issue of confounding.
How can science advance if we aren’t willing to throw methodological standards out the window when they don’t help us to confirm what we know in our hearts to be true?
Consider Saletan’s argument about South African test scores, in which he infers genetic causality from a broad categorical distribution of mean scores among the historical race categories of white, Coloured and African, with the white mean at the top, the Coloured mean in the middle, and the African mean at the bottom. Saletan suggests that this reflects something like blood quanta of intelligence, with “mixed race” Coloureds falling in between “pure” whites and Africans (blacks).
What astonishing courage! Minimal survey of literature on South African racial history and categorization shows that the largest portion of Coloured ancestry lies among the Khoekhoe and San peoples of the Cape region and primarily Madagascan and East African slaves with whom they married, plus some white ancestry, with a somewhat distinct subgroup of descendants of former slaves from Dutch Malaysia, who tended to keep separate for reasons of Muslim religion.
Some closed-minded people constrained by the methodological correctness agenda might think this an insurmountable obstacle to a blood quanta approach to identifying Coloureds as intermediate between whites and black Africans. Some might be troubled as well by the questions that the Khoekhoe & San peoples and the Madagascans pose for the tripartite Rushtonian racial classification employed by Saletan, especially since many historic racial schemata treated “Capoid” Khoekhoe and San as racially distinct from “Negroid” Africans. But our intrepid Will remains undeterred.
Likewise, less stout-hearted opponents of methodological correctness might quail at the problems of confounding posed by historical South African patterns of educational spending. After all, per capita annual expenditures for white education were nine or ten times larger than those for African education, and those for Coloured education about three times larger than for African education. But does William Saletan care? No! How can one help but admire the devil-may-care with which Saletan ignores these patterns? It is almost as if he were completely unaware of them. What verve, what clarity of commitment!
We must all be grateful for Saletan’s determined refusal to kowtow the the methodogically correct crowd. Saletan’s willingness to press on in defense of theories discredited merely because they are methologically incorrect is truly astonishing. Hats off, everyone. You go, Will!
— Egmont Kelp · Nov 24, 11:22 PM · #
“In the same way that some conservatives (Larry Kudlow, for example) have begun to embrace a kind of unified-theory-of-nonsense embracing neo-creationism, the idea of tax-cuts as revenue-raisers, and the conviction that we are winning in Iraq”
You are being unfair to Kudlow. He is smart enough to know how much of what is spouting is nonsense.
Be was bought by FreeTradeUberAlles crowd and he is loyal enough to stay bought.
— mik-infidelos · Nov 25, 08:02 AM · #