Did you know that pseudoscience about race and ethnicity was a key part of Nazi ideology? If so, do you disagree that this contributed to their efforts to wipe out the Jews?
This is appeal to consequences, though - it’s essentially saying that whether a link between race and IQ is scientifically factual or not is irrelevant - ‘the consequences would be dire, so such data should be squelched even if true.’
We know that race and intelligence is a pseudoscience now. That hasn’t discouraged the white supremacists. In fact, there seems to be more of them in the US than any of us knew existed. My point is, you don’t need bad science to motivate racists, and good science doesn’t appear to discourage them.
We have slavery today. Not the antebellum chattel slavery system we used to have.
You just have to be convicted of a crime, and we don’t call it slavery anymore. As for genocide, there was efforts in that direction in the Philippine-American war of turn of last century. Not to mention Japanese interment forty years later, and the atrocities going on at our border, including involuntary sterilization.
These things recast to fit into the ethical framework of the society. Christian morality condemned the slavery systems of the classical civilizations, so race was invented to justify a new system of slavery. Americans became uncomfortable with the wholesale slaughter and displacement of the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee so they instead replacement them with isolation, neglect and the Indian boarding school system.
The pseudoscience itself has encouraged them, though, which is a good reason not to fund or platform pseudoscience. And given the track record of hypotheses about biological differences between the races, there’s excellent reason to suspect a new hypothesis in that vein will also be pseudoscience.
Well, that’s exactly what this thread is about. Whether such things should be squelched even if they were true.
I was aware. I guess geopolitical factors seem more relevant today.
I said “pseudoscience”, which is what is out there right now. There’s no actual good science suggesting some races are inherently inferior, genetically, in intelligence.
And not just racist pseudoscience, but less obviously wrong but still somewhat controversial issues.
Good science does help ensure smart people aren’t converted to nonsense by those pseudoscientific white supremacists.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. What did I say that you disagree with?
“Geopolitical factors” can make pseudoscience a useful tool for ethnic cleansing. If you can convince your group that the other group is inferior, it’s much easier to motivate them to help you kill them all.
From your mouth to the ears of Deepak Chopra and every homeopath everywhere.
Kidding aside, we agree that no more money, time and attention needs to be spent on things that are pseudoscience. But sometimes we know pseudoscience when we see it and sometimes it takes a little time, money and attention to figure that out.
If, for the sake of argument, physicists come to the conclusion that the multiverse hypothesis is junk. That every wave collapses to the same one know universe. Would you consider all the research, time, money, platforms that had gone into that M-Universe hypothesis to have been a waste of time because it turned out to be pseudoscience?
No. I don’t believe even actual conclusive scientific proof of variances in intelligence by race would lead to slavery and genocide.
I think there was a will to wipe out the jews and they looked for reasons to justify it, if it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another. I think it was driven by bigotry not pseudoscience. I don’t think they one day discovered that jews were mentally deficient and decided that therefore jews needed to be exterminated.
That is in no way a responsive answer to the question that was actually asked.
I’m talking about pseudoscience, not real science. I don’t know what this sort of “conclusive scientific proof” would do. But we have tons of history about racist pseudoscience – and every mass atrocity in human history was accompanied by pseudoscience meant to help justify it.
Pseudoscience was a useful tool for the Nazis. Without it, it would have been harder to motivate their population to tolerate and support this genocide.
History shows that pseudoscience about race is ALWAYS a part of racist atrocities. Always. This isn’t just some replaceable cog – per history, it’s an integral part.
Without diving deep into the topic of race and IQ (which would be a separate thread,) a lot of people use circular reasoning (or Scotsman-ing) to avoid having to engage with the topic.
“Science says there is no link between race and IQ.”
“But this, this, and that point to such a link.”
“Then it must not be good science!”
(The fact that, as one poster pointed out above, there must not be a link between race and IQ, unless it somehow inferred that white people are dumber, in which case it would be okay, further confirms that it’s about what people want to be true.)
We’ve had a million threads on this topic. There is no actual science that indicates that black people are inherently inferior, genetically, in intelligence. None. Not a single shred. If you disagree, let’s see it. Open a thread for it, if you don’t think it fits this one.
I agree that it should be in a separate thread, so I’ll drop this topic after this post. My final word on it is - you are behaving exactly like Christians who argue that any science that contradicts their particular view of the Bible must not be good science. In other words, it’s a begging-the-question circle: “All good science agrees with me, and if any doesn’t, it isn’t good science.”
Whatever this is, it’s not actually responding to anything I’m saying, or even making an actual argument. You could use this response about someone who says “there’s no science that says Obama is a lizard from space”, and it would be equally meaningless. The actual response, if you disagree, would be to show the evidence you think exists.
That’s funny, but when I hear conversations of this sort, the response I usually hear is “Here are the reasons why your so-called “science” doesn’t hold up,”