I don’t choose my sexual / romantic partners based on how intelligent they are, in fact super-high intelligence is a major turnoff. Even if you did, however, there are much, much, much better ways of telling how intelligent someone is than what race they are. (“What did you study in college”? is a good one, as is conversing with them for a bit). I don’t really see any reason to think that people would start choosing their partners based on IQ, and I see even less reason to think people would use a crude heuristic for IQ like race.
I think the case for AA would get much stronger, not weaker. And no, I don’t believe it rests on the assumption that ‘everyone is equal’. It rests on the assumption that in order to have a fair and stable society, all racial groups should have some representation in influential social institutions, and all of them should have access to tools for social mobility.
As you do point out though, a large swathe of people in America (and probably more in some foreign countries) already believe this.
I don’t think we really have to hypothesize about what would happen if a belief like this were commonly held – for most of American history, the common belief was that black people were inherently inferior intellectually… and this belief was the justification for much of the awful treatment.
Were this belief to return to being commonly held, I think we would see the return of many of the informal means of discrimination (and possibly even the formal means) of the past.
FYI, this is what I meant when I said “cherry picking” earlier. Maybe not a good choice of words on my part, when I ultimately meant that AA programs in this case would preferentially choose qualified members of the X group (to use your terminology) so that they’re not unfairly tarred with the same brush as the 50% with the dumb gene. Not the same thing as current-day AA at all.
Affirmative action ‘cherry pickes’ the smartest Black students right now, which many people actually posit as a criticism of it. I don’t see how that would change if more people started believing that IQ differences between racial groups are genetic.
None of our social institutions, as far as I can tell, are premised on the idea that all racial groups have equivalent intelligence, or that all people are equally genetically gifted (which is a much more fundamental point). Affirmative action certainly is not: there are plenty of different rationales for it, some of which assume genetically rooted IQ differences.
Other than, maybe, the American belief in free market meritocracy, that people who are smart and financially successful deserve their money and status because they worked hard, and should get to keep it. That belief might get undermined if people started believing that your degree of success in life was mostly due to genetics. I don’t think losing the belief in meritocracy would be a bad thing, though.
I never said it was. But we don’t know why Neanderthals went extinct. Given the extended period of overlap (thousands of years), it’s unlikely that we purposely slaughtered them all. It’s also generally thought that Neanderthals, as a species, were on the decline before we arrived on the scene so it’s unclear they would still be here had we not (arrived on the scene).
I mean this in all sincerity-- read something on the subject that is less than 20 years old. Your statements reflect an outdated understanding of our interaction with Neanderthals.
Right now, a member of a minority group who argues that they need AA to get a fair shake will often hear arguments like this:
“There is no discrimination for you to worry about, silly. Quit yer whining and keep working as hard as I have.”
But under the hypothetical, it would hard to say this with a straight face. Discrimination would not only be rampant, but it would be overt and unapologetic. The same way it was before there was Affirmative Action. The smart, capable member of Group X who argues that there is still a need for AA would be 100% correct.
Unless, that is, we just want Group X to self-destruct itself and take the rest of society down with it. Which would sad, considering we don’t even know how much an IQ differential we’re talking about.
Wrong again. How do you know that “such groups” ever existed in the first place? And if they did, how do you know they weren’t absorbed into other groups over time?
I know you want this meme to be true, but you need to actually prove it to be true rather than just throw out a bunch of unsupported assertions about it.
And what does it even mean for all of humanity to have the same average intelligence? That statement doesn’t even make sense.
Speaking from the white male suburban view, the criticism I’ve most often heard is that AA preferentially places underqualified minority candidates in favor of more qualified non-minority ones.
I don’t think that most people would have a problem with AA picking the minority candidate IF they were equal or better on paper than the non-minority candidate. People have a big problem with employers or schools taking minority candidates preferentially over more qualified non-minority candidates.
To use a real-world example, if you have Jamal from Houston Worthing high school applying to UT Austin with a 3.1 and a 1100 SAT, and Billy from Ft. Bend Dulles applying with the same 3.1/1100, then I don’t think people would be as annoyed with Jamal being chosen over Billy due to race as they are when Jamal gets into UT with the 3.1/1100, and Billy ends up at Sam Houston with a 3.3 and 1300.
If there really is a dumb race then even a phenotypically intelligent one might carry the “dumb” genes, just like a phenotypically white person with mixed race heritage can have phenotypicaly black children. It’s also likely such an intelligent individual’s children would regress to the mean, or maybe be an average of the two. Unless hybrid vigor is happening it doesn’t make sense for the intelligent race to mate with the dumb one.
Maybe you’re right and people wouldn’t care, but given the literal discovery of a dumb race I’d imagine people wouldn’t be so progressive. Call me a cynic.
This is interesting because I’ve read studies about how diversity for diversity’s sake tends to make groups more productive for a variety of reasons (Scientific American had a big spread on this a couple months ago). So one could say that using AA to maintain diversity would be good in a productive sense, even if the members being introduced are less capable they improve the gestalt.
I think you’re arguing a more social harmony, moral sense. That would be a tough sell, given all the criticism AA already takes. You’d have to convince people to accept watching jobs be filled with demonstrably less qualified people. And you wouldn’t be able to fall back on culture, oppression, less opportunities, less mentors in the industry, etc., but because they are literally less intelligent. Not an enviable position.
I think there’s an appeal-to-consequences motivation factor at work:
“If certain races had a lower average IQ than others, that would be terrible, so it cannot be true that certain races have a lower average IQ than others. All races must have roughly equal IQ.”*
I think we have virtually no knowledge on which genes are responsible for high and low intelligence in humans, much less their prevalence in various populations, and I think there is direct experimental evidence that refutes the genetic explanation for test-score disparities, so I think it’s ridiculous and utterly unscientific to conclude that black people are inherently intellectually inferior on average due to genetics.
And yet those same people don’t get upset when they learn that Billy can drop out of Sam Houston with a 1.4 GPA and still be more likely to get hired and promoted before suma cum laude Jamal will. They see inequity and injustice in the first outcome, but they assume the second outcome must have been “fair and square”.
I have no idea how Worthing and Dulles compare. If they are comparable institutions and Jamal and Billy have comparable socioeconomic situations, then sure, I can understand wanting both of them to compete on equal footing.
But I’m not going to pretend that universities are meritocracies any more than any other institution. SAT scores are correlated with 1st year academic performance. But the correlation isn’t that strong, and they aren’t predictive of how well a student will do after that year. I think a university should have the freedom to select candidates on multiple metrics. If some of those metrics are intangibles like cultural background or socioeconomic class, I think that’s okay.
Let’s say that Jamal belongs to this Group X we’ve been talking about–the group that possesses all these inferior intellect genes. We know that people who have a high school GPA of 3.1 and SAT score of 1100 can do college work and succeed in life. It’s not like Jamal is mentally deficient. We know that Jamal is sufficiently qualified to do well at an institution like UT if he works hard enough. But without AA, it is likely Jamal will be excluded from the UT’s of the world. He may even be excuded from second- and third-tier institutions who don’t want to fulfill their diversity quotient with a bunch of dumb bunny Xians. He’ll likely get an inferior job because of this, be relegated to an inferior location of residence, and thus have children who will be educated in an inferior way. And what will result is a self-fulfilling prophesy about Group X’s inferiority. Jamal’s uphill battle against stigma is even steeper than it was before.
The truth is that if Jamal had been born 50 years ago, in the body of a “mainstream” person, his GPA and SAT score would have been perfecctly fine, as long as he had met other criteria (the “right” religion, the “right” gender, the “right” socioeconomics). What constitutes “qualified” is a constantly moving target.
This discussion has been interesting, but not as interesting as it could be.
Let’s say that instead of an already stigmitized minority group being the big “dummy”, it’s the dominant racial group. A leading geneticist finds that individuals who self-identify as “white” are disproportionately more likely to have genes for low intelligence than those who self-identify as “non-white”.
I can hear the peanut gallery asking, “Durr…if that’s the case, why do white people outperform blacks, HUH?!”
Anticipating this question, the scientist is able to show how the environmental advantages associated with being white have mitigated the effects of these genes. If white people, as a whole, were treated the same way that black people were treated, as a whole, the central tendency of their IQ scores would not only decrease significantly, but it would drop below the mean score for black people.
These findings are so shocking that scientists the world over try to debunk them. But they are unsuccessful.
The majority viewpoint expressed in this thread is that if a stigmitized racial group was found to be genetically inferior, then we would need to end AA and adopt a laissez faire approach to societal disparaties. So I’m curious if people would still hold this opinion if the hypothetical is flipped.
That’s exactly what I was gonna post! It’s like you reached the same conclusion as me, only faster for some reason.
Given how many people deny evolution and climate change, I’m gonna fight the hypothetical slightly, or at least modify it:
I think that what would happen is that the results would outright be ignored or mocked. Funding for such research would be banned. Major media outlets would devote billions of dollars to discrediting them in the public view. And oh, the crocodile tears that would be shed over reverse racism would fill the Mississippi.
You really think that? Honestly, that post sounds like the CT nonsense we hear from the racialists who claim that no scientist today can investigate racial differences because… PC. I can’t imagine that our society would act that way if,for example, it was learned that Japanese have an extra “smart gene” that bumps up the average IQ of that group by 20 pts. In fact, you’d find people racing to be the first to do experimental gene therapy on their embryos to give them the “Japanese boost” in life.
Many racialists already think that Asians are inherently smarter, and yet how many talk about doing anything like this? None that I’ve come across. These people generally treat intelligence as an immutable characteristic–an evolutionary end-product that we must accept as is and not even bother trying to change.
Well, since no gene has been identified why would anyone talk about it? I’ve never heard anyone refer to an evolutionary characteristic that can’t change, but maybe I run with the wrong crowd.