The shape of the skull. It’s the only basis. :rolleyes:
Nonsense. All we’re asking for is the same standard of statistical significance—not proof—that any responsible statistician would require from any rigorous statistical experiment.
It’s not our fault that the subject you’ve chosen to make statistical claims about is intrinsically extremely complicated and difficult to study rigorously.
“Fuzzy sets” aren’t your problem here. You don’t need to show that every member of a certain population has a particular characteristic in order to show a statistically significant result linking that population with that characteristic.
All you need to do is this:
**1) Find two or more groups of sufficient sample size that differ genetically in specified ways to specified extents.
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Control effectively for all other differences between the groups.
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Show that the observed quantitative difference in overall results for the groups meets the appropriate quantitative criteria for statistical significance.** (Note, by the way, that not every member of each group has to exhibit such a difference in order for the overall difference to be statistically significant. So having a “fuzzy set” isn’t the obstacle to a successful experiment here.)
Yes, step (2) is the hard part in that procedure. It is, in fact, incredibly fucking difficult to control effectively for all possible differences between groups of actual real-life human beings that could determine a particular outcome.
But just because it’s incredibly fucking difficult doesn’t mean it’s scientifically okay not to bother with it. Responsible scientists, when confronted with an experiment design that they’re not yet able to carry out rigorously, don’t sit around whining that they ought to be allowed to perform it non-rigorously instead, because it’s unfair and mean to expect the same standard of rigor for an incredibly fucking difficult experiment as for easier experiments.
Look, special snowflakes, we weren’t the ones who chose this research topic for you. You chose it yourselves because you were intrigued by a bunch of remarkable-looking facts that seemed on the surface to imply a causal connection between race and some complicated physico-psychosocial outcome. Now you actually have to do the heavy lifting of examining that apparent implication with scientific rigor.
If you want an easier task, go investigate an easier subject. But don’t come around crying because you’re not allowed to get away with skimping the proper scientific procedure on an incredibly fucking difficult task.
African immigrants have the highest academic attainment in the US
Of course, this doesn’t disprove the notion that dumb bunny genes are disproportionately represented in the “black race”. Maybe these successful immigrants are the lucky ones that don’t carry the genes. Maybe they have the genes, but it takes a couple of generations living in harsh environs of the US for genes to be expressed. But the finding should give people some pause before jumping on the “it’s gotta be genetic!” bandwagon. Especially considering what happens to the second generation:
America is the land of opportuny for black immigrants, but not their kids
What’s bad is that it destroys an illusion that people find comforting. Same reason why we have billions that believe in various mythologies even when science and rational thought work so well. Comfortable childhood myths are extraordinarily difficult to overcome.
Actually, I don’t. For what you propose is ridiculous. I’d love for you to calculate precisely turbulent flow. Or weather. You’ve heard of the butterfly effect right? If so you know what you propose is preposterous and the same standards of proof could be demanded from those who deny that genetics have any impact.
Prove that it’s only culture. Some in this thread have already conceded that 100% culture is a “strawman” which in my eyes is concession enough.
Science and rational thought apparently haven’t worked so well for you personally, though.
Because whenever it’s pointed out to you that you have to follow the requirements of science and rational thought in order to make a statistically meaningful claim about a hypothesized causal connection, you simply pretend that your claim has somehow magically been already shown to be true.
Talking to you about statistically significant evidence on race is like arguing with an anti-vaxxer. The more we explain to them that the so-called empirical evidence they’re so impressed by doesn’t actually meet scientific criteria of validity, the more they fall back on stubbornly insisting that we must just be brainwashed.
Who has denied that genetics have any impact? Show us the poster who claimed this. You just keep repeating this strawman over and over.
It’s a strawman that you introduced into the thread, since nobody in this thread claimed 100% culture except you.
Who are those people again? In this thread? Feel free to name names.
How is it a loaded term? It basically means inborn or a characteristic attribute.
You realize the Asian population is not random sample either?
Accurate observations do make me feel better.
Yes, but you are pointing out an observation that has a clear causal link. People tend to drive slower as they age for a variety of obvious reasons. That makes perfect sense as would pointing out that people with dentures tend to be older.
The things you are talking about are closer to stereotypes like Asian people being poor drivers. There is no known causal link, and observations tend to just be confirmation bias. The fact that you just notice a bad Asian driver doesn’t make the stereotype any more true. And even if it were objectively true, there is no basis to assume it’s genetic.
In the above case, no. In general, if you are applying the same logic to a stereotype based on biases, then you are wrong.
So then you agree that these prejudices are not effectively bolstered by observations since there frequency and rigor of observations are not such that anyone can draw a conclusion about a given group?
It is when you can go back mere decades to see the complete opposite. Many people on your side try to link IQ and National GDP. However, you need only go back a few decades to see countries like Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, etc. as economic backwaters. In the 1950’s, 78% of Korean were illiterate. How do you think their test scores would have compared to Americans? Now the obvious change has been that they, as a country, embraced education. It wasn’t genes that changed, it was the culture and environment. There is NO genetic explanation for changes like this, and example of this kind are numerous. And even if you wanted to argue that these “smarter than average” Asians were always capable of such feats, the lessons of history tell us that the expression of those intelligence genes is largely based on being in a productive environment that will foster it.
Depends on what you mean by terrorism and how far back you want to go. That said, you are soft selling the issue. When people like Trump want to ban ALL muslims from entering or leaving the country, you are not making an argument based on relative harm from a microscopic percentage of bad people. You are essentially arguing all or most of them are bad.
Do you think Muslims think the same acts you think are terrorism are in fact terrorism? Do you think Israels (or Russian or US) acts of aggression are considered terrorism to them? This one reason making a bald observation that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists carries a relatively unfair and myopic judgement of what is and isn’t terrorism.
If you think the above, then you have no understanding of how most people use the term. The former might be considered more precocious, but plenty of really smart people don’t pick things up quickly or do things early.
Yes, and most outside observers will judge the average student to be more intelligent.
Hello? We judge the ability based on the process of actually learning something. No one cares if some kid is imminently capable of learning; they care what he knows. Imagine for a second that Einstein was locked in a room alone until he was 25. He has no access to books or people from whom he could learn. When he leaves, would the first people he speaks to think he was intelligent? Of course not.
Again, this is what an outside assessment of intelligence is typically based on. This is why John Kerry is typically considered to be smarter than George Bush despite them having fairly similar academic records. You can make some pie in the sky argument that we are not judging “raw intelligence” or whatever, but that doesn’t really hold up to cold reality.
And again, you are displaying how out of your depth you are. Being able to juggle concepts is a learned skill by and large. This is why a basic demonstration of this idea (memory) can be honed with practice.
Twins have closer environments and experiences as well. This doesn’t speak at all to there being genes that largerly determine intelligence in broad groups like “Asian”.
But they aren’t in reality. That is what you keep missing. You are looking at a snapshot in history and then making up a story to fit your preconceived notions. This is why yours isn’t the working theory of most experts. Because it doesn’t explain why Canadians and Russians dominate hockey or why almost all of SE Asia went from having terrible test scores and rampant illiteracy to being near the top. It doesn’t explain any trend we see; it’s just guesses based on spitball “observations”.
:dubious: Not my fault that you chose to make unsupported statistical claims about a ridiculously difficult topic.
[QUOTE=octopus]
I’d love for you to calculate precisely turbulent flow. Or weather. You’ve heard of the butterfly effect right? If so you know what you propose is preposterous
[/quote]
Wait, what? You seriously think that a chaotic dynamical system whose future state by definition cannot be predicted, like long-term weather effects, is the same sort of phenomenon as population genetics?
So, you realize that you’ve just claimed that your proposed hypothesis is literally and inherently untestable?
You’re wrong, of course: average genetic effects in a population aren’t literally unpredictable in theory due to chaotic behavior. They’re just incredibly complicated and difficult to measure in practice. (Especially when we’re not even sure yet which genes we’re talking about.)
[QUOTE=octopus]
Prove that it’s only culture.
[/quote]
But I’m not claiming that it’s only culture. I’m not making any claims about the relationship of race and intelligence one way or the other.
Because I’m not dumb enough to make scientific claims about a phenomenon that at present is too complicated and poorly understood to do scientifically rigorous experiments on.
I’m just pointing out that you have no scientifically rigorous support for your repeated insistent claim that it’s not only culture.
If you haven’t proved your claim is true, that doesn’t make it my job to prove your claim is false.
In fact, I don’t particularly care whether your claim happens to be true or false; I don’t think it makes much difference to human worth or success if one racial group should happen to be intrinsically somewhat smarter than another.
But I do care, quite a bit, about the proper use and justification of scientific claims. If somebody came along pretending to have a scientifically validated claim that outcome differences between racial groups are not at all due to genetics, I’d be spanking them for sloppy thinking just as hard as I’ve spanked you.
Dude, we’re talking about science here. Your personal observations are at best, a few data points. And they aren’t even scientific data points, since they weren’t done in a controlled study. The person making suppositions and assertions here is you.
When we look at the scientific data we have right now, it is conflicting and its not clear at all how genes interact with all these non-genetic factors (except possibly for very specific genes under very specific sets of factors). That’s what the data says right now. It’s not our problem if you can’t go read the literature.
This is yet again another strawman.:rolleyes: brickbacon is being very patient with you, and the least you can do is to stop resorting to this strawman over and over.
Evidence for either of those claims, (aside from 19th century speculation).
What “won” was superior breeding, the ability to procreate more surviving babies starting from a position of as larger population.
And your attempt at sly racial insults does nothing to make your fallacious argument more persuasive.
Why don’t our distant cousins the pine trees beat us in sprints? Genetics. Same concept between other groups even if much closer related. Now I’ve never said it was 100% genetic so there should be no contention. Aside from the fact that it’s politically unpalatable and since we can’t even agree what “is” is I’m not hopeful for any formal proof. And the funny thing is formal proof of exact contribution is not even possible. Which you know. Thus you are being disingenuous.
G’night, folks. Drive safe.
And why may I ask do I look like I’m making a sly racial insult? I thought the story of the Nd vs HS would be very relevant to this already dumb thread. That’s species vs species, which is probably more illustrative. I worded my assumptions as questions because I’m not sure. Maybe you have different standards for directness of statement. And the talk has been focusing on black athletes for several pages now.
Given enough generations, yes.
No. Strawman.
What I believe is that in a multivariant case like height (or intelligence), there isn’t enough genetic distance between the Japanese and Dutch to create separate populations for height that would persist given equal environments.
The obvious confusion is you seeming to think because I’m making this argument for Japanese/Dutch, I’m also making it for Pygmies/Dinka, when I’m not.
I would’ve gone with “The Aristocrats!,” but yours has a more classic feel to it.
This, for a change, is 100% indisputably true. No argument here.
[QUOTE=octopus]
Same concept between other groups even if much closer related.
[/quote]
Just because some observed differences between groups are genetic doesn’t mean that all observed differences between groups are genetic.
For example, it is a biological fact that on average, French people are more closely genetically related to other French people than to Australians. It is also indisputably true that on average, French people are much better at speaking French than Australians are. Coincidence??
Yes, actually. The reason that French people on the whole outperform Australians at speaking French is not genetic, even though there are also some genetic differences between their overall populations.
[QUOTE=octopus]
Now I’ve never said it was 100% genetic so there should be no contention.
[/quote]
That’s not how science works. Just because you refrain from asserting a more extreme unsupported hypothesis doesn’t make your less extreme unsupported hypothesis valid. You still have to do the work of showing with scientific rigor that there is evidence supporting your hypothesis in a statistically significant way.
[QUOTE=octopus]
And the funny thing is formal proof of exact contribution is not even possible.
[/QUOTE]
For one thing, you’ve mixed up the concept of “formal proof”, which applies to mathematics rather than to empirical science, with “scientific validity”.
For another, nobody’s saying that you have to be able to determine empirically the exact contribution of genes to observed race-based outcome differences in order to make a scientifically valid point. You just have to show with scientific rigor that there is some contribution of genes to observed race-based outcome differences, based on statistically significant evidence.
Which neither you nor anybody else has so far managed to do. Because (and I think I may have mentioned this already) the contribution of genes to complex human physico-psychosocial traits at the level of racial groups is an incredibly complicated and difficult subject to study with scientific rigor.
Honestly, octopus, you should probably stick to discussing the genetic differences in athletic ability between humans and pine trees. That is about the level of scientific sophistication that your scientific understanding is capable of handling. Literally everything else you’ve said in this post is flat-out wrong.
You’re right, I was not being clear. Let me restate my position. In an absolute vacuum, there would be no reason to think there was any connection between race and intelligence/achievement. But we do not live in a vacuum. And in the USA today, it is indisputably true that there is a strong statistical link between race and academic achievement. The question is why that is. And my position is, I don’t know.
What I think is an intellectually unsupportable position is “well, we see this strong link, but there are reasons why it could be due to the environment, therefore we assume is absolutely positively due to environmental factors, and the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to claim otherwise”. That is, treating the “it’s all environmental” position as the default fallback position (which I was referring to as the null hypothesis, likely incorrectly), just kind of because it would be pleasant and happy. Now, I would very much like that position to be true, not least because it would prove an enormous number of really awful people wrong, but we can’t just make it true by willing it to be true. Nor do I see any logical or scientific reason why it should be the assumed-to-be-true-until-proven-otherwise fallback position. (Note: there are good reasons to assume that to be true until proven otherwise, but they are social/ethical reasons, not scientific reasons. That is, a society in which we treat everyone as equals based on race is a vastly better society than the other alternative, but saying “until we are absolutely certain of the scientific truth, we assume this is true, for purposes of societal goodness” is not the same as “we assume this to be true, for the same reason that we assume unicorns don’t exist until proven differently.”)