The thing is, studying the genes behind intelligence is useful, or the neurology.
Studying small populations that have abnormally high or low IQs might be useful.
Studying populations of hundreds of millions of people, where we know there’s massive amounts of overlap is about as useful as trying to settle which “race” has the biggest dicks.
That’s not to say we mustn’t do it: science is not only about what’s useful and sometimes paths that didn’t seem useful turn out to be. It’s just to say the whole “suppressing science” thing is BS: the people most interested in this area are the bigots, they are the people who want to classify people based on appearance.
Still doesn’t address the issue of punitive measures against so-called “failing schools”. If there are reasons beyond schools’ control (including but not limited to genetics) for inner city blacks’ low test scores, as I believe, then these hardworking teachers and administrators are being unfairly scapegoated. Which is not a blow only to their self esteem but a threat to their very livelihood or at least career advancement.
Oy, the false equivalency. Yes, I asked you if you would admit you were “bending over backward to avoid Ockham’s Razor” and concluded that Sam was right to characterize his critics as “abandoning scientific parsimony for the sake of political correctness”. Guilty as charged. Now let’s take a look at some of what has been dished up on the other side:
Have you (Kimstu) gone this far? No. Are there others in the general camp of Harris/Murray/SlackerInc critics who have been more tempered in their rhetoric? Yes. But none of them have called out any of these people for their overreaching or their lack of civility in discussing this issue. To me that comes across as implicitly endorsing that approach, even if you don’t engage in it yourself.
I’ve been fairly into keeping this thread focused on the actual topic - just about how much of a racist waste of oxygen you, SlackBrain, personally, are.
The convo about how much you’re in love with Sam Harris is fairly boring to me, the way all witterings by or about Harris tend to be. Take it to Great Debates if you want a polite borefest celebration of scientific racism, racists.
Well I didn’t address that because that’s not what was just being talked about and what my post was responding to.
Can we just say nobody thinks teachers should be treated unfairly and move on from that straw man? Whether blacks have the same IQs on average or not, teachers shouldn’t be considered solely responsible for uneven results. The end
Point of order, you hypocritical racist crybaby: I’m neither in a camp nor on a side in this “debate.” I just enjoy goading you for acting like a hypocrite, a racist, and a crybaby.
.
:dubious: “Calling out people for overreaching or lack of civility” doesn’t seem particularly appropriate in the BBQ Pit. Even I, always the soul of ladylike propriety with a general aversion to unrestrained effing and blinding at people no matter what the forum, don’t take offense at anybody else’s letting loose in the Pit.
If you don’t want a discussion to become intemperate or uncivil, then, you know, maybe don’t open it in a messageboard forum specifically devoted to rhetorical intemperance and incivility. Or if you do choose that path, then don’t complain if other posters say uncivil things to you. Or if you do feel bound to complain about other posters’ incivility anyway, then for the sake of consistency you shouldn’t be saying uncivil things yourself, even if they’re substantially less uncivil than what some other posters are saying to you.
Having now read the article, I think that the question of whether or not racial-group differences in IQ test scores are genetic in origin is almost entirely irrelevant to the debate over “failing schools”, for the following reasons:
I think the NCLB-style testing-heavy approach to so-called “school reform” is dumb for a whole lot of reasons independent of student IQ. Effective teaching of students, whether smart, dumb, privileged, disadvantaged, non-native-English-speaking, or whatever is not a simple or one-size-fits-all task, and trying to adapt it to optimizing performance on one-size-fits-all standardized tests doesn’t serve anybody well.
The standardized tests that the so-called “failing schools” are “underperforming” on are very different from IQ tests, and many students have difficulty with them for a variety of non-IQ-related reasons. For example, the testing experience of the student “Maria” described in the article was shipwrecked on her language difficulties as a not-fully-proficient English speaker, rather than on any problem with her fundamental intelligence or cognitive ability.
So I think we should all be supporting struggling schools that manage to increase their students’ interest and proficiency in their school work, graduation and college acceptance rates, etc. And we should all be opposing mindless across-the-board quantitative metrics for shoehorning student success into a particular template.
But I don’t see why the question of student IQ needs to be brought into it at all. If standardized tests are intrinsically a clumsy, biased and imprecise tool for measuring student success, then we don’t need to come up with IQ-based excuses for why some otherwise successful students don’t score well on them.
[gently replaces mic in stand in a ladylike proper way]
So how much can the respective beliefs in these threads be attributed to environment? And how was that environment created? By other people whose intellects were shaped by environment?
It is worse when one considers that early on SlackerInc admitted that he brought it to the Pit because he doesn’t “trust that it can be discussed elsewhere without risk of running into some kind of moderation against “hate speech”.”
Meaning that he also did expect the flack, but he is such a snowflake that he as to complain about it anyhow.
It also shows that even he is aware that he would try to do the damndest things to continue to polish the turds from Murray and their ilk.
I’m less than halfway through, but I wanted to highlight something Klein said that I think is very insightful. He said that traditionally, people think of there being racists and anti-racists. But he has increasingly noticed a third group which he calls “anti-anti-racists”. YES. Bingo! If I were talking to him, I would interject “You say it like it’s a bad thing., Ezra.”
Okay, finished reading through once. Here are my initial thoughts:
Lots of talking past each other, and though it was contentious, at least it was largely personal-attack free.
Harris’s main points seem to be a combination of the following:
Murray’s gotten a raw deal by academia and intelligentsia and his books/papers on race and intelligence are not junk science or pseudoscience;
It’s reasonable to look at IQ test score data (and other intelligence-test related statistics) and extrapolate to genetics-based suppositions about differences between groups without considering history and sociology;
Harris/Murray and allies are much too quickly called racists/bigots and this makes it almost impossible to reasonably investigate these questions.
Klein’s main points by my reading:
Murray’s books/papers on race and intelligence are largely poor science, and most of the criticism has been substantive and scientific and not political;
It’s not reasonable at all (and even harmful and highly inaccurate) to look at IQ test score data and other intelligence-test related statistics and extrapolate anything about genetic differences between groups without considering our history and biases in society;
Most of the criticism, or the criticism most discussed, of Harris and Murray (and others) is substantitve and on the science, not the politics.
The first and third points of both probably dominated most of the conversation (along with lots of personal stuff re: Harris and perceived injustice towards him), but I think the second is the most important. Extrapolating anything about the genetics of intelligence between groups from test scores (or other raw statistics) alone in modern society, or recent history, is akin to trying to extrapolate anything about group differences in genetics for farming/physical labor abilities from a series of still photographs of a Louisiana plantation in 1855. Not only would it be leaving out some vital data (about how society treats these groups, much of which can be measured statistically), but it would almost certainly lead to highly inaccurate and scientifically unsupported assertions about genetics.
That is, IMO, by far the most important criticism of Murray and others who believe that present test score data tells us anything about genetics for intelligence between groups; not only that present data does not reasonably lead to these conclusions, but that in a society like ours that has treated (and still does in many ways) black people and others so profoundly poorly, it necessarily cannot tell us anything about genetic differences between groups, any more than statistics about slavery could tell us anything about any genetic tendencies between groups in the qualities of leadership and servility.
And that is after Sam told Klein (and all of us) about ‘how to properly interpret Flynn’ as if Flinn was mistaken and that he (and Murray too) are right.
I have to say that Sam is still depending on the wrong kind of crowd for support, not to also say that this is the 21st century, one should be capable of contacting the experts before telling someone that they properly “understand” what that experts are telling us:
Your reading? LOL, more like your posts! I challenge you to cite from the transcript a justification for this reading. My reading was that Klein very much focused on politics and potential policy implications, and very little on the science.
Here are some excerpts from the transcript I found interesting. I have added a notation to each as to who is speaking:
This is a fair criticism of Murray’s motives, and it is completely fair to establish that he is not just going about pure science for its own sake, for curiosity, or to expand human knowledge. But as Klein seems to implicitly acknowledge here, that doesn’t mean Murray’s data is bogus. So it’s when the anti-racists get hyped up and insist on trying to discredit him on the science itself that they ultimately damage themselves, because they are not really engaging based on science, logic, and following wherever the evidence leads.
Great questions!
Me! Over here! I’m leaping!!!
I had the exact same response to that part of Turkheimer’s argument. I did not at all have the reaction he thought his opponents would reflexively have. But I figured he would just write me off as being worse than the people he was trying to talk to, because I must obviously be a vicious anti-Semite in addition to being a racist. Basically a full-fledged Nazi. :rolleyes:
Here again, he seems to be acknowledging that IQ differences could very well track with more precisely defined ethnic groups, but that the racial categories we generally use are far too broad and murky. I agree with this.
That is because it was an embarrassment when science is only used partially by Murray to justify his (and the other scientific racists) societal solutions.
That, together with Murray’s clear failure to see how Hispanics can demonstrate how wrong he and others are regarding the progress they can get, should be enough to put Murray and their ilk into the same column as “scientists” like Velikovsky.
I read the transcript while on the train. It sounds like:
Harris: These are the data. They show some populations have a lower IQ. Progressives are getting in a panic when it is just the data.
Klein: The data are derived from within a social context within which African-Americans are biased against socio-economically and have been for hundreds of years.
Richard Haier (who defended Harris/Murray), from an article dated today:
That’s, fundamentally, the entire argument I’ve been making. Maybe lots of folks (including some researchers like Haier) have feelings and think it’s likely that genetics is involved in average group differences in intelligence. But those feelings aren’t from any DNA-based evidence. And feelings aren’t conclusions.
And when feelings about genetics aren’t based on DNA evidence, and they just so happen to confirm the assertions about black people made by white supremacists, then it’s reasonable to consider the possibility that the widespread and insidious white supremacism in our culture and society is having some influence these folks, whatever their motive.
Paraphrasing someone Klein referenced whose name I recall, I hold that it’s utterly ludicrous to look at the insane and sadistic experiment that America has run on black people, and conclude that statistical indicators, whether criminal, economic, or educational/academic, can tell us anything at all about inherent inborn (i.e. genetic) abilities.
with a general aversion to unrestrained effing and blinding at people no matter what the forum, don’t take offense at anybody else’s letting loose in the Pit.