OK, but we don’t have to speculate about what would have happened if 99% of Hollywood were Jews because, effectively, that’s just history. I can’t think of any “severe ramifications for society” that that led to other than the Golden Age of American Cinema.
(One could point to the studio system, but that wasn’t “The Jews being The Jews” that was “The Capitalists being The Capitalists”.
Or the Black Lists, but, again, that wasn’t because of “The Jews” that was because of HUAC.)
Knowing the actual history of “The Jews running Hollywood” what legitimate reasons are there to question the Jewishness of Hollywood when we know that, AFAICT, there were no severe ramifications for society and the stuff that Hollywood makes unless you have something in mind.
(This is NOT directed at you:
When I hear folks talk about the ‘severe ramifications for society and what Hollywood makes’ in connection with the religion of Hollywood mattering it’s usually a complaint about “the number of Holocaust movies ‘The Jews’ make to guilt the goys into support for Israel”.)
I don’t know who your ‘race realists’ are, but it seems more likely they just didn’t believe this to be true than that they didn’t understand it. Science isn’t maths. “It’s impossible to test this” is the kind of statement that’s begging to be proven wrong with human ingenuity.
For example, in your leafhopper analogy, you’d first want to establish what the leafhoppers themselves see, since their colour vision could easily be different to that of the researchers. Then you can use a camera to take images of the leaves using the correct frequencies, and process them to match what the insects see. After that you can repeat your experiment without this confounding factor.
That’s just an analogy, but I’m equally skeptical that any real example is genuinely untestable.
As for the ‘race realists’, last thing I heard was that they’ve been disappointed in GWAS results, which they expected to confirm their theories. Actually, GWAS’s have raised some new questions, since there’s a large amount of ‘missing heritability’ compared to twin and adoption studies. This is true for all traits, including simple ones like height, but especially for complex ones like intelligence and educational attainment. It doesn’t add up and something must be wrong somewhere, but we don’t know what.
His comment is obviously claiming that expressing actual facts relevant to bigoted stereotypes (presumably unless they disprove the stereotype) is excusing or sanitising that stereotype. Otherwise there’d be no reason to post it in this thread.
It would be really helpful if we had a better name for this kind of fact. What can we call a fact, statistic or whatever that ‘goes in the same direction’ as a stereotype, but doesn’t actually prove it’s true? Eg from examples given previously, that black men are overrepresented in the NBA, or Jewish people in Hollywood?
I’m reminded of a story from How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie is at a social event, and someone is relating a story. That story references a quote, and the speaker notes it’s from the Bible. Dale corrects him, pointing out that it’s from Shakespeare. Both dig in their heels, then defer to an acknowledged Shakespeare ‘expert’ who says Dale is wrong, it’s from the Bible. Now, the quote WAS from Shakespeare, and the expert admits so to Dale later, but pointed out that Dale’s correction was unwanted, the argument embarrassing, and served no purpose besides making Dale look like a jerk.
Not every factual correction needs to be made in public for all to see. The bigot who is repeating stereotypes doesn’t need me to step up and correct his detractors for him. Let the bigot fight his own battles. When I step in, I’m directing the discussion away from the bigotry, which should stay front and center, because that is a real problem that hurts real people.
It just struck me (though maybe it’s already been raised in this thread), that the conclusion that the fact ‘goes in the same direction’ as a stereotype is itself an implementation of the stereotype.
Is it reasonable to look at the percentage of women vs. men in science fields and say that it aligns with (or goes in the same direction as, or is a nugget of truth that supports) the statement that men are better at science than women?
The fact or statistic on its own does no such thing. It does not suggest a cause at all. You cannot say with any confidence something like “the percentage of professional basketball players who are black men is evidence that black men are better at basket ball than white men” without first exploring why that statistic might be true. It is not reasonable to draw conclusions about a demographic based solely on their over or under representation in a particular data set.
Well duh, if you re-do an unreliable experiment with proper experimental rigor, then you can get experimental results that aren’t unreliable. My point is that
a) you can’t meaningfully use the unreliable results from the original unrigorous experiment as “evidence” for the hypothesis, not even inconclusive evidence; and
b) you can’t design or carry out a rigorous experiment on the “natural” level of a cognitive characteristic in an environment where that characteristic has been subjected to significant systemic social and cultural bias.
Sure, if we could create an IQ testing environment without any of the historical and cultural effects of pervasive and persistent anti-Black racism—like we could re-do the leafhopper experiment with more correct classification of the leaves that the experimenter originally misidentified—then we could successfully test “natural” IQ levels of Black versus non-Black subjects. Easy!
But until and unless we can do that, we can’t pretend that the unreliable evidence we get from IQ testing about racial differences in intelligence is merely inconclusive evidence.
I know it’s not winning me any friends to care more about the truth than stopping bigotry, but I do. And I’m not convinced that ‘white lies’ and keeping quiet are the best way to eliminate bigoted stereotypes anyway. Showing people they’ve been lied to or misled by those in authority, even if it’s over something quite minor, is exactly what sends them spiralling into believing every conspiracy theory out there.
I think if you found there were more women than men in scientific fields, and they were doing better, you’d probably cite it as evidence against the stereotype. I’ve seen people bring up the fact basketball was apparently dominated by Jewish players before WWII as evidence against the “black people are especially good at basketball” claim.
Perhaps these are equally invalid inferences? But if not, then what I’m referring to is evidence that potentially could disprove a stereotype, but doesn’t.
NB: some stereotypes are more direct, so they can be confirmed by evidence. Eg, the biggest stereotype of a basketball player is being a very tall man, and this is statistically accurate. Similarly, it may be a stereotype that most basketball players are black, and in 2025 USA, that’s probably accurate too (I haven’t checked). These stereotypes aren’t generalising from one area to a larger one, or inferring anything about causes, so the evidence really does confirm them.
I’m not sure what you mean here. How is a characteristic subjected to social and cultural bias?
This is my actual problem with the whole thing. Racists support a bigoted stereotype, so now we have to pretend we don’t know what intelligence is and can’t measure it. It’s ridiculous. IQ tests are used every day by psychiatrists; I bet you believe they measure something useful when they help diagnose a kid with learning disabilities and get them extra help in school.
You should save your skepticism for the ideas affected by the replication crisis, like social priming, ego depletion, and power posing. Those are very likely total bullshit.
Sure, they measure something, and it’s useful in certain contexts. But intelligence? The whole, broad, vague concept? Yes, I’m highly skeptical, as are many, many professionals in the field.
Getting back to first principles here, I don’t understand why someone would even want to voice agreement of any sort with a bigoted stereotype.
Person 1: Look at that [minority X or whatever], [playing loud music/driving poorly/committing a crime]. So typical of X
Person 2: Yeah, [although most X aren’t like that], well, what do you expect from X? There’s obviously a nugget of truth to that stereotype.
Person 1 is the bigot, but do you want to be person 2?? Do you include the bracketed language, or just agree with the bigot straight up?
If you’re in a political debate, you may find yourself in a fork in the road where you have to either 1) fully deny everything or 2) concede the nugget of truth but point out that it’s a nugget and not a mountain.
If you’re running for office and your opponent is claiming that illegal immigrants commit the majority of crimes, then saying “illegal immigrants commit no crimes” will be pounced on by the media and society and invite a torrent of people citing anecdotes about such crimes. Saying “They commit some, just like every other category of people, but the image is far overblown, and in fact your own category of people may commit more per capita” is the factual way to go.
General you, not you personally. This thread is full of posters denying facts associated with various stereotypes; why would they bother if they really believed they had no bearing on the issue?
The other thing I want to point out is that most people who decry stereotypes of a certain kind embrace them when it’s the other way around. Such as some feminists who reject any sort of painting of women with a broad brush, but then promptly paint men with a broad brush. Or Christians who lump all Muslims and bad Islamic things together in a bucket but, when Christianity is criticized, immediately claim there are hundreds of sects in Christianity and the purported bad behavior reflects only one sect.
The difficulty in precisely defining, let alone measuring, intelligence is one of the “hard” problems of philosophy and neuroscience. There are thousands and thousands of papers written on this subject. One of the fundamental problems in the AI space is no one knowing if they’ve actually created “intelligence,” because there’s no real consensus on what that actually means.
It’s not just wokies refusing to give ground to racists.
Do you think “has a learning disability” is the same thing as “unintelligent”?
Yes, we live in a society where politicians can spout nakedly racist stereotypes and the expectation is that the responder needs to worry about how the media and society will react. This is why I don’t want any limited and qualified agreement. Fuck that lying racist asshole.
He should be the one scared to death to open his mouth and support his statement, not me. Instead, like I noted above, the non-racists are expected to prepare their Thesis Defense while the racists can unload literally any ridiculous lies they want.
Oh sure. And with AI, it’s complicated by the additional question of whether it is/can become conscious in the same way humans are.
The issue here is motivated reasoning: the person invested in proving bigots wrong is not genuinely trying to understand or find some truth, they are seeking evidence that fits their desired conclusion, and coming up with reasons to discount any that doesn’t. (And some bigots are doing the same in reverse.)
Compare intelligence to board discussion of a concept like introversion vs extraversion: I don’t recall anyone claiming these can’t be defined or measured, or saying personality tests are unreliable or only measure what a person says about their personality, and thus are worthless. Maybe someone has criticised or questioned them at some point, but I can’t recall it. Non-sensitive areas of psychology, and ideas congenial to the listener, are generally accepted with little thought.
No. After checking the definitions, I was actually thinking of intellectual disability, and I already knew a low IQ alone is not enough to be diagnosed with that. But AFAIK intelligence tests are commonly used in diagnosing both, as well as in diagnosis of other conditions. The kind of support a child (or adult) needs depends on their intellectual functioning, and IQ tests are a good way of measuring that. The tests can give both an overall score, and specific areas of deficit and higher functioning, which are useful in diagnosis and care.