Ah man, there’s so much mask off here… Imagine you wrote “yeah black
people are dumber than white folks” when you were 22 and three decades
later all you can say is “yeah I am no expert on IQ questions, I’l leave
that to the experts”. And the Lesswrongers don’t see anything wrong with
it……
yeah exactly. Like even on the most charitable reading, he said "yeah there's a bunch of socioeconomic factors, for sure, and htere may be a genetic component, and I have no idea if there's a genetic factor", but that ends up doing (b).
> language game
I've been meaning to write a post about how there seems to be a fundamental failure to understand language and communication. Really should.
>race realist BS
Not even sure what you’re referring to. Lewontin frequently makes extremely dishonest arguments when it comes to humans. His only good work is in extremely abstract areas devoid of any real political investment from him. He treats it as a moral question, not an empirical one.
>Good work
I think spandrels are really interesting, and from what I remember were a good first push forward for neutral theory (which is probably correct). He was also extremely good with his math in all his papers, in no critiques of his papers is his math ever incorrect which is very impressive.
>Bad arguments
His argument that an FST of 0.12 (or around there) precluded any group differences is extremely dishonest. Neutral loci variance to that degree is more than enough to differentiate populations for things like identification. He was pretending to push back against things like “discreet racial categories” which no one really believes in. It’s a strawman. Even Blumenbach, of all people, realized his taxonomy was attempting to group people that were along a continuum.
> His argument that an FST of 0.12 (or around there) precluded any group differences
Not what he argued to my knowledge.
He was pushing back against the genetic or taxonomic significance of human racial classification.
>”I’m not expert on IQ questions”
Was specifically what I was referring to. Regardless, falsifying environmental variables is evidence to genetics if you believe both hypotheses are exhaustive.
Leaving it to pyschologists/psychometricians "would basically make you a race realist" is specifically what you said.
> Regardless, falsifying environmental variables is evidence to genetics if you believe both hypotheses are exhaustive.
Huh?
Yes, because if your only lens of viewing the issue is through psychometrics, and you understand strict factorial invariance and what that actually means, the idea that systemic environmental disadvantages could be contributing to the gap is extremely unlikely, because it would mean the variable(s) contributing to it affect factor score intercorrelations the *exact same* for both blacks and whites despite ostensibly not affecting whites at all.
I'm a layman, and often trying to figure out statistical terminology on the fly. But measurement invariance, as far as I understand, has to do with validating that a test measures the same thing across groups. Basically that the test isn't biased in any obvious ways. That has no bearing on whether systemic environmental disadvantage could cause a lower mean for one group compared to another.
Systemic environmental disadvantages bias testing, which is why MI does not hold in international samples where you get IQs of like 59 or whatever (+bias from other sources). The only way MI could hold with no bias is if the disadvantages somehow affected every black person equally.
A test could essentially be not biased in the sense of measuring the same construct in two groups, and presumably all individuals within those groups. But if whatever enivormental factors lead to a lower score are greater amongst one group, that group would have a lower mean. The environmental factors don't have to affect all individuals in that group equally. That sounds silly to me.
This is honestly quite clarifying. I think I come to this subreddit
because I believe rationalism has something to offer, and yet the
majority of people who self-identify as rationalists seem to have raging
agendas and biases they are maddeningly unaware of. It’s confusing to me
and the combination of extreme intelligence with what looks like extreme
stupidity often makes me doubt myself. But a good old mask-off moment
like this makes it far simpler to sort out what’s what…
> raging agendas and biases they are maddeningly unaware of
unaware of? Giving them too much credit. My understanding of the rationality community has always been this: it's a way for horrible people to launder their beliefs, disguised under technophilosophical speak and jargon.
This is 100% correct, and is scary, given that I have friends in there, and know people in there who at least at some point seemed good to me, but were very amenable to idiotic ideas that make insiders feel important.
Denial undoubtedly plays a role insofar as it’s the method they use to disguise their true natures. It’s on display right there in Bostrom’s apology abt this email.
>"I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity."
He claims he doesn’t agree with his prior statement that white people are smarter than black people, but then he validates the claim in the list of reasons why there might be "disparities in… cognitive capacity." The performance disparities tied to race exist in social access to knowledge, information, and learning strategies. We can think of them as ‘data’ or content; yet "cognitive capacity" operates as processing power — something genetically determined — which has little to do with the ‘content’ of the data being processed. It’s akin to calling every black person disabled due to social factors and I fail to see how it isn’t overt racism. Denial is rarely a product of ignorance — it’s an attempt to maintain ignorance despite knowledge of the contrary. It’s a product of cognitive dissonance and I see a lot of that in his apology.
edited just to put the quote in a block
[Yeah this isn't really being unaware](https://twitter.com/ohabryka/status/1613447686887460864), the thread devolves quickly with some random person claiming there is a 'arge force making it bad to discuss certain things'. A wording which makes all the furries howl.
why are they interested in the intelligence of blacks? are they even
a little bit curious about the various kinds of intelligences of people
in charge of their health and safety? And what about using the theory of
multiple intelligences to evaluate the CEO’s of the top sources of
pollution on the planet? worth looking into just to make sure, for
rationalism’s sake? oh they look happier than the rest of us so no
worry.
If there's a scale between explaining something with "One neat trick!" or "there are innumerable overdetermined factors" these folks are the former.
To the extent a lot of them (Bostrom partially included) are really into explaining climate change as a symptom of Malthusianism rather than directly caring about it. It doesn't matter if It's an insufficient explanation if you just shove as much as possible into a neat enough trick.
They do care about those - look at all the talk of embryo selection for intelligence and stuff like that (which, to be clear, I think is bad and dangerous). I don't think this answers your first question though. I don't see any reason to care about the "intelligence of blacks", which is such a badly defined and useless concept to begin with, other than justifying racist actions.
These guys ignore both the strong signal that IQ is influenced by socioeconomics to the extent the test must be recalibrated in order to keep 100 as an average (Flynn effect, as well as reversal of same as soon as productivity/wages decoupled) and the fact that interrace differences, even if we ignore all the cofounding factors like race and class, are dwarfed by intraracial differences in IQ scores.
And this is ignoring that they just equate IQ and intelligence without any real understanding of what intelligence is or if it's even one thing.
Because if average intelligence, with more variance caused by nature than nurture, is a significant determining factor in the socioeconomic situations a lot of black neighborhoods are in, that means a lot of the current plans in place which attempt to help those neighborhoods are wastes of resources and quite possibly actively increasing the problem due to the system-theoretical archetype of 'addiction' both culturally and genetically.
But luckily for us IQ is pure nonsense and totally not the most important contribution of psychometrics, so we don't have to live with that cognitive dissonance. Curious how we are always right, but gosh darn glad we do!
Nice try. But until you figure out how to get the exercise of trying to convince the world that black people are inherently dumber than whites to disavow to the broad existence of racial discrimination against black people, instead of reinforcing it, this argument will continue to be self-defeating.
I obviously wouldn't use essentialistic language like 'necessarily dumber'. But different averages and variance are to be expected, between any population with wildly different histories. Ethical advice, regarding for example discrimination, has to be built on uncomfortable truths like that. Adjusting your model of the world to what you would like to be true doesn't tend to work that well in the long-term. Those kinds of thinking have the same properties as religious dogma.
ok i will clean it up for you
"Toothless" is often a slur directed toward rural white Americans from the South and Appalachia. This slur references historically impoverished regions whose residents did not have access to dental care.
A better term to use would be person-first language, eg "people who so happen to be white trash without a tooth in their head."
uhhh did you read anything else i wrote or just the offensive thing?
I'm new here (came looking for that spicy Bostrom/EA content) so I just read the rules which say:
> Do not debate racists. This is not a debate-club in the first place, and racists are explicitly forbidden from this subreddit. I will repeat again: DO NOT DEBATE RACISTS. (This may be your first and last warning.)
[Something terrible happened here](https://prnt.sc/izS56xZy-xAb) ;) (Interesting to see that if you are blocked and the posts get removed it still shows up as unavailable. (iirc you can still see removed posts if you got to their profile and it still shows up there)).
Bostrom’s “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt
Ah man, there’s so much mask off here… Imagine you wrote “yeah black people are dumber than white folks” when you were 22 and three decades later all you can say is “yeah I am no expert on IQ questions, I’l leave that to the experts”. And the Lesswrongers don’t see anything wrong with it……
This is honestly quite clarifying. I think I come to this subreddit because I believe rationalism has something to offer, and yet the majority of people who self-identify as rationalists seem to have raging agendas and biases they are maddeningly unaware of. It’s confusing to me and the combination of extreme intelligence with what looks like extreme stupidity often makes me doubt myself. But a good old mask-off moment like this makes it far simpler to sort out what’s what…
why are they interested in the intelligence of blacks? are they even a little bit curious about the various kinds of intelligences of people in charge of their health and safety? And what about using the theory of multiple intelligences to evaluate the CEO’s of the top sources of pollution on the planet? worth looking into just to make sure, for rationalism’s sake? oh they look happier than the rest of us so no worry.
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