What’s most frustrating about this is the folks pushing it are almost
exclusively social scientists, or media personalities with no deep
understanding of biological complexity. As an actual Biologist, I am
positive that there is absolutely no ‘racial’ genetic linkage between
genes and whatever flavor of intelligence they pretend to be
measuring.
(Intelligence is not quantifiable. Only made up quantifiable measures
of what your test calls intelligence are quantifiable. E.g. it’s all
recursive, made up bullshit where the design of the test allows one to
find whatever they are looking for and then pin it to a biological basis
that isn’t actually there).
This bullshit race science stuff really pisses me off because it’s
just so incredibly bad in all possible ways and even people who feign
good intentions are just useful idiots.
They can dress it up however they like. They can hide behind as many proxies as they want. They can build byzantine, academic structures around it that inspire awe...
None of it can change the fact that they are people who want to believe white people are naturally "smarter" than other races, so they *choose* to believe that, because they like how it feels.
100% of everything else that comes out of these people's mouths, pens and keyboards is post-hoc.
Nor are they historians, who can tell you exactly how race as we know it was invented to form the justification for racism, which was a way of justifying colonialist oppression that was already profitable and convenient. I would guess that anyone with actual credentials interested in this crap is a psychologist AKA a science whose methodology is perhaps not as well equipped to account for these facts. Especially if you don't want to.
To my perception, even psychologists have moved way past this drivel. Prominent behavior geneticists – even if I disagree with thier perspsective & focus – are putting in decent work to dissect the complex, confounded relationships between genes and individual differences. And that's where contentions today are focused. No serious person is talking about weak, nonsense inferences about "genetic" group differences.
The irony is that this crowd fetishizes the "hard" sciences, like biology, and holds the social sciences and humanities in disdain as having been corrupted by fuzzy, ideological thinking at the expense of academic rigor. And yet, when asked to provide evidence for their own claims, they have to turn to the very worst examples of the social sciences and humanities. Charles Murray, the guy who revived racial pseudoscience when he co-wrote *The Bell Curve*, holds degrees in history and political science, not biology or any related scientific discipline.
Side note: give anybody who tries to use IQ score as an objective measure of intelligence the [Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity) (read the acronym aloud). It was created by the Black psychologist Robert Williams in the '70s as an intelligence test that wasn't rooted in white Western cultural assumptions, but those of somebody who grew up in a Black ghetto in the mid-20th century. Sure enough, the Black college students who took it scored an average of 36 points higher (on a 100-point scale) than the white college students, and repeat experiments provided similar results. The test itself was bogus, and for Williams, that was the whole point: he used it to bolster his case that most of the intelligence tests popular at the time (and to this day) weren't as objective as their proponents thought they were.
Hey his only advanced degree is in poli sci not history. And a lot of the worst spouters of nonsense in academia (from all idealogies) have poli sci degrees (or law degrees).
I mean, except for hard science types and especially mathematicians speaking outside their specialty which goes without saying.
> especially mathematicians speaking outside their specialty which goes without saying
Really? I can't think of a lot of mathematicians who become generalist. Theoretical physicists (Tegmark, etc.), biologists (Dawkins), yes, and especially engineers who become experts on everything.
But I can't think of similar cases of mathematicians who've become public experts on everything. E.g people like Gowers, Ellenberg, Villiani, Tao, John Baez, Eugenia Cheng, all are popular math figures that stick mostly to math.
I'm probably missing some people you have in mind but I'm curious who.
Oh my god, that guy, I never thought of him as a mathematician but I guess he got a PhD.
I was trying to think of people who became well known as mathematicians first, then became public intellectuals, like the Tegmark, Dawkins path. He went straight to being an "intellectual".
You've reminded of the whole "2+2=5" discourse Lindsay sparked. [Timothy Gowers](https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/1290219079605694464) actually felt the need to weigh in on that one.
> The irony is that this crowd fetishizes the "hard" sciences, like biology, and holds the social sciences and humanities in disdain as having been corrupted by fuzzy, ideological thinking at the expense of academic rigor. And yet, when asked to provide evidence for their own claims, they have to turn to the very worst examples of the social sciences and humanities.
I've noted this before - such loud and ardent anti-SJWs as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne think race-IQ science is utter bollocks, and Coyne actually signed the open letter by biologists against Nicholas Wade abusing their research. Both guys are chuds - but they're also competent biologists and know that race-IQ science is nonsense.
The racists follow the science that they agree with, and ignore the subject matter experts who agree with them on a ton of other stuff but say this one's bollocks.
**[Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity)**
>The Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, also known as BITCH-100 or The BITCH Test, is an intelligence test created by Robert Williams in 1972 oriented toward the language, attitudes, and life-styles of African Americans.
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> I have no idea what I just read.
Count yourself lucky.
There seems to be no black-white gap in the UK [GCSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Certificate_of_Secondary_Education) exams. Some race/IQ folks (also known as ['hereditarians'](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hereditarianism)) are trying to explain how this doesn't falsify their view that at least some significant part of the black-white IQ gap is genetic (whatever tf that [even means](https://turkheimer.com/origin-of-race-differences-in-intelligence-is-not-a-scientific-question/)). One of their main points is that GCSE is likely not a good measure of [*g*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics\)) (*g* is what IQ tests are supposed to measure). Turns out the GCSE is highly correlated with *g*.
> 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.)
The proper way to deal with trash is to take it out.
yr regular reminder that the word “meritocracy” was coined to be ironic, in a satire of how the British class hierarchy rationalized and reinforced itself through unequal access to the nurture of “merit”
What’s most frustrating about this is the folks pushing it are almost exclusively social scientists, or media personalities with no deep understanding of biological complexity. As an actual Biologist, I am positive that there is absolutely no ‘racial’ genetic linkage between genes and whatever flavor of intelligence they pretend to be measuring.
(Intelligence is not quantifiable. Only made up quantifiable measures of what your test calls intelligence are quantifiable. E.g. it’s all recursive, made up bullshit where the design of the test allows one to find whatever they are looking for and then pin it to a biological basis that isn’t actually there).
This bullshit race science stuff really pisses me off because it’s just so incredibly bad in all possible ways and even people who feign good intentions are just useful idiots.
Can you explain for the uninformed? I have no idea what I just read.
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