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There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of
by nmrm2 11y ago
There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of inquiry because the answer should make no difference in a non-evil society:
>I'm torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine.
(for example, the claim it's "extremely well backed" that IQ is both "heritable" and "largely genetic", when both are hotly contested, the former is impossible to have decent evidence for given all of the confounding variables, and the latter ("largely") is definitely not true, even given the necessarily poor state of evidence on this question:)
> For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.
> But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere -- should simply be banned. I don't say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.
> Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.)
> Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies.
> Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I'm sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:
> "Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like."
- jmorphy88 11y agoSo, in other words, suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like? Strong stuff, that.
- nmrm2 11y ago> suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like? Do not fund lines of thought where the harms outweigh the potential benefits, and/or where ethical commitments are violated. That policy is neither particularly strong or particularly uncommon. It's the guiding principle behind IRBs, which are pervasive. (In fact, as Horgan points out, one of the primary motivations for IRBs was racist scientists conducting downright evil experiments on black men.) There are two components to this analysis. First, do benefits outweigh harms? This is easy because there are no benefits. Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge? Second, are there any ethical violations? Also easy. Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, this is one of very situations where the motivation behind Godwin's Law doesn't apply.
- peterfirefly 11y ago> Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge? Stop affirmative action? Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? It is in fact possible to find it evil to NOT do so... > Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, [...] They are exactly "political outcomes that I don't like". Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.
- nmrm2 11y ago> Stop affirmative action? Affirmative action is motivated by either an absolute belief in diversity being good (e.g., there are benefits for economic minorities that apply ragardless of race), and/or as an intervention meant to correct for structural violence in recent history. The racial question is irrelevant to either of those issues. > Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? Immigration and crime policy written under the belief that some races are genetically superior to others... Didn't I ask for examples that aren't fucking evil? In any case, EVEN IF there is a correlation (after controlling for the hundred of obvious things and god knows what else), other factors (including variation that race doesn't explain and environmental factors) are so extraordinarily dominant that racial variation is more an excuse for racist bullshit than an objective justification for it. Which is exactly why we don't even need to know the answer to the question. > Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals. I have no idea what this means. WRT affirmative action this is barely an intelligible position, because anyone with half a brain will realize that there are massive environmental factors that definitely dominate any difficult-to-even-validate racial causation. WRT crime and immigration policy: writing either informed by a barely statistically significant correlation that's probably impossible to even actually prove because of thousands/millions of latent variables is pretty fucking far from treating people like individuals. Especially when that "science" conveniently validates white superiority theory.