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If your curiosity is genuine I can tell you the answer. First, a casual perusal of any human biodiversity blog will tell you that they do in fact care about di

If your curiosity is genuine I can tell you the answer. First, a casual perusal of any human biodiversity blog will tell you that they do in fact care about differences between Germans and Irish as well. Or Tamils and Gujuratis, or a variety of other groups that exhibit interesting differences. Intelligence is particularly interesting relative to other traits since it explains so many social outcomes, but many other traits are interesting. For example, clannishness: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/how-inbred-are-europeans/ https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/how-inbred-are-euro... Some people just find human biology intrinsically interesting, and don't have the same negative emotional reactions to it that you do. If you want a more traditional "give me a grant" motivation, here it is: public policy. Consider racial disparities across fields. One possible cause of such disparities is disparate treatment - e.g., judging white job applicants more harshly than Asian ones. Another possibility is disparate ability - e.g. a greater proportion of Asian people than white people are smart. Different causes of disparities would significantly change what policy you would choose. For example, if disparate ability is the cause and equal outcomes is your goal, you would choose a quota system to cap the number of Asians. and to anyone who shouts them down, calls them racist and attempts to get them socially ostracized, they say, "why are you trying to hide the truth? Fixed that for you.

pron 10y ago
> If you want a more traditional "give me a grant" motivation, here it is: public policy. In that case, I can set your mind at ease. There is a wide scientific consensus -- no less conclusive than the consensus on global warming and based on decades of research -- that social policy itself and other social forces are by far the leading causes for power disparity. Just to be clear: differences in ability among social groups are real, variance of ability among individuals due to biology is also real, and ability is indeed one factor in power disparity among individuals. What we're debating is the relationship between the three. The debate is whether biological differences are the main explanation for differences in abilities between social groups, and, more importantly, whether biological differences have any significant explanatory power for the vast power disparity between social groups. Also, it is unclear to me how a positive answer for the biological explanation could possibly affect public policy. Your point that "if ... equal outcomes is your goal, you would choose a quota system to cap the number of Asians" is a non-sequitur. For one, "equal income" in the public policy sense doesn't remotely resemble what you imply you think it does in your suggestion. For another, I don't see why your suggestion would be different if the difference in ability was environmental rather than biological. > don't have the same negative emotional reactions to it that you do My emotional reaction stems from the fact that empirical evidence is so much against a biological explanation for the power disparity, and arguments against it are based on findings of such small effect size (which doesn't even suggest causality, but even assuming it does) combined with strong potential self-interest. This is a very similar emotional response to that towards climate-change deniers. Their evidence is weak, and denying human-caused global warming serves their interests. Maybe the reaction is unjustified and we should approach every single time anyone brings up an idea without consideration for the thousands of times similar ideas have been expressed in the past, but the reaction is nonetheless, I think, very reasonable. > calls them racist I think you are way too obsessed with labels. Definitions in social science are not the same as definitions in the exact sciences, and they are more used as a shortcut to frame a first guess. The opinions you express are textbook scientific racism, lifted almost verbatim from late-19th or early-20th century texts. I use the name to roughly place them in a tradition of ideas; you think it is an insult. Such rough categorization (which are well recognized by social researchers as such) are an invaluable tool in disciplines with too many variables. Without them, we cannot even begin to discuss models in the history of ideas. Denying that your ideas are part of the traditions is silly and factually wrong, and completely separate from the question of whether they're true or not. So how about instead of saying that you're a scientific racist, I'd simply say that your ideas are part of the scientific racism tradition? You may counter and say that because scientific racism has bad connotations today (even though it was once the consensus), this is an implied insult. But scientific racism has always made scientific claims, and those claims have turned out to be false, that I think that if you're trying to go against scientific consensus (as you yourself claimed you do) -- which is certainly scientifically valid -- and if you think that unlike previous incarnations, scientific racism in its current incarnation is different the burden of proof is on you. If you want to dispel the negative connotations behind scientific racism, you can't attack their validity, because they are very valid; you should just prove us wrong (I would suggest, however, that you employ better data and better analysis than you did, for example, when writing about women's abilities in STEM, because your assumptions basically dictated the result, and were absolutely not justified, so that's going to do the very opposite of changing scientific consensus).

pron 10y ago

> If you want a more traditional "give me a grant" motivation, here it is: public policy. In that case, I can set your mind at ease. There is a wide scientific consensus -- no less conclusive than the consensus on global warming and based on decades of research -- that social policy itself and other social forces are by far the leading causes for power disparity. Just to be clear: differences in ability among social groups are real, variance of ability among individuals due to biology is also real, and ability is indeed one factor in power disparity among individuals. What we're debating is the relationship between the three. The debate is whether biological differences are the main explanation for differences in abilities between social groups, and, more importantly, whether biological differences have any significant explanatory power for the vast power disparity between social groups. Also, it is unclear to me how a positive answer for the biological explanation could possibly affect public policy. Your point that "if ... equal outcomes is your goal, you would choose a quota system to cap the number of Asians" is a non-sequitur. For one, "equal income" in the public policy sense doesn't remotely resemble what you imply you think it does in your suggestion. For another, I don't see why your suggestion would be different if the difference in ability was environmental rather than biological. > don't have the same negative emotional reactions to it that you do My emotional reaction stems from the fact that empirical evidence is so much against a biological explanation for the power disparity, and arguments against it are based on findings of such small effect size (which doesn't even suggest causality, but even assuming it does) combined with strong potential self-interest. This is a very similar emotional response to that towards climate-change deniers. Their evidence is weak, and denying human-caused global warming serves their interests. Maybe the reaction is unjustified and we should approach every single time anyone brings up an idea without consideration for the thousands of times similar ideas have been expressed in the past, but the reaction is nonetheless, I think, very reasonable. > calls them racist I think you are way too obsessed with labels. Definitions in social science are not the same as definitions in the exact sciences, and they are more used as a shortcut to frame a first guess. The opinions you express are textbook scientific racism, lifted almost verbatim from late-19th or early-20th century texts. I use the name to roughly place them in a tradition of ideas; you think it is an insult. Such rough categorization (which are well recognized by social researchers as such) are an invaluable tool in disciplines with too many variables. Without them, we cannot even begin to discuss models in the history of ideas. Denying that your ideas are part of the traditions is silly and factually wrong, and completely separate from the question of whether they're true or not. So how about instead of saying that you're a scientific racist, I'd simply say that your ideas are part of the scientific racism tradition? You may counter and say that because scientific racism has bad connotations today (even though it was once the consensus), this is an implied insult. But scientific racism has always made scientific claims, and those claims have turned out to be false, that I think that if you're trying to go against scientific consensus (as you yourself claimed you do) -- which is certainly scientifically valid -- and if you think that unlike previous incarnations, scientific racism in its current incarnation is different the burden of proof is on you. If you want to dispel the negative connotations behind scientific racism, you can't attack their validity, because they are very valid; you should just prove us wrong (I would suggest, however, that you employ better data and better analysis than you did, for example, when writing about women's abilities in STEM, because your assumptions basically dictated the result, and were absolutely not justified, so that's going to do the very opposite of changing scientific consensus).