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Thanks for the answer. I think you touch on something with the Optometry example, and that example helped me to articulate a proto-idea I've been trying to get

by xamuel 7y ago

Thanks for the answer. I think you touch on something with the Optometry example, and that example helped me to articulate a proto-idea I've been trying to get a finger on and haven't been able to grasp until now. To avoid unnecessary anguish, pretend there's a country called Foo. Natives of Foo are much less intelligent than the average human, and racists point to them as an example validating their racism. But imagine what's really going on is, the natives of Foo are all genetically disposed to have terrible sleep apnea, and that's what's causing their reduced intelligence. If we ask "Why on earth are natives of Foo less intelligent?", then we can follow that thread and eventually realize it's because they all have sleep apnea. Then we can give them CPAP machines and fix the problem. But if we dogmatically put our fingers in our ears and scream "everyone is equal!", then we have no hope of sorting the mess out. It would be as ludicrous as condemning optometry because we're afraid of hurting the feelings of people born with poor eyes. Thanks for the comments about sociology vs. biology. Pragmatically speaking, we need to figure out how we can change our society to legitimately incentivize this "uplifting" (it isn't free). Our current tactic seems to be to brainwash people about magic pixie dust qualities of diversity. This doesn't do anybody any favors, because the invisible hand of the market doesn't care about propaganda. Push it far enough and the whole job market will be made of shell company contracting agencies whose sole purpose is to take on "diversity liability".

komali2 7y ago
I understand the point you're making - that we must not be afraid to talk about genetic differences between people. While I respect the perspective, there's a couple critical "implementation issues": 1. I've never heard of a case like you used in your example, of everyone from an island having sleep apnea which leads to lower IQ. The obstacles are that we've never seen a universal population wide disease like that (before you bring up sickle cell or something hold on), we've never seen such a disease consistently lead to "employable" side effects (say, intelligence or charisma or something), and we've just never had such a homogeneous population anyway. 2. The CPAP issue is open to literally anyone, and so what's the point in trying to figure out whether a given population is genetically predisposed to sleep apnea? Just continue to treat at an individual level (by providing universal access to healthcare) It boils down to: separating populations to find cause of "issue" doesn't actually generate any useful information but does create fantastic weapons for racists. Instead, just persuing socially liberal policies such as universal education and healthcare do a great job of evening the scales for us.

by xamuel 7y ago

komali2 7y ago

I understand the point you're making - that we must not be afraid to talk about genetic differences between people. While I respect the perspective, there's a couple critical "implementation issues": 1. I've never heard of a case like you used in your example, of everyone from an island having sleep apnea which leads to lower IQ. The obstacles are that we've never seen a universal population wide disease like that (before you bring up sickle cell or something hold on), we've never seen such a disease consistently lead to "employable" side effects (say, intelligence or charisma or something), and we've just never had such a homogeneous population anyway. 2. The CPAP issue is open to literally anyone, and so what's the point in trying to figure out whether a given population is genetically predisposed to sleep apnea? Just continue to treat at an individual level (by providing universal access to healthcare) It boils down to: separating populations to find cause of "issue" doesn't actually generate any useful information but does create fantastic weapons for racists. Instead, just persuing socially liberal policies such as universal education and healthcare do a great job of evening the scales for us.