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Wait, what?
We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other
Wait, what?
We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism."
This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?
I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that.
It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
> I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?
Because if they genuinely believe that blacks are inferior, then racism truly musn't exist from their perspective. They think that blacks will naturally be worse off and thus elevating them from there to a level where they're equal is actually unfair and racist to whites.
It's insane, I know, but it really is how people like that think.
How do you propose to gain equality? You can't force inherent ability into someone. Perhaps what you want is flat wages for all jobs, including unemployment?
Since racism is too shocking an idea for you, consider intellectually disabled people instead. How would you make them equal? We can provide special support services to improve their quality of life but we can't turn them into engineers if they're not capable.
That's not at all what anyone here means by "equal".
There is zero scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps exist because Black people are genetically inferior to whites, and there is a ton of scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps are influenced by systems we have set up that have nothing to do with the individual. Equality means fixing those systems.
Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.
The color of your skin has no bearing on your innate ability to be an engineer, so what when we try to address structural inequality we're not trying to suppress anyone's unique abilities. Quite the opposite, we are trying to remove the structures like racism, education gaps, and investment gaps that get in the way of people's unique abilities. How many Black engineers never get a chance to discover their potential simply because their school is too poor to afford computers or software?
We are also not trying to force everyone into a single uniform outcome, we are trying to remove systems that enforce uniform outcomes based on attributes like social connections and income that have nothing to do with innate talent. How many otherwise successful Black businesses were destroyed by openly racist policies like redlining, or because investors have an unscientific, biased view of what a successful businessperson "ought" to look like or what people they "ought" to know?
Now, separately, equality also means guaranteeing the same basic rights and social assurances to everyone regardless of their race and ability. That doesn't mean that everyone can do everything equally as well, it doesn't mean that everyone should have the same job or that success is evil. But even people who are not qualified to be engineers should be able to at least live normal lives without the threat of extreme poverty. They should be able to find housing. They shouldn't be put in situations where they're frightened of their local police. Equality means that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness belongs to everyone, regardless of where you were born or what other people think about the color of your skin. So we're not looking to get rid of success, be we are looking to build basic social safety nets that guarantee that people are not left behind or discarded by society just because a company doesn't think they're useful enough to deserve a livable wage.
And yeah, that applies to intellectually disabled and differently abled communities as well. Being born with a learning disability is not a good reason for someone to be homeless. Those people also deserve dignity and a place in society.
>This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it.
You just hopped onto it to say you want off of it?
Consider for a moment that you are both right. That there are in fact heritable biological differences that can aggregate to average group-wide differences like the parent comment implied, and that assuming that this is the case is harmful for the individual and society, like you argued.
If that's the case, the parent comment, while embarrassing for this site, has a valid claim - that at some point blaming everything on the system could become detrimental to everyone.
> teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?
No. You're confusing group outcomes with individual ones.
To avoid the emotion of racism, you can look at all Americans instead. Average income in the US is $30,000/year. Is it wrong to teach that to kids? No. Does it cause them to fatalistically assume they can't earn more than that because they're unlucky to be American? No. Each individual kid might not be one of the destined-for-low-wages people.
> Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.
That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems. So far, the only politically correct scientifically based reason I've seen has been that it's mostly due to the behavior of black mothers. There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. If that's really the problem, then that's where the solution needs to be focused, not on whatever fits your personal political ideology.
You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. I've looked for it, and asked people like yourself who I would expect to be motivated to find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. If there's no evidence either way, then you're not being intellectually honest by rejecting one hypothesis on ideological grounds.
> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem.
Your research is out of date on these topics.
General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious).
You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume.
This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results.
So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up...
> The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.
Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be?
> You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems...
Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ.
> You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic.
First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.
And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence.
But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you.
> There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life.
So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence?
I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions.
I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.
> continue to exist after you correct for experience/education
No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could.
> dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.
Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.
> No doubt there is also discrimination.
Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists?
> but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use
That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence.
So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed.
So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life?
You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?
> your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence
Not my claim.
As you surely know, IQ tests are scaled by age according to how normal people develop. So an individual who undergoes unusual life experiences can easily have their IQ change with age since their development would deviate from what the rest of the population has. If every person had all the best IQ enhancing interventions, then I would expect IQ scores to be more consistent with age since the environmental factors are controlled, leaving the inherent factors to dominate. But that's not the world we live in, and you can "train for the test".
> Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
Can I identify a proof that Black people can read and self govern? I mean... the modern world? Are you arguing that early race science claims haven't been disproven? Are you familiar with the early claims that race scientists made? You should look up some of them if you're not.
The vast majority of early race science claims can be disproven by your own claims. A 10-15 point IQ gap is not high enough to render someone unable to read, vote, or understand mathematics. If early race science claims were true, then we would expect to see a much larger gap than we currently see. And we don't.
So what's been happening is we've spent a large portion of American history (and pre-American history) listening to people make strong claims that Black people were biologically unable to accomplish certain tasks. Then Black people accomplished those tasks, and scientific racists moved the goalposts a bit and said, "okay, they could accomplish those tasks, but they won't be able to do these ones." And that's continued basically unabated to modern times, where the goalposts are now at, "okay, but they can't achieve equal pay/productivity, they don't have the genetics for that task."
And at no point has the race science community had the presence of mind to take a step back and think, "maybe given that all of our testable predictions have been proven wrong throughout history, we don't understand genetics as well as we think we do."
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> B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics. How is that?
See the remaining paragraphs I wrote in that comment. If you need more clarification, our modern understanding of racial categories is that they are more socially designated than genetically designated (more on that below). Our understanding of intelligence is that it is enormously complex and not likely to be controlled by a small number of genes behind, say, skin color. Increasingly, modern scientists don't even really think of genetic intelligence as being reducible to a single number anyway. Most modern geneticists have rejected a race/IQ link. There's still a lot about intelligence that the scientific community is still learning, but the people in the labs right now doing that research on intelligence do not think your theories are likely to be true.
> C) [...] There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors [...] D) [...] E) [...]
So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
We've had a really long conversation at this point for you to just now let on that you think Black outcomes are in fact at least partially influenced by external factors that aren't related to innate ability (ie, systemic racism and/or inequality).
> Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
??? I'm not sure how to respond to this. African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection. It also doesn't change anything about the fact that African American genetics are also not uniform at this point. A large percentage of the Black community is multiracial, and your "commonly used" definition of Black is primarily determined by who looks Black, regardless of the percentage of African American heritage that person actually has.
> If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
Your research is once again out of date, recent studies suggest that early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
And again, if your ancestry claim was true we'd expect to see very different outcomes in individuals with mixed ancestry, and... we don't see that. So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities. That is not a result you would expect to see if this was genetic.
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> Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist.
Yes, it is. I don't know how else to get this across to you, so maybe an analogy will work. I'll entertain your idea once you're able to disprove to me that the the liberal/conservative divide in our current country is based on innate intelligence.
You say there are other explanations for rural/urban income gaps and college demographics that fit that data better? You say that class divides, culture, and location are obviously better explanations? I'm sorry, I'm sure those are contributing factors, but until you conclusively disprove the genetic connection, then we have to entertain the possibility, even though the evidence is spurious and it doesn't really make sense as a causal relationship in the first place. You say that even if it was true, it shouldn't derail conversations about bias or political equity or censorship? That's certainly a perspective, but maybe we should bring the theory up on every conversation about liberal bias anyway. I'm not saying it's the reason, just that it's a realistic possibility that no conservative has ever conclusively found proof against.
Do you see the problem here? It's really easy to make silly and even outright harmful claims like the above and then retreat back behind "just asking questions". That's why (particularly when we're dealing with a field like race science which has a history of being incorrect and harmful) we demand a certain standard of evidence. Like a set of genes. Or at least a correlation that can't be better explained by external stimuli.
> Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
But not half as ridiculous as the idea that now that we know genes exist we should ignore them. We have better standards now. This is like arguing that we don't need to identify viruses because some people in olden times washed their hands occasionally.
And to be clear, we knew that dog breeding worked because we could run experiments and see it working. We knew that evolution existed because we could make testable claims and predictions that were proven true. Both of those things are a million miles away from "I have no evidence for this, but you can't disprove it." Evolution was not running around claiming that it should get the benefit of the doubt until it was disproven. It brought real evidence and testable predictions to the table that made sense based on what we knew about the world.