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Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20blocks%20new%20class%20system.

by blast 5y ago

Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20blocks%20new%20class%20system.pdf https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot). Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds. This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.

baybal2 5y ago
> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot. Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism. Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries. New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  "Even if it's true..." isn't a great start to build a policy basis on.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Where there are differences among humans, I think they should be eligible and encouraged for scientific study. Science doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) care about feelings. I worry that we’ve created a society where “it’s taboo to study that” will blind us all on the path to true understanding. If we discover facts that we internalize as uncomfortable along the way, it wasn’t the discovery that made those facts exist. Politics can take over after science reveals the facts, but (ideally) not before. I find it extremely likely that, across all research, that we will find actionable information about what interventions are helpful (and which are not) and blinding ourselves to that in the interest of comfort is undesirable IMO. These could be nutritional, societal, economic, or other and these interventions could serve to lift billions of humans to a better condition.
- concordDance 5y ago
  These assumptions of sinister motives are unwarranted. There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I wonder how many people who throw accusations of "closet X" and "stealth Y" so easily are, in fact, themselves closet X and stealth Y and generalize about other people based on their own carefully hidden prejudices.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I'm always public about my convictions, sometime too public according to the moderators of HN.
    - 5y ago
heisenzombie 5y ago
What could be more devastating to a line of inquiry than derision and scorn? easy! a collective yawn!
- dang 5y ago
  Whatever you mean by this, please don't post unsubstantive comments or flamebait comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  Hard to know what's meant by this. If I'd said it, I'd have followed up with an explanation that Chomsky's rarefied and technical argument, while impressive and personally convincing, is going to be a chore to explain to the archetypal bloodthirsty social justice keyboard-warrior who would deploy it, let alone the highfalutin evo-bio smuggies or the lowbrow racists against whom it would be deployed.
- heisenzombie 5y ago
  Oh dear, sorry I wasn't clear here. Having read and enjoyed the linked article, I noted that roughly the second half of Chomsky's argument is that the inquiry into race and IQ is fundamentally just boring -- "of quite limited scientific interest". He's saying "sure, you could be right, but who cares?" This contrasts with the reactions in the article of scorn such as comparing researchers to "Holocaust deniers". It struck me that of the two; Chomsky's reaction is the more devastating.
courtf 5y ago
Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society. We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either. Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy. So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power Are you saying we should be extremely skeptical specifically of arguments that justify the positions of those in power, but not other arguments? Or are you saying that we should be extremely skeptical of all arguments equally?
  - notafraudster 5y ago
    Given we have a fixed amount of effort to apply to scrutinizing superficially reasonable but deeply poor arguments, we should focus on those that -- if false -- have the most deleterious effect on utility, broadly defined. If social equity is a component of the utility function, and I think for many it is, then power-preserving arguments would be such a target. This could really be articulated in any way you choose, but no it doesn't follow that "we should be more skeptical of arguments that facially seem to support the powerful at the expense of the weak" is an irrational or wrong position.
dash2 5y ago
Chomsky's basic argument is that we can build a society where social success doesn't depend on IQ. Or as he puts it: "If... society can be organized more or less in accordance with the "socialist dictum," then nothing is left of Herrnstein's argument" So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
- blast 5y ago
  The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's fine but trivial, it doesn't need pointing out. My point is that within the range of progressive arguments, Chomsky's is definitive because it doesn't involve the intellectual contortions that other progressive positions are increasingly depending on.
  - dash2 5y ago
    You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
    - blast 5y ago
      There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      > value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
      - 5y ago
cm2187 5y ago
Except that the argument Chomsky makes about the fact that this research would have no purpose in a society that treats people as individuals, ie not a racist society, is certainly valid, but the current progressivism is to do the opposite, ie to define people by their race/sex, and to count the number of people of each race or sex in organisations, and to call racism/sexism if it is not exactly the population distribution. That’s the argument Murray makes in his latest book, i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance). This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
  - concordDance 5y ago
    Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about. As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      > Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about. Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. > As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true. AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one. > (of which only a small bit relates to race) It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
tomxor 5y ago
> Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kind of absurd when you think of some of the more superficial and obvious yet real differences. You clarify this very succinctly, but it is still abstract, and I find many people tend not to understand until given a more concrete example... this I find challenging to do without being prejudged as some kind of racist or sexist, so unfortunately I just don't bother any more, the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
- wslack 5y ago
  > the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects. I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt-jemimas-image-to-go/ https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...) Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline. The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    The downvotes tell me how uninterested enough of HN can be to other people's experience, even when the comment is just explaining how someone would dismiss current science based on history.
  - 5y ago
midjji 5y ago
His arguments regarding the social consequences arent as good as they could be, but the ideas he is refuting are so stupid that I cant tell if they are strawmen or just commonly held ideas. Chomskys writing is often convincing, but his perspective always seems so limited. The (in)significance of the research, intentionally vague regarding specific or general as a trick, and justified by fear of missuse in politics, perhaps. But it shows an emphasis on argument over substance, and a lack of perspective on technology.
tomp 5y ago
The research definitely is significant - definitely politically, if not scientifically (which I'd argue it is, any research that helps find the truth / predict the future / create a better model of the world is scientifically significant). We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlation of IQ and interests with race & sex. Sure, genetics don't determine an individual's life, but they do influence population averages, so if genetics explain/predict sex & race differences in careers and education, we could hopefully resolve those debates. Another example of this is the association between violence and (1) computer games, and (2) sex/testosterone. The first one, albeit "intuitive", was debunked using science/statistics, and the second one most people just assume as "obviously" true (and noone claims sexism!) (although AFAIK it's scientifically debatable). Again, genetics don't determine an individual, but they do influence the population & sub-groups.
- swebs 5y ago
  >which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data There's already quite a lot of data on the subject. Here's a 30 year meta-study from 2005 for example. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... The problem described in the article is that people are preventing/defunding further studies.
  - bjourne 5y ago
    You know what both Rushton and Jensen were incredibly controversial figures, right? Perhaps not on the same level as Lynn and Vanhanen, but close.
    - rafaelero 5y ago
      I mean, when society deems this field as toxic, then every figure that aims at exploring it will be filled with controversy.
- everdrive 5y ago
inglor_cz 5y ago
I don't think that a text judging biology, written by an (arguably smart) linguist dating 50 years back can be in any sense "definitive". Even in a moral and political one. Science evolves and real-world consequences follow. Someone playing with electricity in 1800 was doing scientifically insignificant research. 100 years later, electricity was a major industrial force. We are just entering the era when genetic manipulations of not just embryos, but adult organisms will be possible. One day, this technology will be used on humans as well. Even if the U.S. forbade such research, other countries likely won't. 20 or 30 years from now, progressives will have to find answers to technology that can tune various parameters of human beings, maybe including some cognitive abilities.
- blast 5y ago
  > a text judging biology That's exactly what Chomsky's article is not.
stringsy 5y ago
Thanks for that article - that was a brilliant read. But I don't think Chomsky would necessarily be against Harden's research/aims/motives? She seems quite aligned with Chomsky on that front actually. From the OP's article, she seems to be very aware that her research is reflective of current society and should be used to better/change it. Chomsky mentions that such research could be useful e.g. for improving education - Harden seems to agree there. "In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy." So yeh, I don't think they are necessarily talking at cross purposes (despite the 40+ year time delay :P). (First HN comment, be cool to hear back what you think!)
- blast 5y ago
  I partly agree - the progressives I was referring to are the ones criticizing her. (Welcome!)
narrator 5y ago
I suspect the leadership of the leftists in America know that there are race IQ differences, but they use this to set up a loop to gain more power. How do you increase your authority if you know that races are not all of equal ability? 1. Lie and publicly express that you think all races are of equal ability at all things. 2. Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc. 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. 4. Demand that racists must be rooted out and further and further scrutinized for microagreassions, etc. 5. Demand more unconstrained power, money and authority to 'fix' this. 6. Go back to step 1 and continue the loop till you have absolute power.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  I'll lead with this - people should be treated with respect regardless of their race and regardless of their IQ. People should be given equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of any differences. > Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc. >Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. We have widely studied and reported on reasoning for why some races do worse on tests in america, and the answer is not inherent differences in race, and it has very reasonable scientific backing. The reason is racist policies that made it harder for some groups to succeed. This is a real thing in American history. It's the same underlying reasoning why many rich coastal enclaves in liberal areas also do better on standardized tests - better access to opportunity and support. > 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. Its pretty hard to ignore the american history of racism, from slavery to redlining to KKK to modern day voting laws. And its pretty easy to connect the dots to how those MASSIVE issues affect people in 2021.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    > People should be given equal opportunity to succeed That is the old dogma. Today progressives insist on giving certain classes of people more opportunity than others. That is why "equality" has been replaced by "equity" in progressive propaganda.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
Thank you, /blast/, for sharing this article. The US public discourse has become a thoroughly annoying, exhausting puppetry of shouting, wrestling straw-men. Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed. I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  One wonders is Chomsky himself wouldn't have been cancelled if he were trying to get his start these days.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
20jdjs00dlll 5y ago
So I know a lot of people mentioned in this New Yorker piece. Not well but I consider them colleagues. I have a lot to say about it on several levels. On the one hand, I've had to deal firsthand with the phenomenon Paige-Harden is talking about, in hiring discussions and faculty meetings. It's infuriating and bizarre to see the level of denial that arises among people who ostensibly are extremely intelligent and well-educated. It reaches a point where my only conclusion has been that these individuals are completely out of touch in an ivory-tower sense, that they have no idea what happens in clinical settings, and the problems that arise in terms of phenomena that are obviously congenital disorders or near-disorders, even if they don't have a label per se. On the other hand, I think the behavior genetics community is in a bit of denial itself, about the strengths of its models and reliability of its conclusions. The field has found itself in a no-mans land the last decade or so, in that the revolution promised by the genome area instead stripped the field of results: the findings of the twin era, when faced with molecular genetics, largely evaporated. This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication. This all leads to a general sense within the BG community and without that the models and findings of behavior genetics are based on very big assumptions, assumptions that seem to fall apart when looked at through a microscope. They might have some validity in a broad brush sense — in the sense that yes, there are some sets of genes that collectively lead one to have higher functioning cognitive ability, and some that lead to impairments — but the tricky details most people wrestle with are mismodeled. Comparing one end of the bell curve to the other is doable; less doable is comparing adjoining areas of the curve. There's also the strange complexity of life, which is largely absent from these models. A common pattern is for some BG conclusion to be drawn in the literature, and then everyone has very clear, prima facie evidence — on the news, in everyday experience, and so forth — that clearly contradicts it. The BG community wrestles with it, comes up with some contorted explanation for why there's no contradiction, and then silence. The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement. What it concerns itself with are characterizing with abstract descriptions — "additive genetic variance", or "polygenic risk" — people as if they are static objects. It's not oriented toward identifying something specific or manipulable, like a neurophysiological pathway that can be changed, or the products of specific genes. Even when research is oriented toward potential change, as in environmental interventions, genes are still treated as something fixed and unchanging, background that is to be covaried out because it's not something we should do anything about. So, even though I think the left-leaning segments of academia definitely go overboard in how they approach behavior and genetics, there's some sympathetic groups who largely reject it for other reasons. They see the field as fuzzy and unreplicable in a levels-of-analysis sense, if not sample-to-sample sense, and are skeptical of the overall worldview implicitly being promoted. I need to reread the Chomsky piece; it's dense and full of excellent points. But part of what it points to is the fundamental problem with seeing individuals in society in terms of reward or punishment for what they are, rather than in terms of the obligation of society at large toward improving other individuals. The real crisis looming on the horizon isn't the failure of the left to appreciate behavior genetics. It's the failure of everyone to appreciate the implications of a civilization where we will soon be able to alter our genes at any stage of life, as well as the neurobehavioral structures that are downstream from them. Where does the moral obligation lie then? With the individual or society? What value is there then in abstract quantifications of variance due to the individual at birth, and variance that occurs later?

by blast 5y ago

baybal2 5y ago

> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot. Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism. Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries. New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.

ethbr0 5y ago
"Even if it's true..." isn't a great start to build a policy basis on.
sokoloff 5y ago
Where there are differences among humans, I think they should be eligible and encouraged for scientific study. Science doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) care about feelings. I worry that we’ve created a society where “it’s taboo to study that” will blind us all on the path to true understanding. If we discover facts that we internalize as uncomfortable along the way, it wasn’t the discovery that made those facts exist. Politics can take over after science reveals the facts, but (ideally) not before. I find it extremely likely that, across all research, that we will find actionable information about what interventions are helpful (and which are not) and blinding ourselves to that in the interest of comfort is undesirable IMO. These could be nutritional, societal, economic, or other and these interventions could serve to lift billions of humans to a better condition.
concordDance 5y ago
These assumptions of sinister motives are unwarranted. There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")
inglor_cz 5y ago
I wonder how many people who throw accusations of "closet X" and "stealth Y" so easily are, in fact, themselves closet X and stealth Y and generalize about other people based on their own carefully hidden prejudices.
- baybal2 5y ago
  I'm always public about my convictions, sometime too public according to the moderators of HN.
  - 5y ago

heisenzombie 5y ago

What could be more devastating to a line of inquiry than derision and scorn? easy! a collective yawn!

dang 5y ago
Whatever you mean by this, please don't post unsubstantive comments or flamebait comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
revolvingocelot 5y ago
Hard to know what's meant by this. If I'd said it, I'd have followed up with an explanation that Chomsky's rarefied and technical argument, while impressive and personally convincing, is going to be a chore to explain to the archetypal bloodthirsty social justice keyboard-warrior who would deploy it, let alone the highfalutin evo-bio smuggies or the lowbrow racists against whom it would be deployed.
heisenzombie 5y ago
Oh dear, sorry I wasn't clear here. Having read and enjoyed the linked article, I noted that roughly the second half of Chomsky's argument is that the inquiry into race and IQ is fundamentally just boring -- "of quite limited scientific interest". He's saying "sure, you could be right, but who cares?" This contrasts with the reactions in the article of scorn such as comparing researchers to "Holocaust deniers". It struck me that of the two; Chomsky's reaction is the more devastating.

courtf 5y ago

Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society. We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either. Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy. So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.

ethbr0 5y ago
> We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power Are you saying we should be extremely skeptical specifically of arguments that justify the positions of those in power, but not other arguments? Or are you saying that we should be extremely skeptical of all arguments equally?
- notafraudster 5y ago
  Given we have a fixed amount of effort to apply to scrutinizing superficially reasonable but deeply poor arguments, we should focus on those that -- if false -- have the most deleterious effect on utility, broadly defined. If social equity is a component of the utility function, and I think for many it is, then power-preserving arguments would be such a target. This could really be articulated in any way you choose, but no it doesn't follow that "we should be more skeptical of arguments that facially seem to support the powerful at the expense of the weak" is an irrational or wrong position.

dash2 5y ago

Chomsky's basic argument is that we can build a society where social success doesn't depend on IQ. Or as he puts it: "If... society can be organized more or less in accordance with the "socialist dictum," then nothing is left of Herrnstein's argument" So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.

blast 5y ago
The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's fine but trivial, it doesn't need pointing out. My point is that within the range of progressive arguments, Chomsky's is definitive because it doesn't involve the intellectual contortions that other progressive positions are increasingly depending on.
- dash2 5y ago
  You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
  - blast 5y ago
    There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    > value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
    - 5y ago

cm2187 5y ago

Except that the argument Chomsky makes about the fact that this research would have no purpose in a society that treats people as individuals, ie not a racist society, is certainly valid, but the current progressivism is to do the opposite, ie to define people by their race/sex, and to count the number of people of each race or sex in organisations, and to call racism/sexism if it is not exactly the population distribution. That’s the argument Murray makes in his latest book, i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.

littlestymaar 5y ago
> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance). This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
- concordDance 5y ago
  Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about. As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about. Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. > As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true. AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one. > (of which only a small bit relates to race) It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.

tomxor 5y ago

> Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kind of absurd when you think of some of the more superficial and obvious yet real differences. You clarify this very succinctly, but it is still abstract, and I find many people tend not to understand until given a more concrete example... this I find challenging to do without being prejudged as some kind of racist or sexist, so unfortunately I just don't bother any more, the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.

wslack 5y ago
> the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects. I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt-jemimas-image-to-go/ https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...) Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline. The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  The downvotes tell me how uninterested enough of HN can be to other people's experience, even when the comment is just explaining how someone would dismiss current science based on history.
- 5y ago

midjji 5y ago

His arguments regarding the social consequences arent as good as they could be, but the ideas he is refuting are so stupid that I cant tell if they are strawmen or just commonly held ideas. Chomskys writing is often convincing, but his perspective always seems so limited. The (in)significance of the research, intentionally vague regarding specific or general as a trick, and justified by fear of missuse in politics, perhaps. But it shows an emphasis on argument over substance, and a lack of perspective on technology.

tomp 5y ago

The research definitely is significant - definitely politically, if not scientifically (which I'd argue it is, any research that helps find the truth / predict the future / create a better model of the world is scientifically significant). We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlation of IQ and interests with race & sex. Sure, genetics don't determine an individual's life, but they do influence population averages, so if genetics explain/predict sex & race differences in careers and education, we could hopefully resolve those debates. Another example of this is the association between violence and (1) computer games, and (2) sex/testosterone. The first one, albeit "intuitive", was debunked using science/statistics, and the second one most people just assume as "obviously" true (and noone claims sexism!) (although AFAIK it's scientifically debatable). Again, genetics don't determine an individual, but they do influence the population & sub-groups.

swebs 5y ago
>which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data There's already quite a lot of data on the subject. Here's a 30 year meta-study from 2005 for example. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... The problem described in the article is that people are preventing/defunding further studies.
- bjourne 5y ago
  You know what both Rushton and Jensen were incredibly controversial figures, right? Perhaps not on the same level as Lynn and Vanhanen, but close.
  - rafaelero 5y ago
    I mean, when society deems this field as toxic, then every figure that aims at exploring it will be filled with controversy.
everdrive 5y ago

inglor_cz 5y ago

I don't think that a text judging biology, written by an (arguably smart) linguist dating 50 years back can be in any sense "definitive". Even in a moral and political one. Science evolves and real-world consequences follow. Someone playing with electricity in 1800 was doing scientifically insignificant research. 100 years later, electricity was a major industrial force. We are just entering the era when genetic manipulations of not just embryos, but adult organisms will be possible. One day, this technology will be used on humans as well. Even if the U.S. forbade such research, other countries likely won't. 20 or 30 years from now, progressives will have to find answers to technology that can tune various parameters of human beings, maybe including some cognitive abilities.

blast 5y ago
> a text judging biology That's exactly what Chomsky's article is not.

stringsy 5y ago

Thanks for that article - that was a brilliant read. But I don't think Chomsky would necessarily be against Harden's research/aims/motives? She seems quite aligned with Chomsky on that front actually. From the OP's article, she seems to be very aware that her research is reflective of current society and should be used to better/change it. Chomsky mentions that such research could be useful e.g. for improving education - Harden seems to agree there. "In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy." So yeh, I don't think they are necessarily talking at cross purposes (despite the 40+ year time delay :P). (First HN comment, be cool to hear back what you think!)

blast 5y ago
I partly agree - the progressives I was referring to are the ones criticizing her. (Welcome!)

narrator 5y ago

I suspect the leadership of the leftists in America know that there are race IQ differences, but they use this to set up a loop to gain more power. How do you increase your authority if you know that races are not all of equal ability? 1. Lie and publicly express that you think all races are of equal ability at all things. 2. Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc. 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. 4. Demand that racists must be rooted out and further and further scrutinized for microagreassions, etc. 5. Demand more unconstrained power, money and authority to 'fix' this. 6. Go back to step 1 and continue the loop till you have absolute power.

vineyardmike 5y ago
I'll lead with this - people should be treated with respect regardless of their race and regardless of their IQ. People should be given equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of any differences. > Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc. >Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. We have widely studied and reported on reasoning for why some races do worse on tests in america, and the answer is not inherent differences in race, and it has very reasonable scientific backing. The reason is racist policies that made it harder for some groups to succeed. This is a real thing in American history. It's the same underlying reasoning why many rich coastal enclaves in liberal areas also do better on standardized tests - better access to opportunity and support. > 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this. Its pretty hard to ignore the american history of racism, from slavery to redlining to KKK to modern day voting laws. And its pretty easy to connect the dots to how those MASSIVE issues affect people in 2021.
- q1w2 5y ago
  > People should be given equal opportunity to succeed That is the old dogma. Today progressives insist on giving certain classes of people more opportunity than others. That is why "equality" has been replaced by "equity" in progressive propaganda.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

Thank you, /blast/, for sharing this article. The US public discourse has become a thoroughly annoying, exhausting puppetry of shouting, wrestling straw-men. Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed. I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.

commandlinefan 5y ago
One wonders is Chomsky himself wouldn't have been cancelled if he were trying to get his start these days.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

20jdjs00dlll 5y ago

So I know a lot of people mentioned in this New Yorker piece. Not well but I consider them colleagues. I have a lot to say about it on several levels. On the one hand, I've had to deal firsthand with the phenomenon Paige-Harden is talking about, in hiring discussions and faculty meetings. It's infuriating and bizarre to see the level of denial that arises among people who ostensibly are extremely intelligent and well-educated. It reaches a point where my only conclusion has been that these individuals are completely out of touch in an ivory-tower sense, that they have no idea what happens in clinical settings, and the problems that arise in terms of phenomena that are obviously congenital disorders or near-disorders, even if they don't have a label per se. On the other hand, I think the behavior genetics community is in a bit of denial itself, about the strengths of its models and reliability of its conclusions. The field has found itself in a no-mans land the last decade or so, in that the revolution promised by the genome area instead stripped the field of results: the findings of the twin era, when faced with molecular genetics, largely evaporated. This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication. This all leads to a general sense within the BG community and without that the models and findings of behavior genetics are based on very big assumptions, assumptions that seem to fall apart when looked at through a microscope. They might have some validity in a broad brush sense — in the sense that yes, there are some sets of genes that collectively lead one to have higher functioning cognitive ability, and some that lead to impairments — but the tricky details most people wrestle with are mismodeled. Comparing one end of the bell curve to the other is doable; less doable is comparing adjoining areas of the curve. There's also the strange complexity of life, which is largely absent from these models. A common pattern is for some BG conclusion to be drawn in the literature, and then everyone has very clear, prima facie evidence — on the news, in everyday experience, and so forth — that clearly contradicts it. The BG community wrestles with it, comes up with some contorted explanation for why there's no contradiction, and then silence. The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement. What it concerns itself with are characterizing with abstract descriptions — "additive genetic variance", or "polygenic risk" — people as if they are static objects. It's not oriented toward identifying something specific or manipulable, like a neurophysiological pathway that can be changed, or the products of specific genes. Even when research is oriented toward potential change, as in environmental interventions, genes are still treated as something fixed and unchanging, background that is to be covaried out because it's not something we should do anything about. So, even though I think the left-leaning segments of academia definitely go overboard in how they approach behavior and genetics, there's some sympathetic groups who largely reject it for other reasons. They see the field as fuzzy and unreplicable in a levels-of-analysis sense, if not sample-to-sample sense, and are skeptical of the overall worldview implicitly being promoted. I need to reread the Chomsky piece; it's dense and full of excellent points. But part of what it points to is the fundamental problem with seeing individuals in society in terms of reward or punishment for what they are, rather than in terms of the obligation of society at large toward improving other individuals. The real crisis looming on the horizon isn't the failure of the left to appreciate behavior genetics. It's the failure of everyone to appreciate the implications of a civilization where we will soon be able to alter our genes at any stage of life, as well as the neurobehavioral structures that are downstream from them. Where does the moral obligation lie then? With the individual or society? What value is there then in abstract quantifications of variance due to the individual at birth, and variance that occurs later?