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As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condi

As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condition of black people in America as a result of nature and not of hundreds of years of slavery and slave breeding, and of the current condition of black people in Africa to their inferior brains instead of the violent takeovers of their countries, mass enslavement and massacres, and the installation of friendly dictators to ship their resource wealth overseas. Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid. That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past. In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children. aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?

zozbot234 3y ago
The Caribbean has a history of slavery not unlike the U.S., so the fact that Caribbean immigrants are better off is genuinely interesting. Of course, institutional factors are the most likely difference; among other things, the British got rid of slavery a generation or so before the U.S. did, and there was no real equivalent there to the U.S. Civil War and failed Reconstruction. There are also cultural differences that will of course matter, but they're causally downstream of that basic stylized fact.
concordDance 3y ago
[flagged]
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  > Wouldn't this only apply to research from the USA? No. Lots of people from wealthy (and predominantly white) countries across the world have the same kinds of motivations. To recognize that the existing structure of the world split between the haves and the have-nots is created only by human choices, not a natural state, is to admit to oneself: that one’s station in life is more luck than merit, that one is part of a fundamentally unfair system that one benefits from every day, and perhaps that one has a moral duty to fix it—or at least that the fix may require a dramatic change in one’s standard of living and habits and traditions. For most people, who consider themselves inherently “good people”, that is a very tough pill to swallow. It is easier to look for other options, even to the point of some self-delusion.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pvg 3y ago
      Let's not have this chat again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704396
      - concordDance 3y ago
        Please stop harassing me.
Arn_Thor 3y ago
Thank you for the comment. Everyone else is talking around the issue but you cut right to it, and did so very cleanly.

zozbot234 3y ago

The Caribbean has a history of slavery not unlike the U.S., so the fact that Caribbean immigrants are better off is genuinely interesting. Of course, institutional factors are the most likely difference; among other things, the British got rid of slavery a generation or so before the U.S. did, and there was no real equivalent there to the U.S. Civil War and failed Reconstruction. There are also cultural differences that will of course matter, but they're causally downstream of that basic stylized fact.

concordDance 3y ago

[flagged]

Arn_Thor 3y ago
> Wouldn't this only apply to research from the USA? No. Lots of people from wealthy (and predominantly white) countries across the world have the same kinds of motivations. To recognize that the existing structure of the world split between the haves and the have-nots is created only by human choices, not a natural state, is to admit to oneself: that one’s station in life is more luck than merit, that one is part of a fundamentally unfair system that one benefits from every day, and perhaps that one has a moral duty to fix it—or at least that the fix may require a dramatic change in one’s standard of living and habits and traditions. For most people, who consider themselves inherently “good people”, that is a very tough pill to swallow. It is easier to look for other options, even to the point of some self-delusion.
- concordDance 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pvg 3y ago
    Let's not have this chat again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704396
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Please stop harassing me.

Arn_Thor 3y ago

Thank you for the comment. Everyone else is talking around the issue but you cut right to it, and did so very cleanly.