You only need to be able to state that if it is in fact what is observed. Which of course it is not, because "intelligent" is an extremely vague and ill-defined concept.
That's really the root of the problem, I think. People take data like, "blacks scored X percent lower on the John Doe IQ test (1987 edition)" and in turn say "black people are less intelligent". Then when you criticize it, they tell you not to shoot the messenger and they're just reporting what the data says.
This kind of shortcut is pretty common, of course. "People with net worth below X have a higher rate of conviction" becomes "poor people commit more crimes" and nobody really bats an eye. But that doesn't mean it's correct, it just means that people generally don't care.
Do this in the context of race, though, and suddenly people do care. And why shouldn't they? There's a long history of abuse in this area. IQ tests have long been biased toward the culture (and thus, almost inevitably, its majority race) of those who create the tests. People have then taken the results from these tests, concluded that their disfavored race is inherently inferior in some way, and used that to justify all kinds of bad treatment. And of course this is not a solved problem, not by a long shot. Truly unbiased IQ tests are an open problem, and then there's a whole extra layer of exactly what IQ is, why it's worth measuring, and what it leaves out.
By all means, discuss the data. But don't use the data to reach an unsupported conclusion that sounds kind of like data, proclaim it as fact, and then complain about "political correctness" when you get shut down. And think very, very carefully about what exactly the data says, versus what you think it implies, before making factual statements.
How did you manage to deduce that from his statement?
As a statistician, it seems like the obvious issue is that if the US is obviously different from other countries (having a large minority population that disproportionally commits crimes), then its crime rates cannot be compared with other nations without taking this into account.
You have precisely demonstrated the bias that I referred to earlier. You assume that Heston is saying something that he is not (that Blacks are more prone to crime, genetically, rather than the simple fact that they commit more crime), because Heston is not qualified to speak on these issues.
Unless you have some other reason to believe this about Heston, in which case please elaborate.
I have a few reasons for saying what I said.
First, my personal experience when discussing crime in America is that "demographics" is always a code word for "black people are inferior and it's unfortunate that we have so many of them". Although looking up the actual quote, it was "mixed ethnicity." I think that would fall into the same category.
Second, Heston was at the time a conservative Republican and gun nut, both groups which heavily lean towards subtle racism.
Finally, Heston himself has a history of subtle racism. In his autobiography, he states his dislike of the term "Native American" and claims that he himself is one because he was born here. He made statements about a "culture war" in which WASPs are being oppressed, which I find to be racist as it completely ignores the massive advantages that white people still have in American society, and generally tends to be slightly-veiled pining for the good old days when minorities knew their place. He said, "Why is 'Hispanic Pride' or 'Black Pride' a good thing, while 'White Pride' conjures shaven heads and white hoods?" Either he was very, very, very stupid and doesn't understand why generations of KKKers murdering minorities in the name of "White Pride" might give that term a certain stigma, or he thinks that minorities should just ignore systematic oppression and let white people keep on enjoying their advantageous position.
What you are saying is not really that different from my original point.
I claimed that ordinary people were not allowed to reference certain facts, because they had not proven that they would interpret these facts in the right way. E.g. an ordinary person cannot say that Black people commit more crime, because they cannot be relied on to believe that the cause of this is not, for example, genetic.
You on the other hand think that it is reasonable to extrapolate from things people say (e.g. crime rates are due to the America's "mixed ethnicity") from things that you imagine that they think, provided that you know that person is a conservative.
In both cases, the problem with this reasoning is that we think better of people who have wrong opinions, which sets up some perverse incentives. While the particular facts that a person chooses to focus on do indeed say a lot about their political beliefs, we should only discourage people from saying things that are wrong.
From here[1]:
"I had a distinguished colleague - Stuart Nagel - whose tale is worth telling. He taught public policy and one day explained that black businesses in Kenya were uncompetitive against Indian-run enterprises since blacks where too generous in granting credit to friends and family. He had been invited by the government of Kenya to study the situation and suggested better business training for black Kenyans. The topic was indisputably part of the course and thus totally protected by AAUP academic speech guidelines. Stuart was also extremely liberal on all racial issues.
Nevertheless, to condense a long story, an anonymous letter from irritated black students complained of Nagel's "racism" and included the preposterous change of "workplace violence." After a protracted and bungled internal university investigation, two federal trials (I testified at one), he was stripped of his teaching responsibilities and coerced into retirement. Interestingly, having been charged as "racist," his departmental colleagues, save two conservatives, abandoned him. A few years later, partially as a result of this emotionally and financially draining incident ($100,000 out-of-pocket for legal fees), he committed suicide. I can only speculate that he believed that years spent being a "good liberal" (including service in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division) would insulate him from being denounced as a "racist." Nor would he have anticipated that the university would spend the hundreds of thousands in legal fees to punish a famous tenured faculty member who "offended" two students. Nagel's sad saga undoubtedly provided useful lessons to many others. Stupidity can really be dangerous, even in a university. Better keep quiet."
[1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/since-some-people-seem-to-still-think.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/since-s...
thanks for sharing that, and you also confirm my claim that, in the eyes of many, (perhaps Nagel himself) only being a proven "non-racist" would give him the right to have this opinion.
This was written by Robert Weissberg.
The same one who was dumped by National Review when they determined he was too racist. The one who has written about that favorite topic of racists, the difference between IQ of whites and other races. What a great source for solid information.
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Wait - my race has a bearing on my height, skin colour, susceptibility to disease, proportion of fast to slow twitch muscle fibres, the shape of my nose and eyelids, the amount of various hormones in my blood. Why would it not have a bearing on intelligence?
Oh, race might well affect intelligence, it's just that we're pretty sure the effect is so miniscule in comparison to variation within the races that it's not really that interesting unless you're a racist.
...if race exists at all. Isn't as true to say 'people have variations in intelligence; some are slightly inheiritable.'
In America, the difference between population means in IQ is quite large between some racial groups, up to a standard deviation or 15 IQ points. The relationship holds for SAT, PISA, and pretty much any other measure of cognitive ability
You have some of it backwards. Your skin color and the shapes of various body parts have bearing on your race, not vice versa.
Race is a human construct. That's not to say that there aren't real differences, but merely that it's a categorization based on fairly arbitrary things. Now it turns out that skin color and such in some cases correlates with other, less visible things. But it's not what the determination is based on.
For example, the President of the United States is racially black. Genetically, he has equal influence from the "white" side, but racially he is not generally considered to be "half white".
For an example from the other direction, consider that Africa contains more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. We would generally expect to find there both the very dumbest and the very smartest of humans, at least for the genetic components of intelligence. It makes no sense to place that whole group into a single "black" race when the people in that group vary so enormously from each other.
We can certainly talk about genetic differences in intelligence between different population groups. But "race" is not a good way to come up with the groups to examine.
> For example, I studied econometrics, and one regression that is often run is regressing CRIME (a dummy variable for whether someone has committed a crime) on a number of right hand side variables, include BLACK, a dummy variable for being Black. Now it is a well known fact that no matter how many right hand side variables you include, the coefficient on BLACK will always be significant and positive. That is, even after accounting for income, education, etc., Black people commit more crime.
You can't directly measure how much crime is committed by people of different races, so any purported measure of this uses some other proxy, most likely convictions of crime.
Of course, relative rates of conviction for crime may not reflect relative rates of commission of crime. Particularly, they may be distorted by biases in (among other things):
* Crime reporting,
* Prosecution,
* Courts and juries
That is an unimportant nitpick, precisely the kind of objection that people are taught to raise in the face of "racist" facts.
I assure you that the academics involved, all certified non-racists (and mostly non-economists if you don't trust them), are aware of this and either consider the bias to be small (in comparison with the effect being measured) or have corrected for it.
No, the fact that the supposed fact cannot actually be supported except by assuming the non-demonstrable non-existence (or irrelevance) of several other kinds of bias is not an "unimportant nitpick", as it means that the "fact" is nothing of the sort, but a conclusion based in non-falsifiable conjecture.
(Note that I haven't said anything about whether or not its "racist" -- that's your deal -- I'm just saying that characterizing it as a fact is unjustifiable.)
No, the fact that the supposed fact cannot actually be supported except by assuming the non-demonstrable non-existence (or irrelevance) of several other kinds of bias...
Is this a parody of logic? Your point is not clear, regardless.
His point is crystal clear: he's saying you can't claim to rigorously study a relationship between race and crime by relying solely on conviction data, because racial prejudice and its legacy (for instance: what neighborhoods different races tend to live in, and whether those neighborhoods are enforcement priorities) has a profound impact on criminal conviction.
But I could also argue that not all crimes are caught in the data, because the law is written wrong. In fact, I could argue the law as it is written is thus criminal. After all, this is a democracy and the people are responsible for the laws. The people are incapable of drafting the laws in a non discriminatory manner (because racial prejudice and its legacy). Or, I could argue the exact opposite. Both are equaly weak/strong. But, this style of debate is incoherent. For it to be coherent, it would require special knowledge. And is otherwise a variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading
Any empirical work will involve questions of whether you are truly measuring the effect you want to measure.
However I am claiming, based on my knowledge of the field, that researchers have adequately dealt with this, and come to the conclusion that Black people really do commit more crime, after taking into account all observable economic and social effects.
Another replier has already mentioned that you can measure crimes that are less subject to bias in prosecution (like homicide.
If there was an easy way to explain the apparent excess of criminality in Black people by these means, I'm sure I would have read about it in the academic literature.
As all we have is conviction data, we can only see the crimes people care about seeing the criminals punished for.
There are plenty of crimes that go unpunished, and therefore groups can end up under reported, as the crimes they commit are for various reason ignored.
You can measure some crime without convictions. I.e. by ones being reported by crime's victims, or, in the case of homicide, by finding the victims murdered. Some crime like infamous "victimless" crimes can't be found this way, but my opinion is those probably shouldn't exist anyway as crimes.
That kind of hypothesis is clearly outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. Take an example from a link I posted further down the page, "The Death of Free Speech at Harvard"[1]. A law student wrote the following in a private email:
"I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances....
I also don't think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores.... I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.....
In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
Please don't pull a Larry Summers on me."
They did pull a Larry Summers on her. The message got forwarded to the Dean, who successfully re-educated her. Here is the statement that the student later put out:
"I am deeply sorry for the pain caused by my email. I never intended to cause any harm, and I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back.
I emphatically do not believe that African Americans are genetically inferior in any way. I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive.
I would be grateful to have an opportunity to share my thoughts and to apologize to you in person.
Even beforehand, I want to extend an apology to you and to anyone else who has been hurt by my actions."
The Dean's statement is a masterpiece of double-think (emphasis mine):
"I am writing this morning to address an email message in which one of our students suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.
This sad and unfortunate incident prompts both reflection and reassertion of important community principles and ideals. We seek to encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech should be accompanied by responsibility. This is a community dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice. The circulation of one student's comment does not reflect the views of the school or the overwhelming majority of the members of this community.
As news of the email emerged yesterday, I met with the leaders of our Black Law Students Association to discuss how to address the hurt that this has brought to this community.... A troubling event and its reverberations can offer an opportunity to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. The BLSA leadership brought this view to our meeting yesterday, and I share their wish to turn this moment into one that helps us make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.
Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility. The particular comment in question unfortunately resonates with old and hurtful misconceptions. As an educational institution, we are especially dedicated to exposing to the light of inquiry false views about individuals or groups.
I am heartened to see the apology written by the student who authored the email, and to see her acknowledgment of the offense and hurt that the comment engendered...."
[1] http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/11/the_slow_death_of_free_speech_.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/11/the_slow_d...
> Interestingly, having been charged as "racist," his departmental colleagues, save two conservatives, abandoned him.
After someone has been hounded to suicide for saying something unpopular, only crackpots will bother supporting them.
And Nagel's criticism was probably valid. Locals usually lend credit too readily to their friends, and outsiders can be more businesslike. Look at native Europeans vs ethnically Jewish bankers, or native Malaysians vs ethnically Chinese bankers. There's a book on it: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Outsiders-Transformation-Publications-International/dp/0295976136 http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Outsiders-Transformation-Pub...
Nagel's argument wasn't anything to do with race, it just said that blacks, like whites and asians, lend too much to their friends.
I'd like to hear what the PC Police have to say about Nagel. Probably nothing - they probably know they fucked up, but by their standards it is better to say nothing than to say something which is bad for the cause.
An aside, his Handbook of Global Social Policy looks quite good (though I only saw the google reader preview). I can see why it annoys people, though - he focuses on finding compromise solutions.
Maybe Weissberg is lying about the fact that Nagel was taken to Federal court over a trumped-up charge of racism, but you'd think that people would actually deny it if that were the case.