> It's racist to only quote statistics that support one's racist point of view. > And it is racist to be credulous of statistics that support one's racist poin

> It's racist to only quote statistics that support one's racist point of view. > And it is racist to be credulous of statistics that support one's racist point of view. Note that these are kind of circular. You've judged that the speaker's point of view is racist, and therefore his use of statistics is racist. Also note that, to a first approximation, everybody only quotes statistics that support their own point of view, and everyone is credulous of statistics that support their own point of view. It's easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased in favor of showing IQ differences between races. It's also easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased against that. In a world where most people don't believe in IQ differences between races - or even a world where people don't want to look like they believe in them - there's going to be publication bias against that direction. That's true even if there are no true IQ differences between races. > Finally, the concept of race itself is socially constructed, and therefore not objective. Imagine a world where there was a single gene which added ten IQ points to someone. (Which is definitely not the world we live in.) Imagine it was a mutation which arose in a single location a thousand years ago. It didn't become fixed in that population, and it's spread outside. But it's certainly more common in people who were born in that region, whose parents and grandparents were born there, than in people born on the other side of the world. In this world, it seems to me that race would be just as much a social construct, and therefore not objective. But it would also be true that there would be a strong correlation between IQ and race.