Changed that placeholder OP. Bit provocative.

I love watermelons and also grape soda, do I need a paternity test?

Caveat: monkey changed the op and now I look like a racist. But I'm leaving my original post there because one day I hope that fake grape flavour pop becomes as ubiquitous here in the UK as it is in America.

monkey wrote:

Changed that placeholder OP. Bit provocative.

Damn you.

monkey wrote:

This is why I don’t start many threads.

Is it a genetic thing?

OK sure I agree, the motives are absolutely important. 

But Harris addresses this point well in the podcast; this stuff is going to emerge eventually anyway. 

As we delve deeper into how we tick we are going to stumble repeatedly into the hard facts about the ways in which we are similar and the ways we are not - perhaps entirely by accident.

The question then becomes whether or not we can deal with this information rationally and maturely as it presents or are we going to resort again to what Vox are doing here - smearing the people involved and distorting the science with a political bias?

There's a lovely example in the podcast Harris uses where a couple of years ago a team somewhere happened upon the fact that white people actually carry some small amount of neanderthal DNA whereas blacks do not.  Ie black people are 100% "pure" homosapian human beings when whites actually aren't. 

It is simply a quirk of fate that this happens to be this way around, and when it got reported nobody got called a racist, Vox wrote no articles defaming the authors for being bigots and precisely no videogame forums were disturbed. 

Now imagine for a minute that this came out the other way around. Imagine that 3 years ago this same team happened upon the fact that whites were in fact the "pure" race and that the DNA of blacks was discovered to be contaminated with neanderthal DNA all along.

Do you really think that this would just go by in the same way? Do you imagine that the authors wouldn't have got called racists and have to defend their motives against the IP parade and Vox and Salon?

Yossarian wrote:

I absolutely imagine that. DNA testing is an exact science, IQ testing is not.

Yoss apologies, I know I've been ignoring your posts about height and rulers and things but only because I think that's a slightly different topic to this and I'm super wary of developing multiple overlapping strands simultaneously here because of what happened last time. 

The fidelity of IQ testing is something else and I take that point.

JRPC wrote:

OK sure I agree, the motives are absolutely important.  But Harris addresses this point well in the podcast; this stuff is going to emerge eventually anyway.  As we delve deeper into how we tick we are going to stumble repeatedly into the hard facts about the ways in which we are similar and the ways we are not - perhaps entirely by accident. The question then becomes whether or not we can deal with this information rationally and maturely as it presents or are we going to resort again to what Vox are doing here - smearing the people involved and distorting the science with a political bias?

Nicely dodged. We're not talking about chance discoveries here, we're talking about comparing the genetics of race via IQ measurements. How is that going to 'emerge anyway'?

(Edited for clarity.)

It's not just IQ tests that are flawed, it's the entire concept of the IQ. The fact that intelligence could be represented by a single scalar value is absurd.

Relevant to the above - http://www.kristajordan.com/dr-jordans-blog/neuroplasticity-and-genetics-how-our-dna-change-from-experience

A quick Google.

There are better sources, but that's the basic idea.

Am waiting on ozno's inability to debate without aggression and personal slurs, then its time to pull up a chair

During our email exchange, let me use this as an example. You wrote to me, again quoting here, “If James Flynn is right, if Flynn is right, than the mean IQs of African-American children, who are second- and third-generation upper middle class, should have converged with those of the children of upper middle class whites. But as far as I understand they haven’t.”

I think that sentence right there, that is not having enough experience, or having thought hard enough, or dug into the literature. I mean, there are different ways of learning about the world, of course, but about people who’s experience is different than yours.

I mean, I’ll give one example that I actually said to you in these emails. African American families making $100,000 a year tend to live in neighborhoods with the same income composition as white families making $30,000 a year. To say that you have an African-American family that is middle class or upper middle class and that their experience is now so similar to that of whites that somehow the environmental atmosphere around them has equalized, I think that is something that is being missed and that, the way you—

Sam Harris
But Ezra what’s being missed—

Ezra Klein
I’ll just finish on this point. The way you leverage identity politics here is a way of not forcing yourself to see some of that.

This was totally ignored by Harris. The point is that most reasonable people are skeptical about drawing conclusions from the data on iq difference within races. Murray's response is that by the 70s, Americans were functionally equal. (I'm paraphrasing). Harris is either dumb, obtuse (points at the data and calls it science, and everything else is irrelevant context), or a shill for people who want to hear from Murray.

This definitely does not warrant its own thread.

legaldinho wrote:

Dark Soldier wrote:

Am waiting on ozno's inability to debate without aggression and personal slurs, then its time to pull up a chair

You're in the wrong thread, cunt

Am touching me nips now

legaldinho wrote:

This definitely does not warrant its own thread.

No it doesn’t but it needed to be removed from current affairs.

Chomsky really does shit on the whole idea perfectly.

Worst Sonic stage ever.