Lol

No that's fine really.

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?

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?

Nobody rational who actually understands science would've blinked an eye. You and Harris are imagining an imaginary outrage. Seriously, stop for a moment and think about it.

The whole interbreeding of homo sapiens with Neanderthals and Denisovans is interesting though. Look at how well that turned out for our species including iq! Take that Harris and Murray!

But yeah, the sonic level would've been absolute shite.

Goes to show none of this is new.

It also proves humans love interracial (interspecial?) sex. And the human genome between races is still 99.99% compatible. DNA is just amazing...

hunk wrote:

Nobody rational who actually understands science would've blinked an eye. You and Harris are imagining an imaginary outrage. Seriously, stop for a moment and think about it. The whole interbreeding of homo sapiens with Neanderthals and Denisovans is interesting though. Look at how well that turned out for our species including iq! Take that Harris and Murray! But yeah, the sonic level would've been absolute shite.

I agree with that, but the whole issue here is that non-rational actors are all over this debate and would be all over that one too.

This is happening right here and right now. You're dismissing perfectly legitimate and mainstream science while eager to slime anyone who's taking notice of it, all fuelled by ethically dubious and openly biased journalism. 

Here's what I reckon is a key couple of paragraphs from Hariis:

There’s no point in having our politics be hostage to these kind of tripwire effects, where you say something that seems politically invidious, merely talking about the data as they are — unless every population of human beings has exactly the same mean and the same variance for every trait we care about, we are guaranteed to be blindsided by these differences that seem important to people who care about differences among groups.
The end game here is to not care about differences among groups, to treat individuals as individuals, and to realize that, yes, people have different sets of gifts and competences and we can change them. We can give people whatever advantages we can, and we should.

…
but the way to be ready is to be willing for good and intellectually honest people to be willing to talk about the facts of biology and various things we understand about things like intelligence without losing sight of our political and ethical commitments to one another. Those commitments just have to be to make the world better and to treat everyone fairly and to treat one’s political opponents fairly. There’s a real shortage of people who can do this right now, Ezra, and your style of dealing with this is part of that problem...

...I can tell you, we’re not going to get rid of human difference until we’ve all just uploaded ourselves into the matrix. There will be differences that we’re continually trying to correct for. All we have is intellectual honesty and ethical goodwill as tools to do that. What you are adding to that equation is a really indissoluble kind of tribalism, which I keep calling identity politics.

It’s showing its dysfunction even in this conversation, in the way you’re thinking about this, in the kinds of things you’ve published, in the consequences to me and Murray and Andrew Sullivan and others for you having published it. That is what I’ve been complaining about.

edited slight to sound less inflamatory.

Why are ethics and science being lumped in with eugenics groundwork?

legaldinho wrote:

This is the only video y'all need to look at https://youtu.be/SQm2kf5vbqs

I tried adding a comment here but cannot. He says it perfectly. 

I wonder though about IQ tests. I suspect that literary is key, so you probably find a greater correlation between high IQ and how many books one reads, than any other factor. If so, that illustrates that the IQ is falsely elevated to a higher prominence than it deserves.

Again, the hubris here is just staggering.

You really think that that none of that stuff has ever previously occured to anyone in the scientific community that's been looking at intellegence and IQ over decades? You've spent 30 seconds thinking about it and you've immediately stumbled upon the perfect knock-down?

But wait! What is IQ is effected by ... reading!?

Genius guys. Get yourselves back to Oxford ASAP.

You both clearly have literally no idea what you're talking about here but are just so supremely satisfied to talk about it like you do. You just have to hold your own thinking to a higher standard than this bacause all you're doing is disqualifying yourselves as people worth having a converstaion with.

IQ tests are standardised. Did you even know that?

IQ tests are standardised sure, but for what purpose. My wife is a clin psych and she uses tests such as the WISC I believe it's called, on occasions where she is trying to assess if there are any cognitive impairments at play. It doesn't form the basis of her assessment but it adds context. 

However, these tests are in the same language and cultural context as that which the test was designed. She couldn't take it into remote indigenous communities and expect the same useful information because there might be different cultural emphasis at play (oral tradition, lack of familiarity with some background info on the questions). 

Every intelligence test has contextual information that needs to be known first. It doesn't mean the person taking the test is unintelligent. It just means they are learning different things.

i feel i gave this more than a fair chance at least, but there's barely a debate to be had in the first place.

One more way of putting things, perhaps - there is no neutral position here, and you don't actually have to believe that black people are inferior or whatever to contribute to the racist effects of such ideas. if you're a far-right extremist, it's a victory just to see this iq stuff being taken seriously by liberals, to have it treated as science that's put in the same bracket as, say, measuring people's height, or that should be separated from the motivations behind it. if you really want to argue against the racist conclusions of the research, you don't start by legitimising its questionable methods.

JRPC wrote:

Again, the hubris here is just staggering.

You really think that that none of that stuff has ever previously occured to anyone in the scientific community that's been looking at intellegence and IQ over decades? You've spent 30 seconds thinking about it and you've immediately stumbled upon the perfect knock-down?

But wait! What is IQ is effected by ... reading!?

Genius guys. Get yourselves back to Oxford ASAP

Well, if nothing else you’ve got Harris’ whining and victim complex down to a tee. At least he occasionally has an inkling about what he’s going on about though.

There doesn’t seem to be any way through that brick wall. Unless you are prepared to accept pseudoscience, conjecture and discount the far more likely explanation, you’re a closed-minded sheep, corrupted by the biased MSM. Same thing with alternative medicine, anti-vax, Illuminati, Brexit. Fuck the facts, here’s the real truth that we’ve just made up.

JRPC wrote:

Again, the hubris here is just staggering.

Orly.

 "You really think that that none of that stuff has ever previously occured to anyone in the scientific community that's been looking at intellegence and IQ over decades? You've spent 30 seconds thinking about it and you've immediately stumbled upon the perfect knock-down?"

Well, it wasn't the end, but hey ho:

Facewon wrote:

Ok, I promise this is the end of the harris/Murray/IQ posts.....

I hit up former star of the God thread, Some_guy, because he's knee deep in a masters in psychology right now. I asked for the gist on race, IQ and genetics.

He came through with 3 links which are fantastic. 

They are all mostly very readable, even for the layman, only one mentions the bell curve, but it's as part of a wider point. 

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/what-do-iq-tests-test-interview-with-psychologist-w-joel-schneider/

This is a lovely read and the dude can write science for the layman. Gets funky towards the end when he's on about his new gizmo, but whatever. 

https://sites.google.com/a/haverford.edu/the-psychology-of/contact/iq-tests-are-biased-against-certain-groups

Again, fantastic writing. Clear and because it's not a polemic or a blog, in this case, it just goes through things piece by piece. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

The third is just good ol wiki. SG is well aware of its limitations, but in this case, it does fine. 
 

Some great history of IQ in the links, from memory. Covering exactly what you're getting at there, JR, re standardisation etc.

Facewon wrote:

Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science

The Ezra piece explaining the emails coming out that led to the pod, with various links.

Facewon wrote:

Facewon wrote:

hunk wrote:

IQ's definition is obviously flawed and skewed to favour academic skills and knowledge. t.

Ffs. 

 
Should be more constructive. Flawed is surely not the right word there, imperfect, maybe. Multiple sources conceding issues and how they have been addressed, but arguing it is measuring something. The second bit seems to have more merit, but I'll also say that it was pretty cool reading the history of the tests, right back to France, and seeing how they acknowledged and attempted to get around the issue of literacy = intelligence. My take away is that we don't need to throw IQ tests out the window to refute a bunch of the more egregious claims/conclusions folks don't like. Anyhoo.

See bold.

And here's me giving you plenty of sympathetic quotes to work with.

Facewon wrote:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data A Vox link, why not.

Because the "moral panic" is as easily ascribed to Harris as it is to IP proponents.....

Facewon wrote:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich?utm_term=.srqxbOOBM#.ltwGKkkb9 One last link for now. Finally read this today....

That final link and the stuff SG suggested led me to be happy to say that IQ is certainly measuring something, and that it's possible to believe that and that there's variance between groups, but getting much further than that requires a few too many leaps for my liking.

Harris insisting that American history is irrelevant to the science is staggering. You cannot just assert that the science is just science. Seperate from all other human endeavour. He's basically arguing NOMA for science and history. (non overlapping magesteria.) irony ensues, etc etc.

The context of the books and stance Murray has outside of the bell curve is important, the fact that he (Murray) uses, in the pod with Harris, examples of studies arguing that they've "accounted for wealth so it must be genetic" (yes I'm paraphrasing) opens up the door to a case for environmental influence.

It also opens up the discussion to social sciences and history and all of the stuff klien brought in.

Harris has to deal with his evidence, his examples (black families with money in poorer areas) for example. He can't just ignore it, he can't just say it's irrelevant. At least not without looking like a guy so keen to discredit identity politics and so battle scared from arguing with greenwald that he's lost perspective. Murray IMO is too quick, for instance, to call affirmative action (or any human intervention) impossible because of his prior beliefs.

Harris's constant insistance on counterfactuals and just so examples is tiresome and flawed. It shows here and it showed with chompers.

Anyhoo, I've enjoyed reading up on all this stuff.

Apologies to Brooks for jizzing all up in Bonnie's hair.

I'd still not claim expertise on any of the subjects, together, or individually, but hopefully I know more than I did previously.

J: it's hard to not ask or state this without sounding like a prick, but it has to be said. Reading back through what you've written, and since having read or listened to all of Harris on the subject, plus the haier piece, I'm yet to be convinced you've read or heard anything on the subject from outside of the Harris bubble.

You're almost quoting him verbatim in spots. Without citation, and you're certainly just asserting the same stuff he is.

Really frustrating thing to combine with shitcanning other sources. (lol I linked to a buzzfeed piece!)

Saw this the other day -