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?
It was that bastion of progressive thinking, William f Buckley, who memorably shat on William Shockley's voluntary sterilisation movement in the 70s by pointing out that JS Bach or whoever was the 19th child of 20monkey wrote:Yep.trippy wrote:Chomsky really does shit on the whole idea perfectly.
hunk wrote: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.
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.
edited slight to sound less inflamatory.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.
legaldinho wrote:This is the only video y'all need to look at https://youtu.be/SQm2kf5vbqs
legaldinho wrote:Verbal reasoning is part of it, but I guess an important part is learning. Having the time to learn, having a structure, reading, writing, imagining, aged 9-18 or whatever. That's why I get a first from Oxford but my great grandfather was barely literate. We're obviously genetically similar.
You think you’re one step ahead of others for wanting to “look at the science rationally and dispassionately”.JRPC wrote:...
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.
...
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
JRPC wrote:Again, the hubris here is just staggering.
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.
The Ezra piece explaining the emails coming out that led to the pod, with various links.Facewon wrote:
Facewon wrote:Facewon wrote:Ffs.hunk wrote:IQ's definition is obviously flawed and skewed to favour academic skills and knowledge. t.
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.
Facewon wrote:
Facewon wrote:https://www.buzzfeed.com/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich?utm_term=.srqxbOOBM#.ltwGKkkb9 One last link for now. Finally read this today....
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