It is an extremely common argument. A few years back a book called "The Bell Curve" came out which put forward that argument.
Regardless, I think the parent post was just exaggerating some hypothetical conversation in class to improve his/her argument. The probably of students arguing in class that some of their classmates are genetically inferior is highly unlikely. And if they did the probability of it not causing a massive twitter shit storm is close to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Troublesome_Inheritance
How about 2009?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135158265...
It's not so blatant as much anymore and more implied nowadays but "scientific racism" is still alive and well today.
Worse, any criticism of it is counted with "you're just denying the truth because it's not politically correct."
In the end, customers are unhappy, you can't ship, and you lose your job because you don't allow yourself to see what's blindingly obvious and in front of your nose.
That's what the western world's identity politics fad feels like. The science tells us that there are important group differences. As long as we don't allow ourselves to see them and instead attack people who show them, we're not going to get anywhere.
The problem is when you find them claiming they are genetic and innate while being completely blind to all the other things that can cause those differences. The bigger problem is when you go looking for differences specifically so you can "prove" the group is inferior. Usually inferior to the group you belong to.
It's like finding that null pointer and coming to the conclusion that the pointer is null due to nature and that's just the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.
I do have high hopes for what we can "do about it". These hopes rest on genetic modification. There's no reason in principle that the next generation, or the one after that, couldn't be made all geniuses. It'd solve a huge number of problems. But first we have to recognize the fact that intelligence is largely hereditary!
For example, you're far more likely to be schizophrenic if your identical twin is schizophrenic compared to your fraternal twin. This strongly suggests that schizophrenia has a major heritable component as no other explanation would account for this. This is as much "hard science" as anything else we study.
And no, I never said (or implied) "it's okay to conduct research so long as you like the findings." It's perfectly ok to conduct research even if you are disgusted by your data. (and I've heard some researchers say they have been disgusted with their data) However, this type of research has a long history of being conducted solely to "prove" racial inferiority.
.. And any type of race/iq inquiry is something that has to be taboo and outside of the scientific community. For a society that values egalitarianism there are some questions that we need not try to confirm or deny
You haven't presented an argument: you've presented a fear-based assertion. I absolutely disagree that it is ever better not to know. Every single time someone has made that argument and tried to enforce it, it's retarded our progression as a species.
The Catholic Church in medieval Europe did tremendous harm, and all it was trying to do was save our immortal souls. It was doing good work. It was better not to know, right? How much progress might we have made in mathematics had Hippasus not been murdered for providing the existence of irrational numbers?
People who share your views do us all tremendous harm. We could make life better for billions of people if we gave up our taboos on researching ourselves.
That said, I do appreciate the honest. It's not often that I see people out right admit to wanting to ban certain lines of research. Your doing it is refreshing.
Until you can take a genome and build computational models of intelligence it is foolish to be so confident to draw any conclusions in IQ research.