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Comment by ebfd | Hacker News Reader

>"The first thing to remember is that the differences among individuals are far greater than the differences between groups."

All this means is that there is some degree of overlap between the two curves; that not every member of group A is more intelligent than every member of group B. Which is trivially true; even the most virulent racists would agree without hesitation that Clarence Thomas is more intelligent than a mentally disabled white person.

The height differences among Filipinos is greater than the difference in average height between Filipinos and the Dutch. Yet we can still say that on average Dutch people are taller than Filipinos, and understand that the underrepresentation of Filipinos in fields that select for height is not the result of societal oppression.

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If you want to reduce white supremacy to basic statistics, you can do that, but as intellectual three-card Monte games go, this isn't a very good one: it's pretty easy to see the trick.

If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist. That's not a value judgement; it's literally what it means to be a white supremacist. I guess you could be a mild, benevolent white supremacist? I can grant you that all white supremacists do not wear hoods and burn crosses?

This is unfair. You want to call people white supremacists based on the literal, objective content of their views, i.e. using the phrase in a narrow, technical sense, while knowing full well that calling someone a white supremacist will rally behind you a whole train of people who are happy to free-associate all sorts of horrible things with the phrase.

You think it's unfair for me to call people who believe in the objective supremacy of one race over another "supremacists", simply because people have very dim opinions of racial supremacists?

It's weird to claim you're simply using a technical term to categorize someone's views, but then choose such a charged phrase. Edit: rethought comment

The term is charged for a reason. If a white supremacist feels bad that they're being compared to Richard Spencer, I think they should do some soul searching.

There's a solid argument to be made that the quiet white supremacists do far more damage than the cartoon characters do.

I just want to make the syllogism you're operating with clear here:

1. If two groups have statistical differences in IQ across the population, then the group with the higher average is superior to the other

2. Person A believes that Group 1 has a higher average IQ than Group 2

3. Therefore, Person A is a Group 1 supremecist

I would want to very strongly and categorically denounce point #1 in this list.

Point #2 is just a matter of scientific observation. I don't have strong opinions on it one way or the other. But point #2 only implies #3 if you believe #1.

I would want to very strongly and categorically denounce point #1 in this list.

Well stated and I fully agree.

Handwaving.

Literally the only reason the topic of "statistical differences in IQ across the population" comes up on this site is as a defense for why there's a microscopic population of African Americans and Latinos in our industry. The reason, the logic goes, is that the supposed racial IQ differences mean that there simply aren't enough African Americans intellectually qualified for the field.

There are plenty of reasons why a cohort of US persons of African descent could have lower recorded IQ scores than US persons of European descent. I'm not the one making the logical leap that the reason is a genetic disposition towards lower intelligence, rather than socioeconomic, environmental, or methodological issues. The white supremacists are the ones saying that†. If you're not, and you're not bringing the topic up unbidden as a defense of the status quo, I'm not saying anything about you.

I'm not interested in pretending that there's a good or rational kind of white supremacist. Several people on this site, and this thread, seem determined to do so. You can, too, and I won't stop you, but "good kind" or "bad kind" I'm going to call them what they are.

† (much to the consternation of some of the best-known people doing the actual science)

Before Scott Alexander started http://slatestarcodex.com/, he wrote this post http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html:

> I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word."

Scott's post is full of examples, many of which I'm sure you'll agree are bad arguments. You are using this tactic with the term "white supremacy". Please note that doing so undermines your position and makes it clear to others that you are not arguing in good faith.

I try to behave such that if someone who held opposite views used the same norms, we wouldn't end up feeling contempt for one another. This means interpreting charitably, trying to understand why people believe what they believe, and avoiding snark and sarcasm. Most importantly, it means not misrepresenting other people's views. Throughout this thread, you have reliably failed at all of these things.

Could you imagine how two tptaceks with opposite views would behave? I'm convinced they would never get beyond name-calling and strawmanning. Both would feel certain in their cause and vindicated by their opponent's behavior. Worst of all, neither's beliefs would get closer to the truth.

Please, for the love of all that is good, be more charitable.

There are clearly people on this thread who think that it's possible to believe in the supremacy of white people over black people without all the ugly baggage of "white supremacy".

I. Don't. Care. I don't care if a white supremacist believes that Asians might be superior to whites. I don't care if a white supremacist thinks anyone who would wear a hood and burn a cross belongs in jail. These things simply don't matter to me.

Like I said: you are free to believe in the "good kind" of white supremacist. I don't differentiate.

'There are clearly people on this thread who think that it's possible to believe in the supremacy of white people over black people without all the ugly baggage of "white supremacy".'

No. There are clearly people on this thread who don't believe that statistical population differences tell us anything about supremacy.

Were we to throw off all the baggage of the entire phrase, the word "supremacy" still has an ordinary meaning in ordinary English. A statement about population differences is plainly not a statement about "authority, power, or status."

The only person in this thread who has argued that population differences imply supremacy is you. Over and over again. This is your word. I don't know how else to tell you that I don't even support your premise.

If you were anyone else, I would already have stopped arguing with you. But you are a person of authority in this space. Your tactics here are dangerous. I'm begging you to consider that.

I don't know whether you're writing normatively about positions you actually hold or descriptively about the positions of others, which makes it very difficult to engage what you're saying directly; everything has to be written through a layer of indirection.

So let me just come out and ask: on the matter of race and intellect, what is it you believe? Can you be specific about those beliefs in the context of American "white", black, and Asian people?

Recall that this entire subthread is the result of your claims about Murray. I am not an expert in the field, so I don't have strong opinions about the competing explanations for group differences in IQ. What I'm fighting against/for isn't any particular claim about intelligence, but rather your framing of one particular claim.†

I do strongly hold the position that a genetic explanation, should one exist, says absolutely nada about policy, "supremacy," how we should treat each other, or really anything else. I also strongly believe that a good faith inquiry into this question (and acceptance of whatever the science reveals) is a pursuit orthogonal to "white supremacy. This is so obvious to me that I feel silly even rebutting it.

Again, I'm not advancing one particular explanation for group differences. I'm opposing your treatment of the implications of one of those possible explanations.

Further, as I stated elsewhere in this thread, the statement "white people are smarter than black people" as a summary of population differences is statistically and biologically illiterate. This way of talking about these issues is unscientific and obfuscatory and it has no place in serious conversations on this topic.

† My personal opinion, as a non-expert, is that the differences are probably explained by a complicated mix of factors, but that genetics likely play some role. If this seems wishy-washy, it's because it is. I'm including this footnote only to avoid the accusation that I'm dodging your question. My opinions here aren't worth much. Frankly, I doubt yours are, either, unless you've got a second career you haven't mentioned in your profile.

I'm sorry, you'll have to forgive me, but I'm still in the dark as to what it is you actually believe. Help me understand the difference you see between observations about population aggregates in studies versus observations about "races".

I'm sorry, but if you're still in the dark about what I believe, then I think you're willfully so. I have to be honest: I didn't really think you were arguing in good faith in the beginning, but I was hopeful that you might be brought into a reasonable back-and-forth.

I no longer believe that's possible.

Edit: Just to make this explicit: I don't have any eccentric or unorthodox views about the differences between "races." I haven't advanced any such views here, nor do I hold them privately. tptacek's implication, of course -- and this happens in every single one of these conversations -- is that I'm concealing some detestable opinion about race. That's why there's always this persistent pleading to clarify what you actually believe. I've stated quite clearly what it is that I believe. No more or less. If I haven't been clear, then we'll just have to attribute that to my failings as a communicator and call it a day.

That is a strange response to a straightforward question, but I can't say I'm unhappy to see this weird little thread die here.

What do you want? How is '''the differences are probably explained by a complicated mix of factors, but that genetics likely play some role''' '''a genetic explanation, should one exist, says absolutely nada about policy, "supremacy," how we should treat each other, or really anything else. I also strongly believe that a good faith inquiry into this question (and acceptance of whatever the science reveals) is a pursuit orthogonal to "white supremacy"''' unclear?

Fact: IQ results differ by race, even though 'races' are a badly-defined concept. Fact: Socioeconomic factors are a lot of this. Postulation: There might maybe be a genetic factor somewhere. Assertion: This doesn't justify treating people differently by race.

What is unclear? What do you object to? You seem to find the idea that there might be any, miniscule genetic factor to intelligence that is more or less common in a specific 'race' as equal to white supremacy. Am I misreading you?

(And note I didn't say anything about which way genetic factors might go. If they exist they might be opposite the socioeconomic factors, who knows.)

How can there be a genetic difference between genetically invalid (badly defined as you say) concepts? I.e. the concept of race is completely social, there is nothing genetic about it (a person commenting on HN is well withing education threshold to be expected to know this). Yet you allow that someone who believes there might still be genetic factors "somewhere" in these differences is not a (closet) racist ... because they don't call for mass murder and insist the supposedly slightly inferior group should "not be discriminated" (just calling them genetically dumber is enough)?

> How can there be a genetic difference between genetically invalid (badly defined as you say) concepts? I.e. the concept of race is completely social, there is nothing genetic about it

Are you denying that there are differences in the genes controlling hair color between different racial groups? Or the frequency of something like lactose intolerance?

"Races" are badly defined, with shifting definitions and fuzzy borders and many different ways of grouping the same people. The idea of categorizing people into a handful of "races" rather than looking at hundreds of intersecting ancestries mixing together is dumb. But there is still a correlation between the two concepts. If you can find a gene that correlates with an ancestry (which you can do), then you've also found a gene that has a weaker correlation with "race".

And because there are thousands of genes that will correlate slightly with race, it's possible that one affects intelligence in some manner. It's not my problem if that's true. I'm confident there are no practically significant differences there. But that doesn't mean there isn't some .002% difference in median intelligence between groups that's caused by genes. It's bullheaded to ignore the possibility just because some awful racist will use it as "evidence" of their superiority. If they can't find out-of-context factoids to abuse they'll make things up anyway.

You want to lump (a) people who simply think, as a technical opinion, that there are population statistical differences with (b) people who desperately want an excuse to cleanse society of black people. They are not the same thing, and to pretend they are is to oversimplify truth in order to make a virtuous statement.

Some people argue that this is a good thing to do, but if you do this you can't complain about the phrase "virtue signaling," as someone prioritizing virtue over accuracy.

"White supremacy" as a movement, as a phrase in common usage, and as a matter of common sense, implies a whole host of beliefs and policy desires that aren't held or sought by Charles Murray or his defenders.

Not holding those beliefs doesn't render you a "benevolent supremacist;" it means, very plainly (and using ordinary definitions of ordinary words) that you're not a supremecist.

It is plainly misleading and obfuscatory to apply that term to anyone investigating population differences in good faith.

Perhaps you mean to say that all such investigations are evidence of nefarious motives? I think that's wrong, but it's at least a coherent worldview.

>If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist. That's not a value judgement; it's literally what it means to be a white supremacist.

Is this 'any' as in 'a single group' or 'all other groups'?

Either way it's not true. You can think a race has better average X without thinking it's superior. A dedicated white supremacist will take a list of advantages that are supposedly inherent to non-white people and make a just-so argument about how that actually makes them inferior.

Edit: If you downvoted, please tell me where you disagree, I'm very curious.

"You can think a race has better average X without thinking it's superior."

Ironically, what this argument tends to reveal is the degree to which the upper crust fetishizes intelligence and believes in the primacy of IQ as the measure of the person. Google practically invented the big, scary interview process that proves you're smart enough to belong.

Is it any surprise that the winners of that genetic lottery believe in the supremacy of that measure?

And once accepted as an organizing principle, you really, really need to believe that there are no statistical differences between groups, because to discover them would, by the original logic, entail grotesque conclusions.

I can only imagine the dissonance this must generate.

This is more or less the response Curtis Yarvin gives when his racism, which seems (if you can hack your way through his prose) virulent, is challenged. To paraphrase:

"I'm not saying black people are worse than white people. I'm saying that white people are smarter than black people, and that our society is biased against those who aren't as smart as white people. Oh, the unfairness of it all".

I have no idea who you are or of this is what you mean; you're just an abstraction to me, a nick on this site I have no association with whatsoever and will presumably soon forget about. But if you're interested (you responded to me upthread), it might be useful to you to know how this kind of logic comes across to me.

I didn't read dionidium's post as an endorsement of the chain of logic, or of the fetishization of intelligence by the upper crust, at all. In fact, quite the opposite.

I don't know who you are either, but this comment comes across as rather harsh and over the top,

I have no idea who that guy is or why I'm being asked to defend him, so I'll speak only for myself when saying that the statement, "white people are smarter than black people" as a summary of population differences is statistically and biologically illiterate.

This is just simply not how serious people talk about populations.

Further, to conclude that such differences, should they even exist, imply anything else about the world (or how to treat the people in it) is morally incomprehensible.

"Society is biased against black people" is a perfectly accurate statement, so I'm not sure what that is supposed to show.

Can't you make an objectively-true equivalent statement about height? People with certain ethnicities are taller. Taller people are treated better. It's unfair.

It doesn't seem like the way that logic is constructed reveals any racism. Just the premise of "X are smarter than Y" is the problem. Kind of begging the question.

> If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist.

Good, then we can agree that all these people who believe that Asians are smarter than whites aren't white supremacists.

  If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are 
  intellectually superior to any other race of people, 
  you're a white supremacist.

Were the 52 professors who signed Mainstream Science on Intelligence in 1994 white supremacists?① Is the APA a white supremacist organization?② If so, with 117,000 members, it would be by far the biggest white supremacist organization in the US.

Thomas, I understand that this is an emotionally charged topic, and you want to attack Damore's argument from all possible angles, but group differences in intelligence has been settled science for many decades, and misrepresenting the facts is not exactly making us look good. It's a long-running conservative meme that people who are interested in promoting equality ignore science for ideological reasons, and this is, you know... exactly that.

Group differences in intelligence are obviously bad, and they seem to be narrowing over time by Flynn effect actions, but they do actually exist. Saying that anyone who measures a difference between groups is literally promoting the supremacy of the white race is pretty wild. What measured difference makes you a white supremacist? 10 IQ points? 0.1? If you measure a difference of 0.000001 IQ points, should you instantly lose your job for being A Racist, as you've argued elsewhere?③

===

①: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellig...

②: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unkno...

③: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953843

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