The Left views the expert consensus on intelligence in much the same way that the right views the expert consensus on climate change. The consensus view is rejected not because of evidence, but because of what it does to their model of the world and fear that it will open the door to great abuses in the future (increased government regulation for climate change, and increased racism and discrimination for intelligence studies).
Looking towards the past on how (pseudo)science about intelligence has been leveraged to commit atrocities, and looking at the reasons why so many on the right really really really like bringing up IQ and whatnot, I'll pass. At best the conversation dissimulates the urge to justify hierarchies of dominance-- the same fucking reason why the right likes to bring up anything from biology. At worst you get enthusiastic eugenicists; meeting such people at, say, conferences or other programmer venues (i'm sure programmers skew both towards higher IQ and views that the strong should crush the weak) is like stepping on a cow pie.
Not to mention, I know plenty of people who would score high on intelligence tests, perhaps much higher than I would. Some of them seem to leverage that intelligence to be far stupider than anyone dumber than them could manage (us programmers again...).
The point being-- the gap between scientific research on intelligence and what it means for A) society, and B) my personal life is a chasm I have no reason to bridge.
What would you feel if someone said about climate change something like "I am very recalcitrant about allowing that understanding into politics, policy or most discussions I want to have about anything"?
Yes, someone could make structurally the same post I did about any topic instead of intelligence research, even right down to the grammar. Turns out that completely changes the meaning of the post!
The answer is that I think climate research has clear and obvious input into not just state policy but how we structure large scale human activity in general. So, I would think such a conservative was wrong, and perhaps an asshole too depending on how earnest they are.
But you could have already guessed, so did I miss the point of your question?
Scandinavia deserves plenty of credit for the legislative efforts they've made towards egalitarianism, but it's important we put our perception of them into context.
The problem is that differential outcomes are used as a measurement of systemic bias. Well, you weren't willing to look at the differential inputs, so how could you possibly make claims about the differential outcomes?
The problem is that well-meaning people on the left come to the table full of assumptions and intuitions about how reality works and what causes inequality, and base their policy positions on these. People on the right bring up biology because it can expose weaknesses in these assumptions and beliefs.
> Looking towards the past on how (pseudo)science about intelligence has been leveraged to commit atrocities
You can also look at how blank slatism and Lysenkoism were leveraged to commit atrocities in the USSR. Science and pseudo-science have been use to justify all kinds of horrible regimes. That isn't a license to ignore reality and form policy based on unfounded beliefs.
Did I say anything about unfounded beliefs? I didnt. I even said I accept research on intelligence. Not basing policy on X is not the same thing as basing policy on X.
But I'll bite. Tell me a way that intelligence research should inform policy that isn't immediately morally repugnant.
I wasn't commenting on your personal beliefs. I was commenting on your position that certain true facts should not be spoken in a political context. To me, that is the same as saying that people should be free to make policy without being challenged if their beliefs are incorrect.
> But I'll bite. Tell me a way that intelligence research should inform policy that isn't immediately morally repugnant.
No Child Left Behind in the USA is (I think) widely regarded as a failed piece of legislation. It is based on the idea that the only reason kids don't succeed in school is because schools are failing them. It heavily penalized schools that can't get their achievement scores up. Intelligence research can provide one leg of a counterargument that kids are different in all kinds of ways, and proscriptively mandating equality of outcome makes for bad policy.
The left would say that environment can and should be fixed.
At age 7 the difference in IQ between a adopted white child and adopted black child was 20.1 points. At age 17 this changed to 17.8 points. The difference for a half black child and a white child was 6.1 at age 7, and 8.3 at age 17. The goal of the study was to show the opposite of what it ended up showing. Consequently many individuals, including the authors of the study themselves, have still tried to argue that this is not evidence of a genetic link to IQ. Arguments against it have run the gamut from environmental factors from before the children were adopted (which again was less than 1 years old in all cases) to skin color causing environmental effects. These certainly could be contributing factors, however they would undermine any and all results of the study - which is indicative of a 'nuclear' after-the-fact effort to undermine their own results, rather than a reasoned concern.
That concern is also mitigated by an an unbelievably fortuitous 'accident' that helped create a further control sample. A number of the parents of the interracial children believed that the biological parents of these children were both black. And consequently these children certainly would have believed the same, which would lead one to believe that any environmental affects that would have affected black children more negatively than transracial children would also have affected these children similarly. In reality, they ended up scoring comparably to the interracial children whose parents knew they were interracial.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
The fact that the definitions and consequences, no matter how ultimately arbitrary the first should be so deeply intertwined and pervasive, is hardly surprising.
There is no alternative hypothesis for climate change that fits the data. As the sibling commenter noted, there are many credible alternative hypotheses for the observed differences in general intelligence across races that do fit the data (and moreover, predate GP's study and were the preferred explanation of that study's authors), and from what we have seen with Asians as a prior, I am more inclined to believe them until an experiment can separate the competing hypotheses.
When there is a hypothesis that is heavily supported by data, something that might be right, but lacks data, is not a credible alternative. This is the same fallacy that 'climate deniers' make. They think that by arguing that our understanding of climatic systems is limited (which is indeed true) that they can then argue that therefore we can claim alternatives that lack the same scale of evidence (such as that climate change is natural and the CO2 link is a correlation, not causation). That's not how this works...
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And there's one meta aspect, I want to consider here for a minute. First consider the case of the numerous parents and children who were led to believe that their child was biologically black. These children, and their adoptive parents, would have behaved in a fashion identical to all other parents of biologically black children. Yet, they performed academically and on the IQ exams at the same level as their genetic peers, other transracial children.
This works as a phenomenal control for environmental factors after the period of adoption. And the extremely early period of adoption means if there is indeed an environmental effect happening here then it's either prenatal or in the earliest stages of infancy. Do you understand how enormous the incentive to discover this would be, if people genuinely believed it? You're talking about raising the IQ of millions of people by up to 20 points. That is something that would radically reshape society and would be, by a very wide margin, one of the most important discoveries of the social sciences ever.
Yet oddly enough, nobody seems to be running experiments to try to control for environmental factors to see what exactly it might be that all black parents seem to be doing to their children that's lowering their IQ so much. And this isn't something that would be hard. You'd simply need to offer enough to a sample of families seeking to have children, of differing raises, to have their behavior monitored immediately following conception. What would that take? $10k and free medical checkups? I'm sure that'd be plenty, and there would certainly be grants available to fund it. Yet... nobody seems to be going this route. Think about that for a minute. Actions - or the lack thereof, as always, speak much more loudly than words.
You've simply repeated my point. All of the existing data supports GP's sibling's competing hypotheses.
> When there is a hypothesis that is heavily supported by data, something that might be right, but lacks data, is not a credible alternative.
The competing hypotheses are supported by exactly the same data and are further supported by the data from the Asian diaspora and by the twin study data. You must find an experiment that supports one hypothesis and rejects the others, which is what climate science has plenty of.
> That people, and groups of people, are radically different is supported by everything we know. Genetic factors influence every aspect of our beings, and so to argue that intelligence is somehow immune to this is something that requires evidence.
You make a giant leap. Intelligence is partly inherited -- that is true according to twin studies (which don't control for the fact that adopters have to meet a certain bar and therefore can't show the actual effect of post-natal environment and also don't control for prenatal environment). However, claiming that the difference in intelligence between racial groups is due to genetic differences vs. due to environmental differences is not supported by evidence. In 1947, the literacy rate in India was 12%. After seeing the rise in literacy rate over the past 70 years, you would be hard-pressed to claim that this deficiency was genetic.
It seems you can parrot the concepts of scientific reasoning that I explained in the GP post but are simply unable to apply them.
IQ is dominantly heritable. The consensus on heritability (that is the percent of deviation that's explained by genetics alone) has been increasing over time. It used to be believed to be 'only' around ~60% whereas more recent results have shown it to be upwards of 80%. There are lots of strange things about IQ that can lead to poor measurement, like the fact that environmental roles can play some in young children, yet play a negligible role for people as early as adolescence. Anyhow, that paper again provides a great overview of all the issues here. If you're not up for it, Wiki has a page on it [2]. But I'm already cringing there. On the first page, I noticed some editor apparently and literally thinks regression to the mean means two people with high IQ are more likely to produce children of average IQ... Wiki has gotten really quite awful, but I digress!
I'm unsure what you think you're referencing with the "Asian diaspora" or twin study data. Twin study data is conclusive on this topic. I could spam you with sources here, but seriously just searching (google scholar is a useful tool) for iq twin study will lead to a very one-sided picture. If you can provide some papers on the "Asian diaspora" that'd be appreciated, though.
[1] - https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
1. the kind of issue that the 'left' considers a problem, and
2. just a wee bit embarrassing.
On the other hand, if what some would describe as the consensus view is true, then a suitable breeding program, perhaps even forced, would be a moral imperative.
Next time on Hacker News: Brave New World: dystopia or utopia?
Governments can and do use climate change as a pretext to seize additional power, and increasing the price of energy is unquestionably a regressive "tax" that harms the poor and working class a lot more than it harms the wealthy.
History demonstrates that if you legitimize any rationale for considering any group of people superior to one another, people will run with that all the way to the death camps. The PC doctrine of equality is a "noble lie" of sorts and a reaction to millennia of bloodshed and unbelievable suffering.
This has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the research but I'm not entirely convinced these things should be ignored when discussing it.
If climate change is real and manmade and if IQ is mostly genetic and a significant predictor of success, does it follow that the poor should be made poorer through more costly energy and should be discriminated against on the basis of IQ scores?
In the real world this reasoning applies to things like studies on gender differences and performance in different disciplines. Let's imagine there really is a solid scientific case that women are, say, 20% less likely to be good at programming. (Just making up a number.) If this became common knowledge, companies just wouldn't bother hiring women for programming positions. As a result the women who are as good at programming as men don't get a chance.
Rinse and repeat for evidence of racial differences in IQ, etc. If it were in fact true that blacks had on average 5-10% lower IQs than whites (making up another number) and if this were common knowledge, nearly all blacks would face intense discrimination including those with IQs the same as or higher than average whites.
These examples might sound like typical "social justice warrior" fodder. Let me throw out a totally different kind of example to escape that framing.
There's a stereotype out there that male programmers and other male science/engineering types are on average more socially awkward and less socially intelligent than the general population. Now let's say there emerges actual solid scientific evidence for this, and let's say that evidence becomes common knowledge. Would this cause, say, women to just reflexively avoid dating men in technical professions? Would it cause men in technical professions to be passed over for management roles on the perception that they just "don't have the social skills?"
A case can be made that biological differences in ability should be somewhat verboten in public discourse because human beings are terrible at statistics and will lazily extrapolate averages to entire groups. Scientific evidence for a statistical bias in ability that applies to any identifiable sub-group of humans can easily lead to blanket discrimination against that entire sub-group regardless of the strength or mutability of the effect or the long term reliability of the science.
Edit:
The long term reliability issue may actually be a stronger argument than the statistical innumeracy of the average person.
Once something like this becomes "common knowledge" it is very hard to educate people otherwise even if the science is revised. Take fat for example. I still know people who eat margarine because "butter is bad" in spite of the fact that we've known for over a decade that fats aren't necessarily so bad for you and that trans fats (present in margarine) are much worse. Unless you have certain metabolic or circulatory issues butter is much better for you than margarine, but try telling your grandparents.
Let's say some systematic difference in ability becomes common knowledge and then the science is found to be faulty or -- as is often the case with such things -- reality turns out to be a lot more complex than we thought. How many generations would it take to de-educate the population and how many lives would be ruined in the meantime?
We don't generally publish the latest research on biological weapons synthesis or implosion geometries for compact nuclear weapons that use very little fissile material. Studies on race and gender and how they relate to IQ and ability aren't quite as dangerous as these but they should probably be discussed in obscure journals in coded language and should never ever be reported in the popular science press. Society just isn't mature enough to deal with this stuff.
Edit #2:
I'm not arguing it should be illegal to discuss such things or anything like that, just that several good arguments can be made that it's irresponsible to popularize it.
Now I'm not saying anything about your personal views about the research, but I think in order to fix the cultural and societal discrimination you touch upon we should emphasize exactly the reasoning you expounded about the nuance of averages. We know that there is more differences within groups than between them and I think to deter the effects of discrimination we need to emphasize analysis on the individual level and to have a real and honest discussion about the issues and to make statistical reasoning more prevalent among the general population.
I'll be more optimistic about this when I see sales of lottery tickets start dropping dramatically and when stuff like this stops happening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU
Gambling and silly financial schemes are driven by the same sorts of logical fallacies as those I discussed up top.
> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
There is an entire scientific debate about it in the field of psychology. Claiming it is anti science is willful ignorance.