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Comment by Veelox | Hacker News Reader

>there needs to be a positive bias for minorities who were historically disenfranchised

>I absolutely think we need affirmative action to relieve historic deficits, but at the same time this affirmative support is in itself discriminatory and can have negative effects. What to do?

Quit affirmative action at anything above the high school level and poor resources into fixing the issues before high school. Personally I reject the framing that we need it and fully agree with you about the negative effects. The long term effects of people "being given" jobs or school placement I think are more negative than positive and you are seeing that. The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and Koreans were all able to get to parity or better without affirmative action.

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> The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and Koreans were all able to get to parity or better without affirmative action.

This of course assumes that genetic (racial) differences in intellectual (and physical, for that matter) ability do not exist. This has never been proven to be the case [1], and never will.

We all know dog breeds have different intellectual and physical characteristics. Why are humans supposedly immune from this? Because it is a morbid reality that throws a wrench in the "all men are created equal" liberal lie.

This is not me advocating for gross eugenics or even discrimination. I just want to point out something frequently missing from these conversations.

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." – Aristotle

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Biologist with a background in genetics here- there is no compelling evidence for statistically valid differences in measured intelligence on a racial genotypic basis. Most attempts to sort races by intelligence (e.g. The Bell Curve) end up being poorly designed junk science.

Dr. Adam Rutherford is a great pop science presence for debunking, or at the very least, addressing the claims that intelligence tracks with race on a genetic basis if you're truly interested in this topic.

https://youtu.be/3F0YSyeQavU

I agree with some of Taleb's critiques of IQ as a whole, and am quite interested in this topic. I will check out Dr. Rutherford's talk, thanks!

BTW your own linked source, the Wikipedia article states clearly:

"The current scientific consensus is that there is no evidence for a genetic component behind IQ differences between racial groups."

Yes, it's the biggest lie of the 21st century. Every scientist that does not agree with the "consensus" on the genetic-IQ link is almost always fired and ostracized from academia.

Even James Watson saw the same fate.

You believe there's a conspiracy against racists and promotion of racist ideas in science?

It’s fascinating that you’ve so casually compared people to dogs.

Out of curiosity, of the groups of people that are impacted by affirmative action, which groups remind you of which breeds and why? For example, are women border collies? Or some other breed?

Every day people have innocuous conversations such as "Ohhh, look at how cute that Border Collie is. I heard they're herding dogs and are very intelligent. I wish my Lab was half as intelligent as those Border Collies..."

When it comes to humans, it's just "purely socioeconomic factors" causing intelligence differences between races. The alternative is simply too morbid for our "nice" liberal society to accept.

I would argue denial of reality always causes more suffering than it purportedly "prevents."

I understand that it might be difficult for nice liberal society to accept that dogs and people differ identically.

Considering that it appears as though you’ve accepted this concept as being true, can you please give me an example of an actual category of people that you feel is analogous to a category of dog? I don’t see how that would be difficult.

I understand your desire to make the point about things that may be hard for squares to swallow, but what exactly is this truth that you’re privy to? So far this point seems a bit like gesticulating without actually committing enough to make a statement of substance.

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