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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

If your opinion of Cofnas is based mainly on what other people have said about him, or based on quotations from things he's written, I'd highly recommend you:

- read this paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803

- read the Harvard data behind the famous "0.7%" quote

- watch his interview with David Starkey

I do not believe Cofnas is racist or that his exposure of Arday was motivated by racial animus.

But, even if it were, he still did a service to the public by exposing the governance failures at Cambridge.

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On your recommendation, I have just (fairly quickly) read the paper. I'm not impressed. It appears to assume that "some philosophers and scientists" have objections to race-based intelligence classifications based upon a belief that environmental factors alone are responsible for individual variation - then argues that this is false.

The reason why I object to group-based arguments about intelligence is specifically because the intra-group differences are bigger than the inter-group differences (though I also agree with some - though not all - of the critique made by the addendum/critique/reply linked under the abstract).

"Men are taller than women" is sometimes used to teach introductory ANOVA, sometimes to argue for a diversity of crash test dummies, but also to argue at "women" are less good for something because "they" are shorter. The first is trivial. The second would mostly be better dealt with by dealing with the broad range of human heights (5th/95th percentiles?) rather than merely adding an "average woman" to the existing average man one. The third is bogus because When many men are shortarses and many women are taller than me. So we're again generally better measuring people's actual height for things where it matters. Whichever group differences in intelligence are found, you're going to end up with overlapping distributions, making the groups a crappy proxy for individual variation in any case. But that's exactly what the author advocates doing in their section 4.

If you want to establish which genes are linked to intelligence then go ahead. It's not particularly important or glamorous work as far as I can see, but whatever - the academy has always had plenty of heterodox interests in it. But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view.

When you wrote this sentence, were you referring to Cofnas?

"But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view."

If so, what is the 'grand social policy' that Cofnas advocates or has advocated?

As far as I can tell from the paper, the only thign that seems like a policy proposal is that educational programs should be tailored to different ability profiles (and what he said about Head Start). But him saying that maybe we should fund different educational interventions isn't eugenics, or abouyt treating individuals differently depending on their race/ancestry. The paper argues against using group differences to blame or rank anyone. (See section 5.2 as it's the main point there.)

The overlapping-distributions point makes sense: even if group differences turned out to be partly genetic, group mean/median IQ or whatever isn't a good proxy for individuals from that group. So if you have a policy that is based on group membership (not individual assessment), it's going to be poorly targeted and end up wasting resources.

Section 4 endorses 'tailored' programs and doesn't explain how they'll be targeted. He doesn't say they'd be targeted by group membership, though. He references Jensen 1969 (https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1969-jensen.pdf) and in that paper Jensen advocated individual testing, not assignment based on race/ancestry. From page 78:

  The important distinction between the individual and the population must always be kept clearly in mind in any discussion of racial differences in mental abilities or any other behavioral characteristics. Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a "gifted" class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an individual, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality.

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