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Comment by seekingtruth | Hacker News Reader

That something someone says makes you feel bad or is used by others to justify ideas or actions you find loathsome does not make that person or what he said wrong. Your skin color and height are highly heritable attributes and it is by no means an outrageous assertion to state that intelligence is as well. Some estimates for heritability of intelligence are as high as 0.8. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_of...

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It's irrelevant whether intelligence is an inheritable trait or not. You can not say 'all Asians are short' nor 'all Africans are black' as they simply aren't all, nor does the precise number or accuracy give you indication about the traits of any single person. Watson is under the blatantly false impression that his statement have statistical merit when they clearly don't. He was simply wrong and should not have spoken about a field clearly outside his expertise.

The interpretation of the adoption research in the article you linked is particularly infuriating as there is only one thing clearly dominating in the results, the upbringing of the child which accounts for a full 10 points, a number that would seem to point to an almost irrelevance of any genetic predisposition let alone one correlated with prehistoric ancestry, those 3 points could come from literally any uncontrolled for other environmental influence.

> You can not say 'all Asians are short' nor 'all Africans are black' as they simply aren't all, nor does the precise number or accuracy give you indication about the traits of any single person. Watson is under the blatantly false impression that his statement have statistical merit when they clearly don't.

This is an intellectually dishonest interpretation of statistics and/or his claims. Saying "all Asians are short" is stupid, but saying "Asians are shorter than Europeans" is not; my interpretation of the statement is that Asians are in average (or even better, in median) shorter than Europeans, not that all Asians are shorter than any European (btw, I don't know if it's true, and I don't particularly care, but it very well could be, and it very well could be the reverse).

About race and intelligence, I don't think it's a controversial claim, at least in the US, that Asians are more intelligent than whites, who are in turn more intelligent than blacks. Now, the reasons for this are varied, and might nothing to do with race, but with history (e.g. Asians are descendants of immigrants who were driven to succeed, while blacks are descendants of slaves, who grew up in poor neighborhoods). Why would you object to the second claim, but not the first one?

I would object to both claims, because you, very much like Watson, seem to not grasp the idea that you can not simply drop a quantifier and assume people will interpret it as 'on average', this is simply not how the English language works. When Watson says "any person who has to deal with Black employees will know" he is implying that it is expected for any black employee to be dumb, whether he meant for that expectation or not. And frankly I believe he knows damn well how his language is interpreted and just hides behind his statistics to give his bigotry the illusion of merit.

On the one hand, you're totally right, I always interpret such statements as "in average" (or some other statistical quantifier, but definitely not "all"), and I don't know how other people understand it. On the other hand, I have never seen (in online discussions/articles that I read) object to the idea that Asians are smarter than whites (in the US) (except you), or call the statement bigoted/racist; in contrary, I would consider it fact (again, with appropriate quantifiers), and the discussion seems to be focused on how to deal with this fact (e.g. negative racial discrimination for Asians in universities).

Well I have my own beliefs of course, and they might taint my rationality in accepting such statements. Still it's good to be vigilant, it might be true that Asians on average perform better at certain tests at a certain age, this might not at all mean they were born more intelligent and might only correlate with their upbringing and the expectancies of the world around them.

Also, I think universities have the job to yield brilliant researchers, inventors and engineers. I don't think any racial prejudice would be a very fundamental way of working towards that goal, so I'd rather they not do it, even if it means whites would rarely be accepted.

Of course, that whole problem might be caused by their entry exams not being a very good way of selecting for their goal, but that's me as a hopeful white person :p

Height is highly heritable. North and South Koreans are genetically the same. The average South Korean is six inches taller than the average North Korean.

What does the assertion that intelligence is heritable mean to you?

What does the assertion that intelligence is heritable mean to you?

It means that if I dropped a bunch of Danes into South Korea, their children would be closer in height to their cohort in Denmark than would the children of another group of Danes dropped into North Korea. The North Korean Danes would be taller than the North Koreans and the South Korean Danes would be taller than the South Koreans.

Not going to discuss with a a throwaway account. You can go back to /r/greatapes and have fun with your racist pals.

There is never anything to discuss with people who would rather close their eyes and ears and call others names than bother to read discomforting information.

Using throwaway accounts makes sense for discussing controversial topics that people could use to e.g. damage your career.

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