I've noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk's gaze (I've yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).
It seems to me that a lot of the "Don't suggest that there are racial differences in IQ" position is actually based on a hidden belief that looking at the possibility of racial differences is gazing at a basilisk.
Suppose you are an employer hiring for a position, using an examination where performance is correlated with intelligence. It is essentially harmless to take the position, "My prior is that whites have higher IQs on average than blacks, so I expect the average score of the white applicants to be higher than the average score of the black applicants."
What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying "This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I'm going to treat my prior and the examinati...
I'm not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford's original story was about an image that crashes onlookers' brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the "Funniest Joke in the World" Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren't mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
I am not convinced this situation is at all analogous. Consider the following three facts: 1) The geographical distribution of blacks, hispanics, and whites is not random -- there is considerable segregation by race; 2)In the aggregate, blacks and hispanics have lower average credit rating than whites; 3)If your neighbor defaults/is foreclosed, your own property value falls.
This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual's intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.
...La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement - that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as
This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual's intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.
So instead of evidence that the bankers should have redlined members of certain groups, this then would be evidence that they should have redlined certain neighborhoods.
I can't even imagine what sort of hell would break loose in my Politics class if I were to profess a belief merely in the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence between races. Any logic would be ignored, immediately branded as justification for a bigoted agenda. Politics truly is the mindkiller.
Same way that some people can talk about the statistical correlations between e.g. IQ and race, most other people nowadays have learned to correlate instead those people who so correlate these things with evil people who want to oppress other races.
And certainly that's actually the rational thing to do. If you hear someone seek to correlate races with IQ, you ought adjust upwards the probabilty of them wanting to oppress other races. Because there is a positive correlation between people who speak about lower intelligence of blacks and evil people who so want to oppress other races.
Was this part of a "lets try to kill the minds of the bootcampers and see how they handle it" or did the subject just come up?
Group differences in average IQ are relevant in discussions regarding whether or not policies and institutions that were successful in some jurisdictions should be recommended in other jurisdictions where the people have different genetic backgrounds. They can also legitimately arise in discussions about the evolution of intelligence.
How well the relevant groups in those discussions match folk notions of race, is another question. Some aspects of our folk racial categories seem obviously silly in this regard-- like how children of one white parent and one black parent are considered black.
One of the interlocutors feels it's important to take civil rights away from people.
I have never seen that happen ever.
I think the problem is that even though people in their heart of hearts know that the chance of IQ distributions being 100% equal between arbitrarily divided groups is impossibly low, we confuse the idea of accepting that with acting upon it. Distinguishing between individuals based on any arbitrary indicators is seen as discrimination. Strictly speaking, it is discrimination in the strictest sense of the word, but the word discrimination is indexed to something intrinsically wrong and immoral, in modern American English at the very least.
But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
There is a standard answer to how "adding race makes it worse", which this article doesn't address at all. In simple and blunt terms, the standard answer runs as follows:
It's bad that some people are dumb. However, given that there are dumb people, it's okay to treat them like they're dumb.
It's bad to treat smart people like they're dumb.
If race-based differences in intelligence exist, the
Yes, that is a fatal flaw in the above argument. It "proves" way too much, namely that we should be disturbed by the idea that there is any observable property of people whatsoever whose correlation with intelligence is neither zero nor one.
Individual IQ differences are, in general "not okay"; racial IQ differences are downright verboten. I won't discuss either in certain company for fear of attracting any number of labels, with the exception of the effect of lead on IQ, which is a soapbox I mount often.
As ArisKastaris points out, those labels should adhere to you more often than not. I tend to think that this is because the rest of us have never developed a decent realm of discussion which includes IQ. I get the same feeling with the "not everybody should attend college" ...
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack.
Mormons believe that you existed in a pre-mortal life. I don't know if it's doctrine or not, but it's commonly believed that your conditions here are chosen based on how you acted in the pre-mortal life. I've been t...
if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack.
This makes the essay a self-refuting argument.
It could be that your mother was on crack when pregnant, but you are not on crack.
I kid, I kid.
Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
People act as though it is perfectly fine and normal for individuals to have differing levels of intelligence, but that it is absolutely horrible for one racial group to be more intelligent than another. Why should the two be considered any differently?
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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