@Steve: racists exist and are real and the only reason for not calling someone a racist is to avoid a fight. I will walk away from them, though. One time at Microsoft I was in a new office and the other person in there managed in less than ten minutes after meeting to tell me that black people were responsible for all crime in America.…
@Steve: racists exist and are real and the only reason for not calling someone a racist is to avoid a fight. I will walk away from them, though. One time at Microsoft I was in a new office and the other person in there managed in less than ten minutes after meeting to tell me that black people were responsible for all crime in America. I am not making this up. All.
I didn't call him any names. I simply excused myself, went to my manager and told him I did not want to share an office with that guy. I didn't give details. Then I went to the cafeteria and had some coffee and when I got back to the office it was he who was gone, his stuff cleared out. I guess he had already been on thin ice.
Anyway. There is one thing that troubles me about these discussions and about people like Murray. We know that intelligence is a characteristic that has some genetic foundation, so if two intelligent parents have children there is a strong likelihood that their children will be smart too, maybe even smarter than either, as was the case for me.
Cultures that favor intelligence are likelier to encourage marriages between smart parents leading to a disproportionate number of smart offspring. European Jews are such a culture; such people have a disproportionate number of members far on the right of the bell curve ("normal distribution" henceforth).
Ashkenazi Jews are a culture, not a race, though. The issue at hand here is race. When we talk of Asian-Americans we are discussing not just a race but a population strongly skewed by selection pressure; those who came to America from the other side of the world were likely skewed toward the more successful, correlating strongly with intelligence. I've lived with Asians half my life and have seen the powerful cultural imperatives toward achievement, some of which verge on cruelty. In one school where I was teaching English a student came in second in the aptitude tests among thousands; he went happily home to tell his parents, who turned away in disappointment: "why were you not first?"
OK, here we go. We have dealt with the notion that black people are less intelligent on average than others; the Asian : white : black continuum comes up in a lot of metrics.
But suppose they're right?
Mind you I am not suggesting nor do I believe that there are significant differences in average intelligence between the races, I don't want to believe that ... but suppose there are? Can we live with that? It won't last, of course, but suppose that, right now, it's true?
"Mind you I am not suggesting nor do I believe that there are significant differences in average intelligence between the races, I don't want to believe that ... but suppose there are? Can we live with that?"
This is the other side of this problem. It's a fear based, as far as I can tell, on nothing.
Let's say that there are significant differences in average IQ. Let's say we find definitive proof that the average black person has an IQ ten points lower than the white person. So what now? How many employers currently use IQ tests? How relevant is IQ (as long as it's above a certain base level) to most jobs? What mechanism should we use to tell the difference between an above average black person and a below average white person? And what would we gain by doing so? How much of an impact does hard work have in addressing these differences? Why don't we have a "determination" or a "perseverance" quotient?
Underlying all of these debates is this idea that the IQ performance of our "race" is a reflection on us as individuals, or needs to impact the way we run society in some way. But there are dumb white people and dumb black people. Smart black people and smart white people. There are people of all "races" who are immensely talented artistically or practially but not good at IQ tests or tests in general.
This is why the pursuit of equality of *opportunity* is so important. The playing field isn't level. It never was. But there are people way dumber than me who are way richer. And people who are way smarter than me who are way poorer. There are so many factors that goevrn where you end up in life. All this fuss about the racial breakdown of a single measure of a single type of intelligence seems so silly to me.
A ten point difference would be unmistakable and not masked well by overlap. I was thinking suppose there was a difference of one or two points; airborne tetraethyl lead from the days of leaded gasoline lowered IQ by 2.5 points for urban children, and we didn't even learn about that for a long time. Four times that and we would know.
Again, I don't believe there is a significant difference.
"A ten point difference would be unmistakable and not masked well by overlap."
I admit I'm not an expert, but wouldn't that depend on where the difference occured on the scale? The diference between a 70 and 80 IQ would be very clear I think. But would that be the case for a 100 and 110?
But yeah, I guess the wider point is that definitive proof of an average racial IQ gap wouldn't change much about how society ran.
Ten points is a LOT no matter where it is, except maybe for the difference between 170 and 180. A 110 IQ person is qualitatively different from a 100; more intellectually engaged, more curious, more likely to be a reader.
Even between 70 and 80 you have the difference between someone who can care for himself and hold a menial job and someone who likely can't.
I was imagining something like 0.2 points. The bigots would take that and say all black people are retarded. Real people would call it statistically insignificant.
If I'm not mistaken +/- one standard deviation from nominal is IQ 85-115 which is the middle of low and high average (68% of humanity). IQ 70-130 is two +/- standard deviations (95% of humanity). Since we don't wear a red badge of IQ we don't really know the IQ of people we work with beyond levels of perceived competence. I doubt that I could guess anyone's IQ with accuracy, but then I've never cared to try.
You're not mistaken, those figures are right. And ± 3SDs is 99.7%.
I would swear that in the past it was 10 points that comprised a standard deviation.
I wouldn't try to guess numbers either but there is an unmistakable indication when you're talking to smart people: they grasp what you're saying before you finish the sentence.
I hate to be the conveyor of bad news, but there is a LOT of research on this matter over the decades. The measured differences tend towards about one standard deviation, tho the gap narrowed for a while then then rose again. But don't take my word for it, do your own research.
Let me hasten to add (sigh, so easy to be misunderstood by somebody, not saying you), that a measured difference between population groups does not automatically imply a genetic difference, and says nothing meaningful about individuals. The range within population groups is still far larger than any difference between means.
I take IQ measurements as an intermediate measurement, NOT as some unalterable and permanent fact (at the group level over generations), because we know from research that environment plays a very significant role, and environment can be changed. What it might mean is that some of our interventions might best be upstream of that measurement - that is, to raise the measure IQ at the population level. Once a person's g factor has solidified, it tends not to change much over a lifetime, and while it's only one measure of an individual, it does seem to have substantial effects on their success, including their income.
Let's not get silly and cite exceptions. That like disputing the fact that more men than women are in prison for violent crimes, by noting a particularly violent woman, or a particularly non-violent man. Cherry picked exceptions will alway occur in in sizable population, but do not disprove any statistics. And no widely read author disputes that many other factors are important, in total usually more important, than general intelligence. However, general intelligence (as an intermediate measurement of our success) does have a significant influence on outcomes.
Basically, I'm saying that taking g off the taboo list would allow us to attempt deeper interventions in order to try to better equalize opportunities. If we ignore all cognitive factors, materially equal opportunity as good as it is, will not produce equal outcomes, period. An attempt to influence the environmental factors which in turn influence measured cognitive ability should be a part of any attempt society makes to equalize opportunity in the broader sense.
Think about the problems with confining interventions exclusively to those downstream of cognitive ability. One thing such a limited policy tends to do is try to remove any measure of ability or knowledge from society, because they may not say what we want them to. So remove the SAT for example, or avoid teaching math above algebra in high school - so that some students don't reach their potential, and thus reducing the differential achievement.
And that doesn't have to be. I completely understand the fear that accurate and scientifically valid knowledge can potentially be misused, but I disagree that the proper approach to avoiding that is to suppress truth and salient science, as neo-progressive ideology is driven to do. (Any truth or science which doesn't reinforce the narrative, to be more specific). I believe the right answer is to vigorously counter any mis-interpretation mis-application with facts and evidence.
A technological society which treats objective reality and the scientific journey to incrementally improve our understanding of it - as just another story made up by those in power to remain in power, is not going to last very long, and the fall is not going to be pretty since our population carrying capacity depends on keeping the technology functioning.
My deepest principle of political philosophy is to base one's policies first and foremost on an accurate understanding of objective reality; any philosophy which fails to impedance match with reality is going to go down, no matter how pleasant it sounds in the abstract. We then use our rational intelligence to devise reality-based policies in tune with our values and goals, producing the best feeling result we can within the parameters of being reality based. I recognize that values to large degree analogize with axioms - things we cannot prove, but must assume. But to be functional, they must be layered atop objective reality, rather than trying to over-ride it. Neo-progressive ideology does not handle this well.
I'll give a brief example. Why not just print US $1 Billion in cash per person and give it to every resident of the country? Some people would find this a very attractive notion - they would love it if everybody was rich beyond imagining, and believe that this would accomplish it. But no matter how hard they try to sell me on how wonderful that outcome would be and why it's more fair - I am not buying, because my understanding of money and wealth indicates that such a policy would not achieve its ends, regardless of how noble its intentions. So - reality get primacy, values second, policy derives from both of these and does the best it can in an imperfect world of tradeoffs to optimize for the desired goals and values. In that order.
"the only reason for not calling someone a racist is to avoid a fight."
Actually I think a far better reason for not calling someone a racist is because you want to have some hope of making them think more clearly. I've managed this on numerous occasions. Most people with racist attitudes don't think of themselves as racist. And pretty much everybody dislikes being called a racist. Which means that however accurate it might be, if you label somebody that way, the walls go up and productive conversation is impossible.
The people who write their diatribes calling people racist or calling everybody who disagrees with them (even me sometimes!) racist, only ever make matters worse. The person they're speaking with digs their heels in, or worse, uses the confrontation for justification of their belief that black people are spiteful and irrational and can't handle their "perfectly reasonable facts," further cementing their racist ideas.
But again, I want to change people's minds. Not fight with them, and not write them off as hopeless. Which means I'd rather engage with people when I think they're missing something important. I've spoken to many people who ended up seeing racial issues more clearly after a conversation or two.
I take it from your spellings, Steve ("jewellery"; etc.) that you live in some Commonwealth country. I grew up in the USA, mostly in the south, and I've met hundreds of people who wore their racism with pride. We've had this conversation before; while I don't say that reaching people is hopeless I am a lot more pessimistic about it than you are. Your patience will bring you greater success than I have had, though my efforts have been more in trying to get gay men to stop the confrontational belligerence toward heterosexuals.
And yes, actually seeing that I changed someone's mind is more rewarding than anything.
Of course I understand about raising defensiveness. I have some insights into that I will never tell a living soul.
I've had conversations about race with people from all over the world. In person and online. And yes, you're right, racism is different in different parts of the world because its roots are different and people's moral judgement of it is different. I've met many people who wore their racism with pride. But that doesn't mean their minds can't be changed.
I will never stop loving the opportunity to share this video. It's only 3 minutes long.
I understand where the pessimism comes from. I'm an optimist, but I'm not naive or a fantasist. Even if you do everything perfectly, you only occasionally get the satisfaction of actually *seeing* that you've changed someone's mind (and even more rarely of having them admit it). But if it's possible to get through to the Grand Wizard of the KKK, I think there's hope for most people.
Which is why talking to people as if they’re human beings instead of dismissing them or name-calling is effective. Sadly, especially nowadays, these are also exceptional behaviours.
I don't do the name-calling thing but I do tend to disengage, having run out of patience long ago. In decades online I have only seen two conversions out of thousands of people, which is FAIAP zero.
But that exception strategy works. Once a bigot knows someone from the hated group to be a respectable person the whole attitude crumbles. I like to think I've been the exception a few times for gay-haters.
Opinions by and large change gradually and incrementally in humans. The "conversion" experience is relatively rare - typically only due to traumatic or transcendant experiences.
For example, I know people who were pretty deep into neo-progressive ideology, and who have gradually pulled themselves out of it, typically a small piece at a time over years. I wouldn't call any I have known a "conversion" experience, but despite being slow, such shifts can be important.
I myself am one case in point.
And congrats in being the cognitively dissonant exception! That does work, as you say, albeit usually gradually and incrementally.
I've been a big fan of Daryl Davis since I first learned his story.
Years ago, many assumed it was OK to use the N word around me, and while the war in Vietnam was fresh on people's minds, the "gook" word because I am white. People wear it on their sleeve less now, but how much is a reduction of racism and how much is caution? I cannot say..
When using one of these words will get you escorted from your workplace under guard carrying a box of your personal stuff, it has a way of suppressing bigoted speech.
It was not that long ago that people would use the worst epithets on coworkers, I remember it well.
Virtually all popular discussions about genetic differences between races occur around the assumption that the term “genetic” refers to the genome at the level of DNA sequences. This is a vast oversimplification of the state of the science on trait heritability. The core concept is that phenotype doesn’t map directly onto underlying genotype. To quote Sonia Sultan*:
“Phenotypes emerge from the dynamic interplay of different types of regulatory elements and not simply from the presence or absence of particular DNA sequences. Indeed, the very notion of genes as discrete pieces of developmental information has become open to question.” “A number of developmental factors can be transmitted across generations.”
The take home message is what we already know--- we shouldn’t prejudge any individual based on their ancestral or cultural heritage.
*Organism and Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation, by Sonia E. Sultan, Department of Biology and Program in Environmental Studies Wesleyan University.
> "we shouldn’t prejudge any individual based on their ancestral or cultural heritage."
Exactly. I know of no widely read author who does not agree with us on this point.
And you are right - the era of finding single genes which control some behavior or attribute was brief and not very fruitful. Today, whole genome influences are recognized as more important and more fruitful (albeit more laborius to illuminate).
I disagree that Ashkenazi Jews are only a culture. I'm not sure what anyone's distinction is between ethnic group and race, so I'm not going to waste time on that distinction, but clearly Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group, with certain recognizable genetic markers. 23andMe has demonstrated that much to many of us.
There are, of course cultural components of being Jewish, as well. But I'm pretty sure that's not what 23andMe is measuring :-)
I was raised Episcopalian but three of my grandparents were Jewish and a genetic test said that I am 87% Ashkenazi. Most of my mother's family was very elderly and I only met them a few times and yet when I find myself among people of that, umm, ethnic group I feel a weird at-home feeling that cannot be based on upbringing. When I write music I find myself using Klezmer-like modes, and I have never even heard Klezmer until I ran across the late Irving Fields.
That is spooky. Klezmer is incomprehensible to me; I have never seen a mathematical definition for it. That it would come naturally to you without cultural exposure is fascinating.
I plant find the link I had to your music compositions. Now if like to listen to it again.
Modes are easiest to explain with the white keys on the piano. If you start tapping keys you will quickly learn that playing from C to the next C sounds "right"; do re mi fa so la ti do. This is Ionian mode, and pretty much all the music you have ever heard was based on it.
Now try playing from D to D; this is Dorian mode, and it's how blues musicians play. E to E, Phrygian, Japanese music. The others: F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A Aeolian (the Godfather theme), B Locrian, get you burned alive in the Middle Ages.
If you listen to my Strands (https://soundcloud.com/cheopys/warmed-over) piece, which is pretty atonal, there is one piece that climbs up and down a scale starting at 1:22; this is a mixture of Lydian and Mixolydian, on the white keys it would be C D E F♯ G A B♭ C. I have a sweet tooth for this stuff. It's too fast for the altered notes to leap out as you as "wrong."
Klezmer is not exactly one of these modes, it's a Middle Eastern sort of scale that starts with Phrygian (E to E) but has some augmented seconds, I think Hava Nagila is E F—G♯ A B C—D(♯?) E. I just played it, confirmed. The D can be either note.
I just noticed that the excellent Android "SmartChord" ap lists "Jewish modes"; Adonai Malakh, Ahaba Rabba, Magen Abot and Jewish I & II. Extra notes where I'm more inclined to leave some out. If you have an android device, you might like that ap. The unlimited version is too cheap to not purchase.
I like that music. The Lydian augmented 4 against the Mixolydian flat 7 is interesting. I've done next to nothing with Lydian. The continuous pitch change flow, without the noticeable note separation I'm accustomed to in your music is refreshing and new to me.
I am quite surprised that he numbers modes/scale in alphabetical order Dorian=2, rather than the more intuitive circle of 5th order Dorian=3 which makes modes and scales much easier to understand.
Thanks Chris. Very cool indeed. You caused me to investigate scales other than the ones I normally use. This might cause you to buy a cheap Android tablet and SmartChord unlimited ;0) The fretboard map at the bottom is for the instrument and tuning I have selected. You probably don't much care about that for electronic music, but the general music stuff you might find to be useful.
You'll hear Lydian once in a long while, I can think of a few rock songs that use it briefly. The chorus in Bowie's "TVC15," the first song in David Gilmour's first solo album, Ian Anderson seemed to discover Lydian on Passion Play; a few others. Blues is almost always Dorian, lowered 3rd and 7th.
I looked for that app on iOS, can't find it, both my Android phones died from expanding batteries.
One really interesting scale, six notes, comes from taking the arpeggios of two chords a tritone apart and combining the notes, like C and F♯:
C D♭ E♮ F♯ G♮ A♯
Some jazz players experiment with stuff like this.
I understand the "church modes" well enough. Your last paragraph might help me make sense of Klezimer modes which is the one I mentioned not understanding. I did already think that Middle Eastern music often sounds Phrygian to me. I'll look at what you wrote.
As an old-time banjo player Ionian, Mixolydian and Dorian with a modal variation are the modes most familiar to me. I am not formally educated in music, and I was recently wondering why Am is notated with one sharp as if it were G Major instead of C Major (no sharps), Same for songs in Em commonly notated with two sharps. I puzzled out the answer in the notes tab of this SS. Dorian minor, rather than Aeolian relative minor (C/Am, G/Em), etc. If I was a music major, I wouldn't have to puzzle out such things for myself.
I create spreadsheets like this to do my thinking about such things. I changed my mind about what I was doing with what started as a quick hack and I left a bunch of useless artifacts of that. I wouldn't leave it like that if I was on the job. The circle of 5ths became a comparison of scales and chords on a number of banjo tunings. Don't judge the slop too harshly please. You should be able to use the pull downs at cells S1 & S2 in the circle tab. You probably don't care about banjos. Banjo tunings are all about sympathetic ringing of open strings, thus the sus4 sawmill tuning for modal tunes. We've got a new (to us) banjo player who tunes to Double D for fiddle tunes in D (capoing for A) while I normally stay in Open G, so our chords are different inversions which is a good thing. He mostly finger picks while I down pick (clawhammer). We don't step all over each other that way. You can see that on the SS.
The African ancestor tunings are probably lost in time. Banjos are spiked lutes that commonly have a short drone string. Gut string fretless gourd banjos evolved to the thing that became a uniquely American instrument. I think that black Americans abandoned the instrument because of the racism associated with the minstrels, but I see a movement to bring it back to black Americans which I see as a good thing. Opps, I got started on banjos ;0)
Thanks for the link again. Atonal music is not something I've gotten into. Key changes up a 5th, like D to A are easier to accommodate in my mind since only one note sounds accidental if you don't realize what happened. The Chord changes are a tip-off.
It's my candy too. Apologies for everyone else.
I just added the Modes tab from another SS. You might like it while ignoring banjos.
Dorian minor is commonly used in old-time music and is the one I'm mostly familiar with. They taught natural (relative) minor in elementary school music class back in the day. I don't know if the even teach it there any more.
That is what makes it a 3rd rail issue. A presumption of truth of that has historically been a bad road.
I frequently include "where does that lead?" to decision making (akin to what could go wrong?). Your stated tendency to walk away from some fights is likely an understanding that the price of victory could be too high. The punchline from the movie "War Games" comes to mind. "The only way you win is to not play."
Do we really want an answer to that question? Where might that lead if the answer was yes? We look to history for that answer. Given that, what would be useful about such a discovery? I can think of nothing.
Did it matter whether ulcers were mostly caused by stress, or by a bacterial infection?
If knowing the answer can make no difference in how we intervene to improve outcomes, perhaps we don't have any burning need to know the scientific truth.
If knowing the answer might inform better treatment (eg: antibiotics) and produce better real world results, then perhaps finding out would be useful. So we need to decide which situation obtains here.
In terms of evaluating an individual, every serious writer emphasizes that population level statistics are meaningless. Let's clear that one off the table.
In terms of evaluating a policy intended to change statistical outcomes in the real world, often it is helpful to understand the existing dynamics. If a police department is mistreating poor people of all races because their use of force policies are too loose, then requiring officers to take a racial Implicit Association Test is not going to improve outcomes, because you are ignoring the actual dynamics in favor of a narrative detached from reality. On the other hand, if they are discrimination based on race, perhaps that course is dead on. Being effective depends on understanding what dynamics are really going on.
If we were to form policies based on misunderstanding the dynamics of a social phenomenon, and our interventions fail to work, such that 50 years from now we are still barking up the wrong tree, does that matter more or less to one than maintaining a comfortable narrative today?
The sign of a misapprehension of reality based on political filters: generations of policies based on ideology or intuition, which are on the whole not accomplishing what they seek to accomplish. Is that something we see signs of, or not? It's certainly something to watch for in the future. If the existing paradigm is failing to produce the changes desired, perhaps one needs to relax the mental blinders, if one truly cares.
(If one is just seeking to signal virtue, then positively affecting real world outcomes is irrelevant; one can virtue signal for a century quite comfortably absent real progress on the ground. In that case, having an accurate model of the real world is more of a danger to the psychological and social payoffs, rather than being a benefit by helping to refine effectiveness.)
--
However, the way I would put the question is:
How would a rational person with strong liberal values best implement those values if there were measurable differences between population groups (any population groups, any kind of ability) with real world implications? And there are two sub-questions: how should a rational liberal respond if the differences were mostly due to potentially changeable environmental factors? Versus how they should respond if the differences were mostly due to unchangeable genetic factors.
One key here is that we are talking about strong liberal values, and rationality - we are not asking about how a neo-nazi should respond, but somebody whose nuanced and humane values we whole heartedly agree with, who seeks to improve the real world as effectively as possible.
I do have tentative answers. For assessing individuals, it doesn't matter. Assess each individual without pre-judgement. That's both moral and scientifically valid.
If differences matter to group level outcomes, and the society is focused on group level outcomes, then seeking effective interventions would make good sense to a liberal who wants to reduce defacto inequality of opportunity. IF unchangeable genetic factors predominate, then the best strategy is to reduce the identification.
Back to cognitive ability. Each nation in Europe has a different average IQ, which you can find if you are interested. White immigrants to the US from different nations have also shown population level differences. However, once they mingle within the US population, we give little to no salience to which nations their ancestors come from. If Franco-Americans score lower than Russo-Americans, that difference gets lost once we de-emphasize origins so there is no widely discerned national origin to hang a stereotype on. Then the cultures and genetic pools also get diluted and intermixed as well, making the differences both less objectively, and harder for humans to add interpretation to.
A highly visible distinction makes this approach more difficult, but moving in that direction (less salience among the population based on the distinguishing characteristic) still seems like the best approach from a traditional liberal viewpoint. Kids raised in a mixed race environment, absent stereotypes, tend to treat differences in "race" as unimportant. Physically visible of course, but not considered to be of high importance. Fostering that race or ethnicity neutral categorization is the best way to avoid stigmatizing individuals.
Between 1619 and the latter part of that century, African (involuntary) immigrants were treated the same as other indentured servants (there was no chattel slavery), working alongside European indentured servants, and being freed after 7 years. A majority of the Europeans who immigrated to the territories which became the US were indentured servants (most but not all "voluntary" by some definitions), and the involuntary African immigrants were just part of that flow. During their servitude they had the same (limited) rights, but after the term were equally free.
It was only a couple of generations later that life-long slavery was introduced, mostly for economic reasons we could go into. And then subsequent to that, the concept of "race" as relevant, and then the concepts of white supremacy among "races", were invented to rationalize the oppression of slavery - in that order.
I would go back to that time, and eliminate race as a relevant category to the psyches of Americans, no more important than hair color. Alas, that direction has been disparaged today.
So we had better hope, as I fervently do, that unchangeable genetic factors have very little influence on cognitive ability at the population group level. Because the neo-progressive toolkit is inadequate to adapt to that reality - within liberal values of equality - if it should come to pass. They prefer to deny reality to adapting to it (in general; not saying what the reality is in our current discussion).
And in the meanwhile, we know that changeable environmental factors play a significant role in cognitive ability, so we should do what we can to take advantage of that, as part of a broadened attempt to produce better equality of opportunity; and we need to emphasize that each individual needs to be treated as such without group-based pre-judgement, period. Drill it in. That's true of every scenario. And of course all of this is within a yet broader effort to address factors other then differences in abilities - like discrimination and stereotypes.
I note that France takes a different approach than the US in regard to "race". They are strongly against the concept of "race", and make it illegal to record the "race" of people - by the government or by private companies. I think that approach has positives (reducing the salience of race) and negatives (making it harder to compare outcomes to detect possible discrimination). I do not know which approach will produced the better outcome in 100 years; I do not take for granted that US approach of elevating racial identity as primary has been proven to work better in the long run, so I think we should have some humility and be open to learning.
> "Cultures that favor intelligence are likelier to encourage marriages between smart parents leading to a disproportionate number of smart offspring."
This sounds like a hypothesis that cultural factors might, in a sufficiently reproductively separated population, over time through selective mating produce genetic proclivities towards increased intelligence compared to other populations.
I have some doubt about this culture-begets-genetics hypothesis. After all, the rest of the sufficiently separated population is also still reproducing as well, not just those at the top of the IQ curve. Mating assortment would more tend to increase the range of intelligence within a population, rather than to raise the mean; the range of variability would tend to grow until reaching some equilibrium with regression to the mean.
And I think that since general intelligence is known to be highly influenced by environment, cultures more highly valuing intelligence can perpetuate that propensity to produce intelligence though providing effective environments to foster that in offspring, without needing any recourse to genetics. Culture is another way to pass on characteristics, when sufficiently separate from other cultures.
(Now if a culture had some reproductively significant filtering - not just assortment - on the basis of intelligence, that could be another matter).
I see no value in prefixing "general" to "intelligence." What's the alternative? Specific intelligence? What does that even mean? I favor a multitude of scales, separating skills like mathematics, 3D visualization, language .... over a single metric.
It is worth noting though that the single metric has fairly robust predictive value. People who are good at one kind of problem-solving tend to be good at others.
Though it cuts fine. I'm a very good programmer but when it comes to parsing strings I am a complete idiot.
Culture example: where European cultures favor a logical approach to discourse, African ones favor a discursive (storytelling) approach. This is a disadvantage on intelligence tests, which tend to be logic-based.
Yeah, as you say, wouldn't this be in specific skills like mathematics or skill for languages perhaps? Again, I see no value in examining this across "racial" lines, but as a measure of aptitude it seemse pretty interesting, no?
The word "general" is absolutely crucial in modern discussions of cognitive science. The current established view rejects General intelligence for what is sometimes called "the Swiss army knife" theory. The idea is that we have lots of different abilities, each of which evolved to solve specific tasks. Later on, of course, those abilities were exapted to do tasks they were not originally designed for. But there is no single intelligence that is responsible for all of our abilities. In many cases, they occur in different parts of the brain specialized for language, face recognition, spatial orientation etc.
Chris (and anyone following this), the difference is that "general intelligence", often represented by an italicized lower case g, is a well researched term of art in psychometrics, not just a random justaposition of words.
Look up "g factor" in psychology. Wikipedia has a good short summary of the history, the supporting evidence accumulated over the past century, the critics, and the response to the critics. I'm serious - read it first and we can talk meaningfully. Until then it's like trying to discuss a "balanced binary tree" with somebody who is reasoning from just knowing what the individual words mean in common English usage, and knows zero about the terms of art in computer science.
Your talk of multiple skills is sensible and you are right that more can be captured with a multiple scale description - and that has been taken into account longer than I've been alive and I'm not young. Lumpers and splitters have had at it for a very long time, as with many other sciences. However, it was noticed a long time ago that there is a substantial positive correlation between tests of cognitive functioning - most are far from orthogonal measures. If you know how well somebody does on a few of them, you can substantially predict how they will do on others (as you say) - obviously not perfectly, but substantially as measured by statistics. The basic theory is that there is a more general component of cognitive ability underlying many of these tests, which can be measured (to useful degree, never perfectly). Modern IQ tests are therefore composed of several sub units.
Think of it like a suite of compiler or processor benchmarks. If you measure a few of them, you can get a pretty good idea of how fast a computer or compiler is in general, tho of course it may do better in one than in another. There is always a fuzziness, but it can be bracketed with error bars like other science.
NOBODY has ever said that g, or IQ tests, measure the only thing worthwhile. EVERY treatise I have read on intelligences makes this point, yet laymen tend to assume that professionals think IQ is the end all and be all - but zero professionals think like that. Nevertheless, what it does measure has been extraordinarily widely shown by science to correlate with many things which do matter. That is, it measures something in the psych with more validity than any other psychometric tests measures anything else, it's reasonably stable for most of life, and that something has substantial predictive value in terms of many other areas of life. People who score high in IQ tend to be people whom upon knowing them well, we consider quite smart - so g is a scientific abstraction, which corresponds to something real and salient in human behavior, which we intuitively recognize as relating to "being smart".
And no, it's not entirely logic based, or even language based - some IQ tests use no language at all (or any language). Properly administering a text involves adapting it such that it can be comprehended in the culture involved, so that not understanding the test is not inhibiting native intelligence from being measured. But that's about comprehension of the test itself; the test is not a test of knowledge, but of the ability to abstractly manipulate the knowledge that one has.
Basically, cross culturally, some people are observably better at figuring out real life scenarios, eg: involving hunting game. Others notice that. Pretty much every innovation in pottery or archery, everywhere in the world regardless of language, likely came from somebody with a high g factor. There will be rare anomalies which very high ability in a particular area and perhaps even sub-average cognitive ability in another - but they ARE anomalies, statistically. They are why there are error bars - IQ or g does not assert that it is all encompassing, there will always be fringe cases. But when tested scientifically and statistically, it's quite robust among all measures.
Again, your perspective might have been cutting edge a few generations ago, but the reasonable concerns you have, have indeed been thoroughly considered and debated over the decades.
Again, just read the Wikipedia summary of the g factor. If you distrust Wikipedia, follow some of the references, or pick up a modern psychometric textbook.
And just to head off misunderstandings (from anybody), I will say again that g (or it's best known approximate measurement, IQ) is just one characteristic in humans. It doesn't tell you who is a good storyteller or musician or friend. I very definitely do not choose mates or friends primarily much less exclusively on that basis; there are more important attributes. And it doesn't tell you everything even about cognition. But a massive amount of evidence shows that it does capture an important (not the only important) factor in human behavior.
And again - I realize that your message already noted some of the elements I am discussing, and elaborating upon.
And all that presupposes that "intelligence" is measurable.
If you limit your definition of "intelligence" to "ability to do IQ tests" then yes, that's measurable.
But as you say - there are lots of different kinds of intelligence, and aspects of intelligence - and every time you think you've counted them all, you find you've missed one. So it's infinite-dimensional.
And then you realise that your intelligence varies from day to day - how much sleep you got, how much you've had to drink, what else you're worried about... So "intelligence" maps to an "infinite dimensional fuzzy space".
And they're not measurable. Check out the maths.
You cannot define the distance between any two points in one.
So however you try to measure "intelligence", you're wasting your time... Anything measurable is not "intelligence".
That's why people talk about "general intelligence" and "IQ". They're different, and while there may be a correlation between "IQ" and "success" in some fields, you can't correlate something measurable to something not measurable.
And (a bit of a sidetrack here) that kind of pulls the rug from under eugenics - anyone stupid enough to believe in it is too stupid to be allowed to breed, if you're trying to implement eugenic breeding programs. I do like a good paradox!
You've said all this before including the smear about eugenics.
Measurement is not infinite-dimensional. Infinity has no meaning outside mathematics; in the sciences infinity always means there is something wrong with the theory.
"Too stupid to be allowed to breed" isn't the kind of discourse we use here.
Infinity is a fact of life; hard to experiment with in a lab, or even on a digital computer, I agree, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Intelligence is, after all, also something that only exists in your mind. Like mathematics, it doesn't need to conform to common sense Newtonian physical rules, any more than quantum phenomena do.
Neuroscience shows that what you see as "reality" is actually a model constructed in your mind using sensory input extended by calculations of probability and a lot of estimation - very like mathematics. That's good enough to keep you fed & breathing, usually, which is what it was designed for. External reality looks very different to creatures with different senses - who's to say who's right?
The concept of infinity does often come into play when linear reductionist logic reaches its limits and that is indeed when an apparently satisfactory theory sometimes fails.
"Too stupid to breed" is the kind of thing eugenicists (and racists) say in private, using polite circumlocutions in public. We need to bring that thinking out into the light of day to deal with it.
I won't argue with you about infinity. I am as certain that you are dead wrong as I am about absolutely anything. Factors that can significantly affect the outcome of an intelligence test can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (exhaustion, illness, head trauma, hypoglycemia ...) and all of them would likely lead to rescheduling the test. Factors that would affect the outcome by more than a point or two are probably in single digits. Your position on this is frankly absurd.
I asked you last time this came up what is your beef with intelligence testing and in a shocking turn of events, you didn't answer. Your position is so extreme as to deserve mockery but we don't do that here. Much, anyway.
But when you compare IQ testing to eugenics you cross a line. And no we don't need to bring that garbage out into the light of day; several of my great-grandparents died at Treblinka so I am not seeing the humor in your hyperbole.
Funny you should mention quantum mechanics, it was the infinity of what we call the Ultraviolet Catastrophe that led Planck to quantization and then to QM.
You don't know what you're talking about. Intelligence is reliably measurable.
I'm sorry, had I remembered who you were, I would not have replied to your comments.
Why would I need to explain separately why someone who thinks intelligence is not measurable "has a beef with intelligence tests" ? Isn't that obvious? I think they're fraudulent, damaging & unfair.
The reliability of repeated IQ tests has been the subject of much research, and is probably best described as "undecided", except among companies whose income relies on selling tests.
I am sorry to hear that your family suffered in the camps. I am astonished that someone with your background supports such a tainted methodology so enthusiastically.
If you check back through history and look at who was involved in the development of IQ testing, you will find that most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior" people in Germany, starting with "subnormal" and disabled people and only moving on to the race-based selection of victims at a later stage. Even the terminology is appalling.
A great deal of the initial work was done purely with the intention of identifying people with learning disabilities, and most of the statistical validation for individuals was done with people with low scores. The validation work for people in the "normal" range was largely population based rather than done with individuals, and this (as has been discussed elsewhere in this discussion) is largely self-referential.
For supporting references I suggest you start with the recent book "Control" by Dr Adam Rutherford which offers a reasonably non-academic overview.
"most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior ...." blah blah blah
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
Chris, I want to warn you that you are treading on dangerous ground. Your writing here and elsewhere reveals a very capable and rational mind. You have a tendency to follow the evidence.
That can get you into trouble. This is a minefield. You have intellectual tools which allow you to evaluate your erstwhile colleague as factually wrong about his crime assertion and therefore likely swayed by racial bias or stereotypes. I will warn you that if you start taking a strictly scientific and apolitical approach to investigating this subject, you will likely come across some evidence which is discomforting. No, not silly KKK or neo-Nazi nonsense, I know you would sift that garbage out quickly. I mean scientific evidence which even viewed in context, is troublesome.
However, I will respond to your thought experiment.
Hypothetically, suppose that your researches were to convince you that there are significant differences in objectively and competently measured IQ between some population groups, which cannot be explained by test bias.
Then, as CAS says, that aggregated finding would still tell us nothing about individuals, because the differences within each population group are by the same objective measurements far greater than any group level differences between statistical means, medians or modes. It should have absolutely no effect on how you treat other individuals, period, end of story.
Also, as CAS and Steve indicate, differences between population groups do NOT inherently imply any significant genetic component. Differences in environment and culture would need to be considered - as you have observed in working with Asian ethnicity. The differences could be 100% due to environment and 0% due to genetics (hypothetically), so any such evidence might be just a snapshot in time, describing today's world but not the future.
The area where you might run into trouble is in partially questioning the currently politically attributed causes of other observed differences between population groups. If at the statistical level of aggregate analysis, there were differences in cognitive ability (from whatever causes), then some differences in outcome between groups (at that same statistical level) might not be entirely due to present day discrimination. Such group level differences in cognitive ability could lead to even a system which is absolutely fair to each individual (entirely based on individual merit, without any group prejudice whatsoever), yet which produces differences at the group statistical level because the groups do not have identical characteristics.
So for example, if some differences in cognitive ability exist at the population group level (again, for any reason), then the wildly disproportionate representation of Ashkenazi Jews in certain fields might be in some part related to their tendency to score very well on IQ tests at the statistical level, rather than being entirely due to pro-Jewish (or anti-Gentile) discrimination. Or you might compare Franco-Americans and Russo-Americans.
In short - such group level differences would require no change of course for political philosophies based on treating all individuals fairly and with the same rights, like traditional liberalism. I see no implications for Martin Luther King's direction, for one example. At most, some interventions might be targeted towards enriching the environments (or other factors known or as yet unknown) which might statistically increase the average cognitive functioning of disadvantaged groups (as one prong of a larger effort). For two examples, substantially bad nutrition, and exposure to violent crime nearby, seem to have negative effects (at the statistical level) on cognitive development; improving those factors might improve outcomes, over time. (And of course to the degree that racial bias creates or sustains either factor, it can be appropriately confronted as needed). This kind of extra focus would just be a refinement of the civil rights concepts, not a change in course.
But this hypothetical group difference, if you were to conclude that it existed, might cause some loss of traction for certain more recent political narratives, such as that espoused by Ibram X Kendi. Kendi explicitly reasons that there are only two possible explanation for different outcomes for Blacks and other racial groups - genetic differences and discrimination. Since genetic differences HAVE to be taken off the table as too awful to consider, that prove in his mind that it any differences in outcomes today must be produced 100% by discrimination, QED. This kind of binary reasoning might be threatened by your hypothetical.
From what I've seen of your writing, I would hardly expect you to jump to any conclusions, but rather to evaluate evidence as honestly as possible. And I'm warning you that such an approach is not welcome in many progressive circles and their periphery; no matter how clear you describe your explorations, it will "sound similar to" things which are highly emotionally evocative for some others, and you will tend to be treated as if you are saying things you have tried to be clear that you are not saying. Other people will sometimes assume falsely that X must imply Y, even if you don't say or agree with that implication. Fair warning. If you do continue to research your questions, I'll be glad to hear your results tho.
Everything you are saying here was in my little post. If I didn't call out the difference between median intelligence and individual intelligence it's because I am cognizant of my audience; I don't need to. If there are three not-fully-congruent normal distributions for the intelligence of the three major races, they are vastly overlapped.
Don't expect me to take very seriously the denial of any role of genetics in intelligence, and if you are implying that I recognize no environmental role in how well one does on intelligence tests then you are verging on insulting me. A child who grows up in a house full of books and other stimuli has an advantage over one who grows up with a TV set that is never off and checkout-counter newspapers the only reading material.
And frankly conforming to progressive ideology is not much of a priority for me. I would not post what I did in a WaPo blog or on Facebook because I would be called all kinds of names by sloppy readers and sloppier thinkers. Honestly, I am deeply disenchanted with the current state of progressivism with its "woke" horseshit and its virtue signaling. There is tyranny there and "trans" activists are doing enormous harm in their determination to swell their ranks.
I mentioned Asians. The high achievements of Asian-Americans are not reflected in my experience here, where hardly anyone has the brains to close a door he had to open to walk through.
My father had read all of Shakespeare by the age of twelve. I have no memory of him, he died when I was three, but he left a library behind. I sought to know him by knowing his influences, his books and his writing. A sad substitute for growing up under his influence, but it was a gift.
My wife grew up where such things were not valued. A little girl with no shoes also has no books. But when she came to America she knew what her daughters must have. While I could accept that they might not accel in everything I made it clear that they had better not being a report card home with a comment that they were not performing to their capability, she just wanted to see "A"s. She became that Asian mom in America.
I didn't get to know Vietnamese people while I was in Vietnam, but I know quite a few in America. The name Nguyen was a common one in engineering departments and among super technicians. Principle design engineers who's journey to America began as boat people.
The less technically inclined are often astute business people. The large successful Asian markets here are owned by Vietnamese people. They do what the Chinese in Southeast Asia did. Sowell discussed it in his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". More about seeking opportunity where they find it than race.
Crap! I wandered as I wrote on my phone when I should be sleeping.
How would you respond if you assumed (correctly) that
(1) I have read a number of your writings and appreciated them, earning my respect FWIW. I was feeling happy to have a chance to explore some concepts with somebody I respect. I did not expect your reaction, tho.
(2) I was largely agreeing with you, not disagreeing. I may emphasize a different facet, or phrase something my own way, but that doesn't mean I'm an adversary.
(3) I was neither denying any role for genetics, nor imputing that you were denying environmental factors; just not thing existing in my mind (however clumsily conveyed)
(4) Having read other work by you, I already know you are not a modern neo-progressive, and that we share a disenchantment from what it has become. However, the issues of intelligence and population groups is an exceptionally explosive subject, and can cause problems even for non-progressives, so I wanted to note that.
Clearly, I have badly miscommunicated and apologize for that. I would appreciate if you could quote what I said that led you to believe (1) that I was denying any role for genetics, or (2) that I thought (almost insultingly) that you were denying any role for environment. I'd like to learn to avoid whatever I wrote that came across so far from my intent (I'm in what my spouse calls "debug mode"). Sometimes our words can be interpreted in ways we did not intend, so we need to learn how to avoid that when possible. That's my task.
OK, thanks. The last word was not meant to mitigate anything, but to explain that I was presenting a hypothetical rather than an assertion. Read it in the spirit of "EVEN IF the differences were 100% environmental... certain issues remain". I appreciate your explaining; I do not always anticipate all the ways something I write can be interpreted, so this is helpful.
@Steve: racists exist and are real and the only reason for not calling someone a racist is to avoid a fight. I will walk away from them, though. One time at Microsoft I was in a new office and the other person in there managed in less than ten minutes after meeting to tell me that black people were responsible for all crime in America. I am not making this up. All.
I didn't call him any names. I simply excused myself, went to my manager and told him I did not want to share an office with that guy. I didn't give details. Then I went to the cafeteria and had some coffee and when I got back to the office it was he who was gone, his stuff cleared out. I guess he had already been on thin ice.
Anyway. There is one thing that troubles me about these discussions and about people like Murray. We know that intelligence is a characteristic that has some genetic foundation, so if two intelligent parents have children there is a strong likelihood that their children will be smart too, maybe even smarter than either, as was the case for me.
Cultures that favor intelligence are likelier to encourage marriages between smart parents leading to a disproportionate number of smart offspring. European Jews are such a culture; such people have a disproportionate number of members far on the right of the bell curve ("normal distribution" henceforth).
Ashkenazi Jews are a culture, not a race, though. The issue at hand here is race. When we talk of Asian-Americans we are discussing not just a race but a population strongly skewed by selection pressure; those who came to America from the other side of the world were likely skewed toward the more successful, correlating strongly with intelligence. I've lived with Asians half my life and have seen the powerful cultural imperatives toward achievement, some of which verge on cruelty. In one school where I was teaching English a student came in second in the aptitude tests among thousands; he went happily home to tell his parents, who turned away in disappointment: "why were you not first?"
OK, here we go. We have dealt with the notion that black people are less intelligent on average than others; the Asian : white : black continuum comes up in a lot of metrics.
But suppose they're right?
Mind you I am not suggesting nor do I believe that there are significant differences in average intelligence between the races, I don't want to believe that ... but suppose there are? Can we live with that? It won't last, of course, but suppose that, right now, it's true?
"Mind you I am not suggesting nor do I believe that there are significant differences in average intelligence between the races, I don't want to believe that ... but suppose there are? Can we live with that?"
This is the other side of this problem. It's a fear based, as far as I can tell, on nothing.
Let's say that there are significant differences in average IQ. Let's say we find definitive proof that the average black person has an IQ ten points lower than the white person. So what now? How many employers currently use IQ tests? How relevant is IQ (as long as it's above a certain base level) to most jobs? What mechanism should we use to tell the difference between an above average black person and a below average white person? And what would we gain by doing so? How much of an impact does hard work have in addressing these differences? Why don't we have a "determination" or a "perseverance" quotient?
Underlying all of these debates is this idea that the IQ performance of our "race" is a reflection on us as individuals, or needs to impact the way we run society in some way. But there are dumb white people and dumb black people. Smart black people and smart white people. There are people of all "races" who are immensely talented artistically or practially but not good at IQ tests or tests in general.
This is why the pursuit of equality of *opportunity* is so important. The playing field isn't level. It never was. But there are people way dumber than me who are way richer. And people who are way smarter than me who are way poorer. There are so many factors that goevrn where you end up in life. All this fuss about the racial breakdown of a single measure of a single type of intelligence seems so silly to me.
A ten point difference would be unmistakable and not masked well by overlap. I was thinking suppose there was a difference of one or two points; airborne tetraethyl lead from the days of leaded gasoline lowered IQ by 2.5 points for urban children, and we didn't even learn about that for a long time. Four times that and we would know.
Again, I don't believe there is a significant difference.
"A ten point difference would be unmistakable and not masked well by overlap."
I admit I'm not an expert, but wouldn't that depend on where the difference occured on the scale? The diference between a 70 and 80 IQ would be very clear I think. But would that be the case for a 100 and 110?
But yeah, I guess the wider point is that definitive proof of an average racial IQ gap wouldn't change much about how society ran.
Ten points is a LOT no matter where it is, except maybe for the difference between 170 and 180. A 110 IQ person is qualitatively different from a 100; more intellectually engaged, more curious, more likely to be a reader.
Even between 70 and 80 you have the difference between someone who can care for himself and hold a menial job and someone who likely can't.
Ah, okay, fair enough, in that case, pretend I wrote "two or three" instead of "ten."
I was imagining something like 0.2 points. The bigots would take that and say all black people are retarded. Real people would call it statistically insignificant.
If I'm not mistaken +/- one standard deviation from nominal is IQ 85-115 which is the middle of low and high average (68% of humanity). IQ 70-130 is two +/- standard deviations (95% of humanity). Since we don't wear a red badge of IQ we don't really know the IQ of people we work with beyond levels of perceived competence. I doubt that I could guess anyone's IQ with accuracy, but then I've never cared to try.
You're not mistaken, those figures are right. And ± 3SDs is 99.7%.
I would swear that in the past it was 10 points that comprised a standard deviation.
I wouldn't try to guess numbers either but there is an unmistakable indication when you're talking to smart people: they grasp what you're saying before you finish the sentence.
I hate to be the conveyor of bad news, but there is a LOT of research on this matter over the decades. The measured differences tend towards about one standard deviation, tho the gap narrowed for a while then then rose again. But don't take my word for it, do your own research.
Let me hasten to add (sigh, so easy to be misunderstood by somebody, not saying you), that a measured difference between population groups does not automatically imply a genetic difference, and says nothing meaningful about individuals. The range within population groups is still far larger than any difference between means.
I take IQ measurements as an intermediate measurement, NOT as some unalterable and permanent fact (at the group level over generations), because we know from research that environment plays a very significant role, and environment can be changed. What it might mean is that some of our interventions might best be upstream of that measurement - that is, to raise the measure IQ at the population level. Once a person's g factor has solidified, it tends not to change much over a lifetime, and while it's only one measure of an individual, it does seem to have substantial effects on their success, including their income.
Let's not get silly and cite exceptions. That like disputing the fact that more men than women are in prison for violent crimes, by noting a particularly violent woman, or a particularly non-violent man. Cherry picked exceptions will alway occur in in sizable population, but do not disprove any statistics. And no widely read author disputes that many other factors are important, in total usually more important, than general intelligence. However, general intelligence (as an intermediate measurement of our success) does have a significant influence on outcomes.
Basically, I'm saying that taking g off the taboo list would allow us to attempt deeper interventions in order to try to better equalize opportunities. If we ignore all cognitive factors, materially equal opportunity as good as it is, will not produce equal outcomes, period. An attempt to influence the environmental factors which in turn influence measured cognitive ability should be a part of any attempt society makes to equalize opportunity in the broader sense.
Think about the problems with confining interventions exclusively to those downstream of cognitive ability. One thing such a limited policy tends to do is try to remove any measure of ability or knowledge from society, because they may not say what we want them to. So remove the SAT for example, or avoid teaching math above algebra in high school - so that some students don't reach their potential, and thus reducing the differential achievement.
And that doesn't have to be. I completely understand the fear that accurate and scientifically valid knowledge can potentially be misused, but I disagree that the proper approach to avoiding that is to suppress truth and salient science, as neo-progressive ideology is driven to do. (Any truth or science which doesn't reinforce the narrative, to be more specific). I believe the right answer is to vigorously counter any mis-interpretation mis-application with facts and evidence.
A technological society which treats objective reality and the scientific journey to incrementally improve our understanding of it - as just another story made up by those in power to remain in power, is not going to last very long, and the fall is not going to be pretty since our population carrying capacity depends on keeping the technology functioning.
My deepest principle of political philosophy is to base one's policies first and foremost on an accurate understanding of objective reality; any philosophy which fails to impedance match with reality is going to go down, no matter how pleasant it sounds in the abstract. We then use our rational intelligence to devise reality-based policies in tune with our values and goals, producing the best feeling result we can within the parameters of being reality based. I recognize that values to large degree analogize with axioms - things we cannot prove, but must assume. But to be functional, they must be layered atop objective reality, rather than trying to over-ride it. Neo-progressive ideology does not handle this well.
I'll give a brief example. Why not just print US $1 Billion in cash per person and give it to every resident of the country? Some people would find this a very attractive notion - they would love it if everybody was rich beyond imagining, and believe that this would accomplish it. But no matter how hard they try to sell me on how wonderful that outcome would be and why it's more fair - I am not buying, because my understanding of money and wealth indicates that such a policy would not achieve its ends, regardless of how noble its intentions. So - reality get primacy, values second, policy derives from both of these and does the best it can in an imperfect world of tradeoffs to optimize for the desired goals and values. In that order.
"the only reason for not calling someone a racist is to avoid a fight."
Actually I think a far better reason for not calling someone a racist is because you want to have some hope of making them think more clearly. I've managed this on numerous occasions. Most people with racist attitudes don't think of themselves as racist. And pretty much everybody dislikes being called a racist. Which means that however accurate it might be, if you label somebody that way, the walls go up and productive conversation is impossible.
The people who write their diatribes calling people racist or calling everybody who disagrees with them (even me sometimes!) racist, only ever make matters worse. The person they're speaking with digs their heels in, or worse, uses the confrontation for justification of their belief that black people are spiteful and irrational and can't handle their "perfectly reasonable facts," further cementing their racist ideas.
But again, I want to change people's minds. Not fight with them, and not write them off as hopeless. Which means I'd rather engage with people when I think they're missing something important. I've spoken to many people who ended up seeing racial issues more clearly after a conversation or two.
I take it from your spellings, Steve ("jewellery"; etc.) that you live in some Commonwealth country. I grew up in the USA, mostly in the south, and I've met hundreds of people who wore their racism with pride. We've had this conversation before; while I don't say that reaching people is hopeless I am a lot more pessimistic about it than you are. Your patience will bring you greater success than I have had, though my efforts have been more in trying to get gay men to stop the confrontational belligerence toward heterosexuals.
And yes, actually seeing that I changed someone's mind is more rewarding than anything.
Of course I understand about raising defensiveness. I have some insights into that I will never tell a living soul.
I've had conversations about race with people from all over the world. In person and online. And yes, you're right, racism is different in different parts of the world because its roots are different and people's moral judgement of it is different. I've met many people who wore their racism with pride. But that doesn't mean their minds can't be changed.
I will never stop loving the opportunity to share this video. It's only 3 minutes long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJbrLl7ayoQ
See also, one of my heroes, Daryl Davis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw&t=2s
I understand where the pessimism comes from. I'm an optimist, but I'm not naive or a fantasist. Even if you do everything perfectly, you only occasionally get the satisfaction of actually *seeing* that you've changed someone's mind (and even more rarely of having them admit it). But if it's possible to get through to the Grand Wizard of the KKK, I think there's hope for most people.
Davis' achievement was done by making himself the exception. A virulent bigot can't have exceptions.
Which is why talking to people as if they’re human beings instead of dismissing them or name-calling is effective. Sadly, especially nowadays, these are also exceptional behaviours.
I don't do the name-calling thing but I do tend to disengage, having run out of patience long ago. In decades online I have only seen two conversions out of thousands of people, which is FAIAP zero.
But that exception strategy works. Once a bigot knows someone from the hated group to be a respectable person the whole attitude crumbles. I like to think I've been the exception a few times for gay-haters.
Opinions by and large change gradually and incrementally in humans. The "conversion" experience is relatively rare - typically only due to traumatic or transcendant experiences.
For example, I know people who were pretty deep into neo-progressive ideology, and who have gradually pulled themselves out of it, typically a small piece at a time over years. I wouldn't call any I have known a "conversion" experience, but despite being slow, such shifts can be important.
I myself am one case in point.
And congrats in being the cognitively dissonant exception! That does work, as you say, albeit usually gradually and incrementally.
I've been a big fan of Daryl Davis since I first learned his story.
Years ago, many assumed it was OK to use the N word around me, and while the war in Vietnam was fresh on people's minds, the "gook" word because I am white. People wear it on their sleeve less now, but how much is a reduction of racism and how much is caution? I cannot say..
When using one of these words will get you escorted from your workplace under guard carrying a box of your personal stuff, it has a way of suppressing bigoted speech.
It was not that long ago that people would use the worst epithets on coworkers, I remember it well.
Virtually all popular discussions about genetic differences between races occur around the assumption that the term “genetic” refers to the genome at the level of DNA sequences. This is a vast oversimplification of the state of the science on trait heritability. The core concept is that phenotype doesn’t map directly onto underlying genotype. To quote Sonia Sultan*:
“Phenotypes emerge from the dynamic interplay of different types of regulatory elements and not simply from the presence or absence of particular DNA sequences. Indeed, the very notion of genes as discrete pieces of developmental information has become open to question.” “A number of developmental factors can be transmitted across generations.”
The take home message is what we already know--- we shouldn’t prejudge any individual based on their ancestral or cultural heritage.
*Organism and Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation, by Sonia E. Sultan, Department of Biology and Program in Environmental Studies Wesleyan University.
> "we shouldn’t prejudge any individual based on their ancestral or cultural heritage."
Exactly. I know of no widely read author who does not agree with us on this point.
And you are right - the era of finding single genes which control some behavior or attribute was brief and not very fruitful. Today, whole genome influences are recognized as more important and more fruitful (albeit more laborius to illuminate).
I disagree that Ashkenazi Jews are only a culture. I'm not sure what anyone's distinction is between ethnic group and race, so I'm not going to waste time on that distinction, but clearly Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group, with certain recognizable genetic markers. 23andMe has demonstrated that much to many of us.
There are, of course cultural components of being Jewish, as well. But I'm pretty sure that's not what 23andMe is measuring :-)
I was raised Episcopalian but three of my grandparents were Jewish and a genetic test said that I am 87% Ashkenazi. Most of my mother's family was very elderly and I only met them a few times and yet when I find myself among people of that, umm, ethnic group I feel a weird at-home feeling that cannot be based on upbringing. When I write music I find myself using Klezmer-like modes, and I have never even heard Klezmer until I ran across the late Irving Fields.
Spooky stuff. Lamarckian, almost.
That is spooky. Klezmer is incomprehensible to me; I have never seen a mathematical definition for it. That it would come naturally to you without cultural exposure is fascinating.
I plant find the link I had to your music compositions. Now if like to listen to it again.
Modes are easiest to explain with the white keys on the piano. If you start tapping keys you will quickly learn that playing from C to the next C sounds "right"; do re mi fa so la ti do. This is Ionian mode, and pretty much all the music you have ever heard was based on it.
Now try playing from D to D; this is Dorian mode, and it's how blues musicians play. E to E, Phrygian, Japanese music. The others: F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A Aeolian (the Godfather theme), B Locrian, get you burned alive in the Middle Ages.
If you listen to my Strands (https://soundcloud.com/cheopys/warmed-over) piece, which is pretty atonal, there is one piece that climbs up and down a scale starting at 1:22; this is a mixture of Lydian and Mixolydian, on the white keys it would be C D E F♯ G A B♭ C. I have a sweet tooth for this stuff. It's too fast for the altered notes to leap out as you as "wrong."
Klezmer is not exactly one of these modes, it's a Middle Eastern sort of scale that starts with Phrygian (E to E) but has some augmented seconds, I think Hava Nagila is E F—G♯ A B C—D(♯?) E. I just played it, confirmed. The D can be either note.
I love this stuff
I just noticed that the excellent Android "SmartChord" ap lists "Jewish modes"; Adonai Malakh, Ahaba Rabba, Magen Abot and Jewish I & II. Extra notes where I'm more inclined to leave some out. If you have an android device, you might like that ap. The unlimited version is too cheap to not purchase.
Apologies again to all for the tangent.
I like that music. The Lydian augmented 4 against the Mixolydian flat 7 is interesting. I've done next to nothing with Lydian. The continuous pitch change flow, without the noticeable note separation I'm accustomed to in your music is refreshing and new to me.
This is very cool:
https://producersociety.com/what-is-the-darkest-scale-double-harmonic-major/
Beato's video is worth the ten minutes.
And thanks for that pointing to this very good page.
https://producersociety.com/how-to-learn-music-theory-the-definitive-guide/
I am quite surprised that he numbers modes/scale in alphabetical order Dorian=2, rather than the more intuitive circle of 5th order Dorian=3 which makes modes and scales much easier to understand.
Thanks Chris. Very cool indeed. You caused me to investigate scales other than the ones I normally use. This might cause you to buy a cheap Android tablet and SmartChord unlimited ;0) The fretboard map at the bottom is for the instrument and tuning I have selected. You probably don't much care about that for electronic music, but the general music stuff you might find to be useful.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iBYjopP7JCm-9WD7gva8ZIb1VFH79zSr/view?usp=sharing
I've been playing classical guitar since the mid 70s. I can use those scales. Yeah I can get a latest-model-but-one dirt cheap Android here.
We're hijacking Steve's thread to talk about music theory. Write me at cheopys@gmail.com and let's continue it there.
Right. Serry Steve.
You'll hear Lydian once in a long while, I can think of a few rock songs that use it briefly. The chorus in Bowie's "TVC15," the first song in David Gilmour's first solo album, Ian Anderson seemed to discover Lydian on Passion Play; a few others. Blues is almost always Dorian, lowered 3rd and 7th.
I looked for that app on iOS, can't find it, both my Android phones died from expanding batteries.
One really interesting scale, six notes, comes from taking the arpeggios of two chords a tritone apart and combining the notes, like C and F♯:
C D♭ E♮ F♯ G♮ A♯
Some jazz players experiment with stuff like this.
I actually wrote a Medium article that nobody read about the use of the black keys for the five anhemitonic pentatonic modes.
I understand the "church modes" well enough. Your last paragraph might help me make sense of Klezimer modes which is the one I mentioned not understanding. I did already think that Middle Eastern music often sounds Phrygian to me. I'll look at what you wrote.
As an old-time banjo player Ionian, Mixolydian and Dorian with a modal variation are the modes most familiar to me. I am not formally educated in music, and I was recently wondering why Am is notated with one sharp as if it were G Major instead of C Major (no sharps), Same for songs in Em commonly notated with two sharps. I puzzled out the answer in the notes tab of this SS. Dorian minor, rather than Aeolian relative minor (C/Am, G/Em), etc. If I was a music major, I wouldn't have to puzzle out such things for myself.
I create spreadsheets like this to do my thinking about such things. I changed my mind about what I was doing with what started as a quick hack and I left a bunch of useless artifacts of that. I wouldn't leave it like that if I was on the job. The circle of 5ths became a comparison of scales and chords on a number of banjo tunings. Don't judge the slop too harshly please. You should be able to use the pull downs at cells S1 & S2 in the circle tab. You probably don't care about banjos. Banjo tunings are all about sympathetic ringing of open strings, thus the sus4 sawmill tuning for modal tunes. We've got a new (to us) banjo player who tunes to Double D for fiddle tunes in D (capoing for A) while I normally stay in Open G, so our chords are different inversions which is a good thing. He mostly finger picks while I down pick (clawhammer). We don't step all over each other that way. You can see that on the SS.
The African ancestor tunings are probably lost in time. Banjos are spiked lutes that commonly have a short drone string. Gut string fretless gourd banjos evolved to the thing that became a uniquely American instrument. I think that black Americans abandoned the instrument because of the racism associated with the minstrels, but I see a movement to bring it back to black Americans which I see as a good thing. Opps, I got started on banjos ;0)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1llUFDa0Qb_JQgpHw4uc9KCgKFbuwwVxUz6XDtTaEjKw/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks for the link again. Atonal music is not something I've gotten into. Key changes up a 5th, like D to A are easier to accommodate in my mind since only one note sounds accidental if you don't realize what happened. The Chord changes are a tip-off.
It's my candy too. Apologies for everyone else.
I just added the Modes tab from another SS. You might like it while ignoring banjos.
There are three minor scales:
1) pure minor, A to A on the white keys; boring. The Godfather theme uses it.
2) harmonic minor, very often used in Baroque music; raised 7th but normal 6th. This is more used for chords than melodies: Am, Dm, E7 (with G♯)
3) melodic minor: raised 6th and 7th ascending, ordinary 6th and 7th descending. Also Baroque.
A B C D E F♯ G♯ A G♮ F♮ E D C B A
Dorian minor is commonly used in old-time music and is the one I'm mostly familiar with. They taught natural (relative) minor in elementary school music class back in the day. I don't know if the even teach it there any more.
I do hope you know about Bela Fleck
My intro to Fleck:
https://www.amazon.com/New-Acoustic-Music-Various-Artists/dp/B000008IW0/ref=sr_1_1
A great collection of original music
I do. His ability is orders of magnitude beyond anything I have hope of attaining.
This trip to Africa documentary is worth your time if you've never watched it. https://youtu.be/sJt6jn0xT8A
I really like his collaborations with his clawhammer banjo playing wife Abigail Washburn. They make it work well. https://www.belafleck.com/collaborations/bela-fleck-abigail-washburn
"but suppose there are? Can we live with that?"
That is what makes it a 3rd rail issue. A presumption of truth of that has historically been a bad road.
I frequently include "where does that lead?" to decision making (akin to what could go wrong?). Your stated tendency to walk away from some fights is likely an understanding that the price of victory could be too high. The punchline from the movie "War Games" comes to mind. "The only way you win is to not play."
Do we really want an answer to that question? Where might that lead if the answer was yes? We look to history for that answer. Given that, what would be useful about such a discovery? I can think of nothing.
For the record, no, I don't want an answer.
If such a difference exists then it is small and temporary and its revelation will only do harm, and then there is that near-total overlap.
Exactly my thought.
Let's consider an analogy.
Did it matter whether ulcers were mostly caused by stress, or by a bacterial infection?
If knowing the answer can make no difference in how we intervene to improve outcomes, perhaps we don't have any burning need to know the scientific truth.
If knowing the answer might inform better treatment (eg: antibiotics) and produce better real world results, then perhaps finding out would be useful. So we need to decide which situation obtains here.
In terms of evaluating an individual, every serious writer emphasizes that population level statistics are meaningless. Let's clear that one off the table.
In terms of evaluating a policy intended to change statistical outcomes in the real world, often it is helpful to understand the existing dynamics. If a police department is mistreating poor people of all races because their use of force policies are too loose, then requiring officers to take a racial Implicit Association Test is not going to improve outcomes, because you are ignoring the actual dynamics in favor of a narrative detached from reality. On the other hand, if they are discrimination based on race, perhaps that course is dead on. Being effective depends on understanding what dynamics are really going on.
If we were to form policies based on misunderstanding the dynamics of a social phenomenon, and our interventions fail to work, such that 50 years from now we are still barking up the wrong tree, does that matter more or less to one than maintaining a comfortable narrative today?
The sign of a misapprehension of reality based on political filters: generations of policies based on ideology or intuition, which are on the whole not accomplishing what they seek to accomplish. Is that something we see signs of, or not? It's certainly something to watch for in the future. If the existing paradigm is failing to produce the changes desired, perhaps one needs to relax the mental blinders, if one truly cares.
(If one is just seeking to signal virtue, then positively affecting real world outcomes is irrelevant; one can virtue signal for a century quite comfortably absent real progress on the ground. In that case, having an accurate model of the real world is more of a danger to the psychological and social payoffs, rather than being a benefit by helping to refine effectiveness.)
--
However, the way I would put the question is:
How would a rational person with strong liberal values best implement those values if there were measurable differences between population groups (any population groups, any kind of ability) with real world implications? And there are two sub-questions: how should a rational liberal respond if the differences were mostly due to potentially changeable environmental factors? Versus how they should respond if the differences were mostly due to unchangeable genetic factors.
One key here is that we are talking about strong liberal values, and rationality - we are not asking about how a neo-nazi should respond, but somebody whose nuanced and humane values we whole heartedly agree with, who seeks to improve the real world as effectively as possible.
I do have tentative answers. For assessing individuals, it doesn't matter. Assess each individual without pre-judgement. That's both moral and scientifically valid.
If differences matter to group level outcomes, and the society is focused on group level outcomes, then seeking effective interventions would make good sense to a liberal who wants to reduce defacto inequality of opportunity. IF unchangeable genetic factors predominate, then the best strategy is to reduce the identification.
Back to cognitive ability. Each nation in Europe has a different average IQ, which you can find if you are interested. White immigrants to the US from different nations have also shown population level differences. However, once they mingle within the US population, we give little to no salience to which nations their ancestors come from. If Franco-Americans score lower than Russo-Americans, that difference gets lost once we de-emphasize origins so there is no widely discerned national origin to hang a stereotype on. Then the cultures and genetic pools also get diluted and intermixed as well, making the differences both less objectively, and harder for humans to add interpretation to.
A highly visible distinction makes this approach more difficult, but moving in that direction (less salience among the population based on the distinguishing characteristic) still seems like the best approach from a traditional liberal viewpoint. Kids raised in a mixed race environment, absent stereotypes, tend to treat differences in "race" as unimportant. Physically visible of course, but not considered to be of high importance. Fostering that race or ethnicity neutral categorization is the best way to avoid stigmatizing individuals.
Between 1619 and the latter part of that century, African (involuntary) immigrants were treated the same as other indentured servants (there was no chattel slavery), working alongside European indentured servants, and being freed after 7 years. A majority of the Europeans who immigrated to the territories which became the US were indentured servants (most but not all "voluntary" by some definitions), and the involuntary African immigrants were just part of that flow. During their servitude they had the same (limited) rights, but after the term were equally free.
It was only a couple of generations later that life-long slavery was introduced, mostly for economic reasons we could go into. And then subsequent to that, the concept of "race" as relevant, and then the concepts of white supremacy among "races", were invented to rationalize the oppression of slavery - in that order.
I would go back to that time, and eliminate race as a relevant category to the psyches of Americans, no more important than hair color. Alas, that direction has been disparaged today.
So we had better hope, as I fervently do, that unchangeable genetic factors have very little influence on cognitive ability at the population group level. Because the neo-progressive toolkit is inadequate to adapt to that reality - within liberal values of equality - if it should come to pass. They prefer to deny reality to adapting to it (in general; not saying what the reality is in our current discussion).
And in the meanwhile, we know that changeable environmental factors play a significant role in cognitive ability, so we should do what we can to take advantage of that, as part of a broadened attempt to produce better equality of opportunity; and we need to emphasize that each individual needs to be treated as such without group-based pre-judgement, period. Drill it in. That's true of every scenario. And of course all of this is within a yet broader effort to address factors other then differences in abilities - like discrimination and stereotypes.
I note that France takes a different approach than the US in regard to "race". They are strongly against the concept of "race", and make it illegal to record the "race" of people - by the government or by private companies. I think that approach has positives (reducing the salience of race) and negatives (making it harder to compare outcomes to detect possible discrimination). I do not know which approach will produced the better outcome in 100 years; I do not take for granted that US approach of elevating racial identity as primary has been proven to work better in the long run, so I think we should have some humility and be open to learning.
> "Cultures that favor intelligence are likelier to encourage marriages between smart parents leading to a disproportionate number of smart offspring."
This sounds like a hypothesis that cultural factors might, in a sufficiently reproductively separated population, over time through selective mating produce genetic proclivities towards increased intelligence compared to other populations.
I have some doubt about this culture-begets-genetics hypothesis. After all, the rest of the sufficiently separated population is also still reproducing as well, not just those at the top of the IQ curve. Mating assortment would more tend to increase the range of intelligence within a population, rather than to raise the mean; the range of variability would tend to grow until reaching some equilibrium with regression to the mean.
And I think that since general intelligence is known to be highly influenced by environment, cultures more highly valuing intelligence can perpetuate that propensity to produce intelligence though providing effective environments to foster that in offspring, without needing any recourse to genetics. Culture is another way to pass on characteristics, when sufficiently separate from other cultures.
(Now if a culture had some reproductively significant filtering - not just assortment - on the basis of intelligence, that could be another matter).
I see no value in prefixing "general" to "intelligence." What's the alternative? Specific intelligence? What does that even mean? I favor a multitude of scales, separating skills like mathematics, 3D visualization, language .... over a single metric.
It is worth noting though that the single metric has fairly robust predictive value. People who are good at one kind of problem-solving tend to be good at others.
Though it cuts fine. I'm a very good programmer but when it comes to parsing strings I am a complete idiot.
Culture example: where European cultures favor a logical approach to discourse, African ones favor a discursive (storytelling) approach. This is a disadvantage on intelligence tests, which tend to be logic-based.
"What's the alternative? Specific intelligence?"
Yeah, as you say, wouldn't this be in specific skills like mathematics or skill for languages perhaps? Again, I see no value in examining this across "racial" lines, but as a measure of aptitude it seemse pretty interesting, no?
Don't get me started on language acquisition is my advice. A topic of endless fascination.
The word "general" is absolutely crucial in modern discussions of cognitive science. The current established view rejects General intelligence for what is sometimes called "the Swiss army knife" theory. The idea is that we have lots of different abilities, each of which evolved to solve specific tasks. Later on, of course, those abilities were exapted to do tasks they were not originally designed for. But there is no single intelligence that is responsible for all of our abilities. In many cases, they occur in different parts of the brain specialized for language, face recognition, spatial orientation etc.
University was a long time ago. Correction noted. Thanks.
Chris (and anyone following this), the difference is that "general intelligence", often represented by an italicized lower case g, is a well researched term of art in psychometrics, not just a random justaposition of words.
Look up "g factor" in psychology. Wikipedia has a good short summary of the history, the supporting evidence accumulated over the past century, the critics, and the response to the critics. I'm serious - read it first and we can talk meaningfully. Until then it's like trying to discuss a "balanced binary tree" with somebody who is reasoning from just knowing what the individual words mean in common English usage, and knows zero about the terms of art in computer science.
Your talk of multiple skills is sensible and you are right that more can be captured with a multiple scale description - and that has been taken into account longer than I've been alive and I'm not young. Lumpers and splitters have had at it for a very long time, as with many other sciences. However, it was noticed a long time ago that there is a substantial positive correlation between tests of cognitive functioning - most are far from orthogonal measures. If you know how well somebody does on a few of them, you can substantially predict how they will do on others (as you say) - obviously not perfectly, but substantially as measured by statistics. The basic theory is that there is a more general component of cognitive ability underlying many of these tests, which can be measured (to useful degree, never perfectly). Modern IQ tests are therefore composed of several sub units.
Think of it like a suite of compiler or processor benchmarks. If you measure a few of them, you can get a pretty good idea of how fast a computer or compiler is in general, tho of course it may do better in one than in another. There is always a fuzziness, but it can be bracketed with error bars like other science.
NOBODY has ever said that g, or IQ tests, measure the only thing worthwhile. EVERY treatise I have read on intelligences makes this point, yet laymen tend to assume that professionals think IQ is the end all and be all - but zero professionals think like that. Nevertheless, what it does measure has been extraordinarily widely shown by science to correlate with many things which do matter. That is, it measures something in the psych with more validity than any other psychometric tests measures anything else, it's reasonably stable for most of life, and that something has substantial predictive value in terms of many other areas of life. People who score high in IQ tend to be people whom upon knowing them well, we consider quite smart - so g is a scientific abstraction, which corresponds to something real and salient in human behavior, which we intuitively recognize as relating to "being smart".
And no, it's not entirely logic based, or even language based - some IQ tests use no language at all (or any language). Properly administering a text involves adapting it such that it can be comprehended in the culture involved, so that not understanding the test is not inhibiting native intelligence from being measured. But that's about comprehension of the test itself; the test is not a test of knowledge, but of the ability to abstractly manipulate the knowledge that one has.
Basically, cross culturally, some people are observably better at figuring out real life scenarios, eg: involving hunting game. Others notice that. Pretty much every innovation in pottery or archery, everywhere in the world regardless of language, likely came from somebody with a high g factor. There will be rare anomalies which very high ability in a particular area and perhaps even sub-average cognitive ability in another - but they ARE anomalies, statistically. They are why there are error bars - IQ or g does not assert that it is all encompassing, there will always be fringe cases. But when tested scientifically and statistically, it's quite robust among all measures.
Again, your perspective might have been cutting edge a few generations ago, but the reasonable concerns you have, have indeed been thoroughly considered and debated over the decades.
Again, just read the Wikipedia summary of the g factor. If you distrust Wikipedia, follow some of the references, or pick up a modern psychometric textbook.
And just to head off misunderstandings (from anybody), I will say again that g (or it's best known approximate measurement, IQ) is just one characteristic in humans. It doesn't tell you who is a good storyteller or musician or friend. I very definitely do not choose mates or friends primarily much less exclusively on that basis; there are more important attributes. And it doesn't tell you everything even about cognition. But a massive amount of evidence shows that it does capture an important (not the only important) factor in human behavior.
And again - I realize that your message already noted some of the elements I am discussing, and elaborating upon.
And all that presupposes that "intelligence" is measurable.
If you limit your definition of "intelligence" to "ability to do IQ tests" then yes, that's measurable.
But as you say - there are lots of different kinds of intelligence, and aspects of intelligence - and every time you think you've counted them all, you find you've missed one. So it's infinite-dimensional.
And then you realise that your intelligence varies from day to day - how much sleep you got, how much you've had to drink, what else you're worried about... So "intelligence" maps to an "infinite dimensional fuzzy space".
And they're not measurable. Check out the maths.
You cannot define the distance between any two points in one.
So however you try to measure "intelligence", you're wasting your time... Anything measurable is not "intelligence".
That's why people talk about "general intelligence" and "IQ". They're different, and while there may be a correlation between "IQ" and "success" in some fields, you can't correlate something measurable to something not measurable.
And (a bit of a sidetrack here) that kind of pulls the rug from under eugenics - anyone stupid enough to believe in it is too stupid to be allowed to breed, if you're trying to implement eugenic breeding programs. I do like a good paradox!
You've said all this before including the smear about eugenics.
Measurement is not infinite-dimensional. Infinity has no meaning outside mathematics; in the sciences infinity always means there is something wrong with the theory.
"Too stupid to be allowed to breed" isn't the kind of discourse we use here.
Infinity is a fact of life; hard to experiment with in a lab, or even on a digital computer, I agree, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Intelligence is, after all, also something that only exists in your mind. Like mathematics, it doesn't need to conform to common sense Newtonian physical rules, any more than quantum phenomena do.
Neuroscience shows that what you see as "reality" is actually a model constructed in your mind using sensory input extended by calculations of probability and a lot of estimation - very like mathematics. That's good enough to keep you fed & breathing, usually, which is what it was designed for. External reality looks very different to creatures with different senses - who's to say who's right?
The concept of infinity does often come into play when linear reductionist logic reaches its limits and that is indeed when an apparently satisfactory theory sometimes fails.
"Too stupid to breed" is the kind of thing eugenicists (and racists) say in private, using polite circumlocutions in public. We need to bring that thinking out into the light of day to deal with it.
I won't argue with you about infinity. I am as certain that you are dead wrong as I am about absolutely anything. Factors that can significantly affect the outcome of an intelligence test can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (exhaustion, illness, head trauma, hypoglycemia ...) and all of them would likely lead to rescheduling the test. Factors that would affect the outcome by more than a point or two are probably in single digits. Your position on this is frankly absurd.
I asked you last time this came up what is your beef with intelligence testing and in a shocking turn of events, you didn't answer. Your position is so extreme as to deserve mockery but we don't do that here. Much, anyway.
But when you compare IQ testing to eugenics you cross a line. And no we don't need to bring that garbage out into the light of day; several of my great-grandparents died at Treblinka so I am not seeing the humor in your hyperbole.
Funny you should mention quantum mechanics, it was the infinity of what we call the Ultraviolet Catastrophe that led Planck to quantization and then to QM.
You don't know what you're talking about. Intelligence is reliably measurable.
I'm sorry, had I remembered who you were, I would not have replied to your comments.
Why would I need to explain separately why someone who thinks intelligence is not measurable "has a beef with intelligence tests" ? Isn't that obvious? I think they're fraudulent, damaging & unfair.
The reliability of repeated IQ tests has been the subject of much research, and is probably best described as "undecided", except among companies whose income relies on selling tests.
I am sorry to hear that your family suffered in the camps. I am astonished that someone with your background supports such a tainted methodology so enthusiastically.
If you check back through history and look at who was involved in the development of IQ testing, you will find that most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior" people in Germany, starting with "subnormal" and disabled people and only moving on to the race-based selection of victims at a later stage. Even the terminology is appalling.
A great deal of the initial work was done purely with the intention of identifying people with learning disabilities, and most of the statistical validation for individuals was done with people with low scores. The validation work for people in the "normal" range was largely population based rather than done with individuals, and this (as has been discussed elsewhere in this discussion) is largely self-referential.
For supporting references I suggest you start with the recent book "Control" by Dr Adam Rutherford which offers a reasonably non-academic overview.
"most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior ...." blah blah blah
Is that what we use it for now?
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
So you turned down a high-paying job because they used a qualifying test. I rest my case.
I never said you were stupid but your tossing around infinity in this case is not the argument of a well-informed person.
Infinity is dangerous to mathematicians; many who studied it went mad. But it has nothing whatever to do with intelligence testing.
Chris, I want to warn you that you are treading on dangerous ground. Your writing here and elsewhere reveals a very capable and rational mind. You have a tendency to follow the evidence.
That can get you into trouble. This is a minefield. You have intellectual tools which allow you to evaluate your erstwhile colleague as factually wrong about his crime assertion and therefore likely swayed by racial bias or stereotypes. I will warn you that if you start taking a strictly scientific and apolitical approach to investigating this subject, you will likely come across some evidence which is discomforting. No, not silly KKK or neo-Nazi nonsense, I know you would sift that garbage out quickly. I mean scientific evidence which even viewed in context, is troublesome.
However, I will respond to your thought experiment.
Hypothetically, suppose that your researches were to convince you that there are significant differences in objectively and competently measured IQ between some population groups, which cannot be explained by test bias.
Then, as CAS says, that aggregated finding would still tell us nothing about individuals, because the differences within each population group are by the same objective measurements far greater than any group level differences between statistical means, medians or modes. It should have absolutely no effect on how you treat other individuals, period, end of story.
Also, as CAS and Steve indicate, differences between population groups do NOT inherently imply any significant genetic component. Differences in environment and culture would need to be considered - as you have observed in working with Asian ethnicity. The differences could be 100% due to environment and 0% due to genetics (hypothetically), so any such evidence might be just a snapshot in time, describing today's world but not the future.
The area where you might run into trouble is in partially questioning the currently politically attributed causes of other observed differences between population groups. If at the statistical level of aggregate analysis, there were differences in cognitive ability (from whatever causes), then some differences in outcome between groups (at that same statistical level) might not be entirely due to present day discrimination. Such group level differences in cognitive ability could lead to even a system which is absolutely fair to each individual (entirely based on individual merit, without any group prejudice whatsoever), yet which produces differences at the group statistical level because the groups do not have identical characteristics.
So for example, if some differences in cognitive ability exist at the population group level (again, for any reason), then the wildly disproportionate representation of Ashkenazi Jews in certain fields might be in some part related to their tendency to score very well on IQ tests at the statistical level, rather than being entirely due to pro-Jewish (or anti-Gentile) discrimination. Or you might compare Franco-Americans and Russo-Americans.
In short - such group level differences would require no change of course for political philosophies based on treating all individuals fairly and with the same rights, like traditional liberalism. I see no implications for Martin Luther King's direction, for one example. At most, some interventions might be targeted towards enriching the environments (or other factors known or as yet unknown) which might statistically increase the average cognitive functioning of disadvantaged groups (as one prong of a larger effort). For two examples, substantially bad nutrition, and exposure to violent crime nearby, seem to have negative effects (at the statistical level) on cognitive development; improving those factors might improve outcomes, over time. (And of course to the degree that racial bias creates or sustains either factor, it can be appropriately confronted as needed). This kind of extra focus would just be a refinement of the civil rights concepts, not a change in course.
But this hypothetical group difference, if you were to conclude that it existed, might cause some loss of traction for certain more recent political narratives, such as that espoused by Ibram X Kendi. Kendi explicitly reasons that there are only two possible explanation for different outcomes for Blacks and other racial groups - genetic differences and discrimination. Since genetic differences HAVE to be taken off the table as too awful to consider, that prove in his mind that it any differences in outcomes today must be produced 100% by discrimination, QED. This kind of binary reasoning might be threatened by your hypothetical.
From what I've seen of your writing, I would hardly expect you to jump to any conclusions, but rather to evaluate evidence as honestly as possible. And I'm warning you that such an approach is not welcome in many progressive circles and their periphery; no matter how clear you describe your explorations, it will "sound similar to" things which are highly emotionally evocative for some others, and you will tend to be treated as if you are saying things you have tried to be clear that you are not saying. Other people will sometimes assume falsely that X must imply Y, even if you don't say or agree with that implication. Fair warning. If you do continue to research your questions, I'll be glad to hear your results tho.
Everything you are saying here was in my little post. If I didn't call out the difference between median intelligence and individual intelligence it's because I am cognizant of my audience; I don't need to. If there are three not-fully-congruent normal distributions for the intelligence of the three major races, they are vastly overlapped.
Don't expect me to take very seriously the denial of any role of genetics in intelligence, and if you are implying that I recognize no environmental role in how well one does on intelligence tests then you are verging on insulting me. A child who grows up in a house full of books and other stimuli has an advantage over one who grows up with a TV set that is never off and checkout-counter newspapers the only reading material.
And frankly conforming to progressive ideology is not much of a priority for me. I would not post what I did in a WaPo blog or on Facebook because I would be called all kinds of names by sloppy readers and sloppier thinkers. Honestly, I am deeply disenchanted with the current state of progressivism with its "woke" horseshit and its virtue signaling. There is tyranny there and "trans" activists are doing enormous harm in their determination to swell their ranks.
I mentioned Asians. The high achievements of Asian-Americans are not reflected in my experience here, where hardly anyone has the brains to close a door he had to open to walk through.
My father had read all of Shakespeare by the age of twelve. I have no memory of him, he died when I was three, but he left a library behind. I sought to know him by knowing his influences, his books and his writing. A sad substitute for growing up under his influence, but it was a gift.
My wife grew up where such things were not valued. A little girl with no shoes also has no books. But when she came to America she knew what her daughters must have. While I could accept that they might not accel in everything I made it clear that they had better not being a report card home with a comment that they were not performing to their capability, she just wanted to see "A"s. She became that Asian mom in America.
I didn't get to know Vietnamese people while I was in Vietnam, but I know quite a few in America. The name Nguyen was a common one in engineering departments and among super technicians. Principle design engineers who's journey to America began as boat people.
The less technically inclined are often astute business people. The large successful Asian markets here are owned by Vietnamese people. They do what the Chinese in Southeast Asia did. Sowell discussed it in his book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals". More about seeking opportunity where they find it than race.
Crap! I wandered as I wrote on my phone when I should be sleeping.
Wow. Can we reset and reparse, Chris?
How would you respond if you assumed (correctly) that
(1) I have read a number of your writings and appreciated them, earning my respect FWIW. I was feeling happy to have a chance to explore some concepts with somebody I respect. I did not expect your reaction, tho.
(2) I was largely agreeing with you, not disagreeing. I may emphasize a different facet, or phrase something my own way, but that doesn't mean I'm an adversary.
(3) I was neither denying any role for genetics, nor imputing that you were denying environmental factors; just not thing existing in my mind (however clumsily conveyed)
(4) Having read other work by you, I already know you are not a modern neo-progressive, and that we share a disenchantment from what it has become. However, the issues of intelligence and population groups is an exceptionally explosive subject, and can cause problems even for non-progressives, so I wanted to note that.
Clearly, I have badly miscommunicated and apologize for that. I would appreciate if you could quote what I said that led you to believe (1) that I was denying any role for genetics, or (2) that I thought (almost insultingly) that you were denying any role for environment. I'd like to learn to avoid whatever I wrote that came across so far from my intent (I'm in what my spouse calls "debug mode"). Sometimes our words can be interpreted in ways we did not intend, so we need to learn how to avoid that when possible. That's my task.
"The differences could be 100% due to environment and 0% due to genetics (hypothetically)"
The last word doesn't mitigate it.
OK, sorry if I sounded like I was bristling. I wasn't, but I see how it could read that way. Fair do's.
OK, thanks. The last word was not meant to mitigate anything, but to explain that I was presenting a hypothetical rather than an assertion. Read it in the spirit of "EVEN IF the differences were 100% environmental... certain issues remain". I appreciate your explaining; I do not always anticipate all the ways something I write can be interpreted, so this is helpful.