https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/12/feature_how_david_...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077898

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The HN post you referred to supporting the idea of "race" included a link to a paper [0] where these are the final 2 lines of the abstract: "Respondents educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons reject race more frequently than respondents educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations. The survey shows that the views of anthropologists on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education."

I wouldn't call that scientific support for the notion of race as a meaningful category.

Ever since the idea of "white" people was invented, groups which have at one time or another been considered non-white include the Germans, Greeks, white Hispanics, Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs and Spaniards. [1][2]

I agree with you about the video I linked to cherry picking that quote from Murray about heritability. That section was taken from a critique [3] of The Bell Curve, and the paragraph it was pulled from ends with this: "The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray."

It doesn't seem like we will be convincing each other of anything here. For me, it's just about impossible to be schooled on the history of America and the incredible multifaceted assault on people that aren't white, which is still very much ongoing, and then argue that there's any way to say that there isn't an overwhelming environmental cause for disparities in socioeconomic status/IQ/incarcaration rates/etc between blacks and whites. Just falling back on ockham's razor, which seems more likely:

A - After humans migrated out of Africa and spread out over the globe, there was selection for genes that generated differing amounts of melanin in reaction to different amounts of sunlight at different latitudes. For some reason, genes linked with intelligence shifted as well so that there is now a strong correlation between skin pigmentation levels and intelligence despite a lack of any obvious reason for these things to be linked.

or

B - Africans, being better adept at surviving the malarial load of the new world due to a genetic predisposition [4] were recruited en masse for the trans-atlantic slave trade. The people running this slave trade, having at least a modicum of morality and most likely Christian, invented a theory of race that placed Africans below Europeans so that it became less morally repugnant to maintain the chattel slavery system. This theory of race pitted all of the poor people against each other, allowing people in power to maintain their positions. This theory of race also allowed for a prolonged (and ongoing) withholding of resources from an entire population of people (defined by having dark skin), and this deprivation is having a direct effect on the success of dark-skinned people in many different measurements.

For me, it's B all the way.

[0] https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/current-views-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people#United_States

[2] https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol109/iss4/4/

[3] https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Her...

[4] https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/lowCountry_fu...

"There was little to no support for separate subgroup norms for different racial, ethnic, or social groups or for people with different nationalities (natives vs. immigrants), with the percentage of experts favoring separate norms below 25%.

There was no clear position among experts regarding environmental and genetic factors in the US Black-White difference in intelligence."

Maybe Dr. Collins rubs shoulders with experts other than those surveyed here, who knows.

Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous, and is a pretty lame rebuttal to what was a very extensive attack on the ideas presented in "The Bell Curve". Do you have any critiques on the more relevant points that the video actually makes? E.g. what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all? Or, presuming that IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence, then how to square the supposition the Bell Curve makes about an idiocracy-style drop in IQ points with the Flynn effect?

Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]? For example, in the interview of Charles Murray conducted by Sam Harris for his podcast, Murray used Barack Obama as an example of a typical black man, saying that, and I'm paraphrasing, even supposing that there is a difference in IQ between the races, it wouldn't justify denying a job to someone like Barack Obama if he came in applying for one. But, like, why is Obama black and not white? Have you seen a picture of Obama's mom? She's the whitest white lady from Kansas. I was recently working on some cancer project and I had a spreadsheet of the subjects' self-reported race, as well as genetic ancestry results showing the percentage of African ancestry and European ancestry. Some of the respondents who self-reported as African American had 97% European ancestry.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0]

I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-geneti...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

edited for formatting

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/09/russian-bill...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the...

[0]: https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/

1: Segregation. The black and brown people are all concentrated in the South and West sides, along with most of the violent crime. Despicable and sad.

2: Lack of nature nearby. The city has some nice parks, especially the public lake front, but there isn't any decent camping within a 3 or 4 hour drive.

3: Weather. I've lived here my whole life, and I am becoming less tolerant of the winters as I age.

The traffic is pretty bad too, but I bike commute so I don't really feel that part too much. Finally, and this is a more pernicious problem, but the state's fiscal situation is terrible. It doesn't seem like such an issue now (especially for a fairly affluent white guy like me), but the future will almost certainly include service reductions combined with higher taxes.