The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

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ktz
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by ktz »

Huh. Well, I'm glad the guy's copy paste key works, even if he doesn't seem to have any idea how much of what he's copy pasting conflicts with his position. I guess it's enough for nasty lib'rals to be wrong even if it ultimately contradicts his own ideas. In the only bit of his own words in the post he calls Ezra Klein a "Identity politics nutcase"... strange choice of criticism given that it's literally the most hypocritical accusation he could make. I'm happy enough to take credit for the OP's ideological backpedaling from the pure propaganda-like certainty of
Dachshund wrote: The scientists involves in line of research are all in quiet agreement, the chances are zero and we must begin to accustomise ourselves to this fact.
to the much more measured
Dachshund wrote: November 28th, 2018, 4:10 pm
Conclusion
The science on this subject is hardly settled, and I agree with the authors in the Vox article that the kind of demagoguery on it commonly found on the Internet is both toxic and has the potential to harm real people.
... noting that the article author is literally talking about people like the OP who would co-opt race science to support positions of white nationalism, racial superiority and oppression of minority races. Contrast the OP's position with Murray's own words:
Often we will be talking of group differences so subtle that they can be teased out only with the most sophisticated methods. Often these differences will have nothing to do with “better” or “worse,” but just vive la différence. Even when the differences are substantial, the variation between two groups will almost always be dwarfed by the variation within groups—meaning that the overlap between two groups will be great. In a free society where people are treated as individuals, “So what?” is to me the appropriate response to genetic group differences. The only political implication of group differences is that we must work hard to ensure that our society is in fact free and that people are in fact treated as individuals. And yet I can tell you from personal experience that “So what?” is not a response that many others share. Today, to suggest that genetically based group differences are even probable provokes a reaction that resembles hysteria.
I could go through and address the article point by point, but after dealing with RJG in a different thread I'm a bit sick of interacting with individuals who don't argue in good faith and seek only to parasitically consume the attentional resources of others. If someone worthy indicates interest I can do a point by point rebuttal, but it seems like overkill in addressing someone only capable of copy pasting the contents of an article I already read and made reference to. For the purposes of this conversation, I think the distinction between heritability and modifiability from the original article to be one clear case that throws a wrench into the OP's highly misguided proposition that heritability of IQ implies that one group will never be able to achieve on the same level as another group. Heritability, whether low or high, implies nothing about modifiability. The classic example is height, which is strongly heritable (80 to 90 percent), yet the average height of 11-year-old boys in Japan has increased by more than 5 inches in the past 50 years. A similar historical change is occurring for intelligence: Average IQ scores are increasing across birth cohorts, such that Americans experienced an 18-point gain in average IQ from 1948 to 2002. And the most decisive and permanent environmental intervention that an individual can experience, adoption from a poor family into a better-off one, is associated with IQ gains of 12 to 18 points.

These observations do not undermine the conclusion that intelligence is heritable, but rather the naive assumption that heritable traits cannot be changed via environmental mechanisms.


One nice point by David Reich that more generally contradicts the OP's white nationalist conclusion, having to do with the illusion of "racial purity" to begin with:
The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source. The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years. Similarly, the idea that the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have ancestry from West Eurasian farmers that Hutus do not — an idea that has been incorporated into arguments for genocide — is nonsense. We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is — or could be — pure.
Reich goes on to explain that modern conceptions of "white" actually are an amalgam of four entirely separate backgrounds with degrees of variation as high if not higher than the degrees of variation between commonly understood racial lines. A Scientific American article agrees with this premise, saying racial categories are a social construct and are weak proxies for genetic diversity. From the article:
In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
Reiterating a widely understood position, the variations within populations greatly exceed variations between populations -- categorical declarations based on racial aggregates have extremely limited biological and semantic value.

Finally, I want to talk about how the parting shot from the article copy pasted by the OP, about the discovery of SNPs for educational attainment, demonstrates he has no idea what he is talking about:
I leave with a question for the authors of this piece. This July, behavioral geneticists will announce over 600 SNPs statistically associated with educational attainment — and IQ by proxy. Are you ready to come back to this topic with that data in hand?
If you're trying to make a case for racial superiority, as opposed to the article author just trying to refute the lack of genetic basis for variations in intelligence across populations, what matters is not how many different single nucleotide polymorphisms are correlated, but the degree of variation implicated in the maximum case. In fact, more SNPs is worse for you as it indicates a greater likelihood of confounding factors. In Huntington's disease, for example, one single dominant autosomal allele is enough for a carrier to determine complete genetic heritability or not. But if there's 600 different correlated SNPs with 600 different p-values, that's potentially 600 different genetic factors that create more and more opportunities for variations within populations to exceed the variation between populations, lowering the overall correlation. In one July GWAS study on SNPs for high IQ individuals, the entirety of the polygenic effect of the 600+ SNPs correlated with intelligence have only an aggregate effect of 1%(!), compared with 20% for the aggreg ate effect of height: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121
Although the small effect size of individual DNA variants detracts from their utility in neurocognitive research, polygenic scores can be created that aggregate the effects of DNA variants to predict genetic propensities for individuals. For example, the current strongest polygenic score prediction of a quantitative trait is for height, which predicts nearly 20% of the variance of height in independent samples.

However, these GWA successes in the life sciences have not been reflected in research on intelligence, where relatively few replicated genome-wide significant associations have been found and polygenic scores derived from these GWA studies account for only about 1% of the variance of intelligence.
Each individual gene therefore implicated in only a miniscule effect on the overall aggregate of intelligence, and an easy end result to conclude is that there are a wide variety of environmental factors implicated in the development of intelligence, which ought to be obvious to anyone not seeking racial superiority as a foregone conclusion.

There's plenty of evidence that contradicts the kind of denigration of black intelligence in the original post -- consider for example census data from the year 2000 that indicates African immigrants as the group achieving the highest educational attainment on average -- not Asian immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews any other group. But the impression I get from the other commenters in this thread is that I'm dealing with a delusional troll who probably belongs more on an FBI watchlist than on the list of people allowed to post in this forum, and further interactions are a serious waste of time.
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Burning ghost
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Burning ghost »

Fool -

I am not sure what the above does to counter the evidence of IQ (g-factor) not being about environment - which it isn’t. There is no denying the existence of “intelligence.”

Of course IQ has nothing to do with the “value”/“worth” of an individual though so in the frame of this thread it’s merely an academic curiosity (one that intrigues me.)
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Fooloso4 »

ktz:
Well, I'm glad the guy's copy paste key works, even if he doesn't seem to have any idea how much of what he's copy pasting conflicts with his position.
Pretty funny isn’t it?
If someone worthy indicates interest I can do a point by point rebuttal, but it seems like overkill in addressing someone only capable of copy pasting the contents of an article I already read and made reference to.
I take his arguments apart mostly for my own amusement. It bothers him but does not deter him. It is not entirely for my own amusement though. There may be some who come here who see him citing authors and facts and studies and think that maybe he knows something. It is important to show them that it is mostly misinformation and disinformation.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Fooloso4 »

BG:
I am not sure what the above does to counter the evidence of IQ (g-factor) not being about environment - which it isn’t. There is no denying the existence of “intelligence.”
From a discussion of Robert Plomin’s "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are". Plomin is one of the authors cited in the Lee article.
He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics.

Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.

“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ic-testing)
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

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Fool -

And this refutes g-factor being innate how? You do understand what is meant by “heritability” I assume. It is not really up for dispute that g is largely due to genetics (by largely we’re talking at a conservative estimate of around 0.7-0.8 heritability.) Of course none of this has much to do with what Sausage Dog is saying because “heritability” and “inheritance” are completely different things.

I seem to remember reading about parents with high “intelligence” being more even more likely to have children of average “intellligence.” I didn’t have time to look into the study, but it wouldn’t surprise me is]f it was solid information (if you find it let me know please.)

Intelligence is a social issue and not one we have any idea how to deal with. It is not “race” specific as far as we know although it is easy enough to see various disparities across, and between, various arbitrary groups.

It is amusing to see Sausage Dog resort to “leftist” identity politics in order to shoe-horn his ideology in to fit a distorted presentation of “factual evidence.” If he was so concerned with the far left then why on earth does he play their stupid game and choose to lump people into groups.

Anyway, IQ between people converges with age. One explanation of this is that the variability in youth is due to differences in personal experiences. As people get older their experiences become more and more similar as they do more things in thier lives. It seems reasonable to me to say “intelligence” is innate and that if you wish to nurture your intelligence then “variety is about the spices of life” is probably a damn important factor rather tha the choice of “spice.” Again, this is a generalisation because I imagine there are exceptions to this as always where some prone to stress either burn out or “break through.” In the former those would become stunted individuals and fear exploration (which as far as I can see is important in bringing innate “intelligence” to manifest in someone’s life.)

There is literally no evidence that the g-factor can be raised. If parents are willing enough I imagine exposing their children to as much as they can as early as they can is one sure way to help “intelligence” along. For me the bigger question is about the “morality” and “interest level” of children. I think these are a much more important combo to focus on - even though they too may possess as much heritability as “intelligence” we simply just don’t know and don’t have any serious means of measuring “good” or “bad”, “fulfillment” or “disappointment.” I don’t believe there has been any swriojs correlation between these things and “intelligence” revealed in studies.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Fooloso4 »

BG:
And this refutes g-factor being innate how?
If genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us and environment 50% then to say that the g-factor is innate is to only account for part of what is going on.
It is not really up for dispute that g is largely due to genetics (by largely we’re talking at a conservative estimate of around 0.7-0.8 heritability.
Heritability does not indicate what proportion of a trait is determined by genes and what proportion is determined by environment. So, a heritability of 0.7 does not mean that a trait is 70% caused by genetic factors; it means than 70% of the variability in the trait in a population is due to genetic differences among people. (https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/inheritance/heritability)
BG:
There is literally no evidence that the g-factor can be raised.
The article I cited in my last post makes a distinction between environmental factors we can control and those we cannot. It also distinguishes between means and variances. To say that there is no evidence that the g-factor can be raised does not mean environment is not a factor. Elsewhere in response to Dachshund’s claims about South Africans and IQ I pointed to the environmental factors that attribute to the low test results. Address these factors and group scores will increase.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Burning ghost »

Yes, and heritability between twins and older siblings converges with maturity as the environmental/experiential differences dissipate.

The number if fingers people have can also be effected by environmental factors (such as operating heavy machinery and having them cut off.) We obvoiusly cannot give people the same environment or they’d be the same person (twins would at least.)

The point being people don’t become smarter due to the environment anymore than they sprout wings and fly by sheer force of will.

It is really easy for people to push agendas by acting as if obvious phenotypes like eye colour are as blatant as psychological facets. The more we talk the less room for maneuvering the ideological nut jobs have ;)
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

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BG:
The point being people don’t become smarter due to the environment anymore than they sprout wings and fly by sheer force of will.
But they can and do become smarter on average as a group when certain environmental impediments are removed. Remove these environmental impediments and over time you will see less difference from one race to another.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Burning ghost »

The “over time” is the unknown factor. I really do think it takes generations due to the knock-on effects of prenatal conditions. Once all environmental impediments are removed then heritability is 1.0 genetic - that’s impossible though.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Dachshund »

ktz wrote: November 28th, 2018, 9:03 pm There's plenty of evidence that contradicts the kind of denigration of black intelligence in the original post -- consider for example census data from the year 2000 that indicates African immigrants as the group achieving the highest educational attainment on average -- not Asian immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews any other group.
Dear KTZ,

Could you please provide a link/s to solid evidence of any kind in the scientific literature, that contradicts my noting in the OP that Black Sub- Saharan African as a group have a markedly low average IQ ( around 70 points). I would also be particularly interested to see with my own eyes the data from the US Census for the year 2000 you refer to showing that Black African immigrants as a group had attained the highest educational average on average relative to any other racial/ethnic grouping.

I realise that differences in racial intelligence is an unpleasant subject to discuss, in particular for Liberals like yourself. Even if different races have different average IQs why talk about it? Well, my position is that White Americans have to talk about it, if only in self defense. As things stand, both in the US, and in every other nation in the Anglosphere ( the UK, Australia, Canda, etc.) if non-Whites, and in particular Black Africans and Hispanics do not perform at the same level as Whites, the inevitable explanation is White racism, i.e; its our fault. But what if, on average, people of different races do not have the same IQ; differences in intelligence are well known to play a major role in why it is that some people do better in life than others. Could it be that Black Africans do poorly in school, for example, not because schools are racist, but because they are on average not as smart as Whites ? If that's true, it may not make much sense to try to narrow the racial gap in achievement, instead maybe we should simply be trying to improve the performance of all children and not worry about the gap ?

So, what's the evidence for racial differences in intelligence ? No...actually, that's the wrong question. The right question is why would anyone think that Blacks and Whites, for example, have the same average level of intelligence ? There are certainly smart Blacks and stupid Whites, but why would anyone think that people who live in the Congo are just as smart as people who live in Sweden?

Before Sub-Saharan Black Africans had contact with outsiders, no African society had invented the wheel, no Blacks had a written language or a calendar, no Blacks had built a two-storey building or mechanical device or had domesticated ant beast of burden. All this suggests a low average level of intelligence. Black Africa has been in contact with the outside world for 100s of years, but it is still where you find the countries with the most poverty, the shortest life expectancies and the lowest levels of economic development. "Multi-culti", egalitarian forum intellectuals, like the erudite Dr Fool, (and our beloved "Aristotatlan" Moderator, Miss Greta /"Funky-G") will tell you that Africa is poor because it was colonised and exploited by wicked, White Supremacist Europeans ( for example,the Belgians in the Congo, the British in Zululand and so on), but it's not so. The most extensively colonised parts such as South Africa, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are now the most advanced parts of Africa. Ethiopia and Liberia, which were never colonised are among the poorest places in Africa. Moreover, do you know which country in the Western hemisphere was the first to become independent after the US freed itself from Britain? It was Haiti; Haiti which has an almost entirely African population has been independent for almost 200 years, but it has a profile of poverty, disease, corruption and underdevelopment that make it a perfect match for Black Africa. Its history is very different from that of African countries and it is 4000 miles away across an ocean, but African people have brought a typically African society to the "New World."

Wherever Blacks live outside of Africa but among people of other races, they show the same patterns of generally less successful behaviour. This is true of Canada and Britain, for example, which never had a history of slavery or Jim Crow. Does this mean that White people brutally mistreat Black people all over the world wherever they go, or it it the case that Blacks and Whites simply have different levels of ability ? In the US there are about 16,000 different school Districts and there isn't ONE in which Black students perform at the same level as Whites. Is every one of those 16,000 school Districts run by racists trying to keep Black people down, or, are there simply racial differences in intelligence ?

Blacks and Whites separated from their last common ancestor at least 60,000 years ago. Since that time, the two groups have evolved the dramatically different physical appearances that we see between today's Europeans and Africans. The brain is an organ just like other organs. What are the chances that during the time it took for the rest of their body to become so different that the brain remained exactly the same ? As Professor Geoffrey Cockran and Henry Harpending explain in their book, "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion" (quote)... "The biological equality of human races is about as likely as a fistful of silver dollars all landing on edge when dropped." In other words, it's impossible.

Therefore, just on the basis of what we can see around us and what we know of history, there is no reason at all to think on average that people of different races have the same intelligence. But what does the science say about this ? Ever since large-scale IQ testing began at the time of the First World War, Whites have achieved higher scores than Blacks. The 15 point difference in averages: around 100 points for Whites and 85 points for American Blacks have not changed for nearly 100 years. To date here have been literally hundreds of studies and meta-studies and they all give the same results. Critics of IQ testing claim that (A): it doesn't test intelligence and (B): testing is biased against Blacks. Such critics are, however, completely outside the mainstream of of academic consensus on the subject, which is that IQ test scores reliably predict the ability to do well at things that take brains: success in school; making money and learning complicated skills, etc. Nor is their any cultural bias against Blacks; there are now IQ tests that are completely independent of culture. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of the most reliable tests of intelligence available today and doesn't even use language. People are scored on how well they find patterns, you can even use gestures to explain how the test works and give it to people who don't speak English. Another simple test of intelligence that could hardly be biased is the reverse digit span test. If I ask you to repeat back to me the numbers : 8, 4, 6, 7 2, 5 you can probably do it easily, if I keep adding to the number of digits though , at some point you probably wont be able to remember them all. This is a memory test and Blacks and Whites do equally well. If, however, I recite the digits : 8,4, 7,3,5,6,2 and ask you to repeat them back to me in reverse order, that's a lot harder, that's an intelligence test, and White do significantly better on it than Blacks. How could such a test be biased ? Moreover, those people ( like "Funky-G") who persistently complain about bias never explain why North East ASians do better than Whites on IQ tests like Raven' Progressive Matrices and the reverse digit span tests ? Would they argue are that the tests are biased in favour of Asians, or would they accept the obvious explanation, that Asian are, on average more intelligent than Whites. It is, of course, their higher average IQ that explains why Asians get better grades than Whites in school, get into better colleges and have a higher per capita income than Whites.

It may seem harsh to say so, but people of different races get different scores on IQ tests because they do not have the same average intelligence. Anyone who studies the evidence with an open mind will see this. Some people ( like the learned Dr Fool) argue that that the reasons for this are "environmental", that Blacks live in disadvantaged circumstances that depress their IQ. Environment does have some effect on IQ, especially on children, but that effect is pretty much eliminated once people have grown up. The real test would be to see what would happen to the IQ of Blacks if they were raised in a White environment. As it happens, two scientists: Sandra Scarr and Richard Wienberg decided to to study this precise question. They found Black children who had been adopted as babies by upper middle-class Whites and they tested their IQs at various ages. When the children were small they had IQs that were as high as White children, but by the time they were 17 or 18 their IQs had dropped to just 2 or 3 points above the average Black score. Maybe having spent all that time in White families did raise their IQs a little, but it certainly did not eliminate the 15 point Black-White difference.

There is something else that suggests environment does not count for that much. In 2009, Black students from families that had an income of more than $160,000 per annum got lower SAT scores than Whites from families with incomes of less than $ 20,000. That is a pretty stunning refutation of the idea that a deprived environment is what explains low Black IQ and poor academic performance.

There are, as well, strictly biological data that are pretty hard to argue with. In 2005, "Science" magazine published a report by a geneticist, Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago in which he announced the discovery of gene variants associated with brain growth. Professor Lahn suggested that these variants, which appeared relatively recently in humans, could have played a direct role in the development of human civilisation. The University of Chicago even used Professor Lahn's research to apply for a patent for a DNA-based intelligence test. It turned out however, that these gene variants are common in Europeans but rare in Africans. Pressure began to build on Professor Lahn and he stopped his research (quote)... "It's getting too controversial" he said, and he explained that he was beginning to think that some knowledge just isn't worth having. The University dropped its patent application for an IQ test based on DNA.

One scientist who never backed down was Phillipe Rushton of the University of West Ontario. He pointed out that there is a well-known correlation between brain size and intelligence. In general, the bigger your brain, the smarter you are, and indeed Professor Rushton showed, using MRI and CAT scan neuro-imaging studies that Asians and Europeans have considerably larger brains than Africans and Australian aborigines. Chinese people, for example, have 200 cc more of brains than Kenyans - that's nearly a cup, that's a lot of brain tissue, and brain size is known to have a solid correlation of almost 0.5 with intelligence.

In sum, there is simply no room for doubt that there are substantial racial differences in average intelligence, and the evidence we have to to date is very strong that there is a biological basis to these differences. In a paper by Professor Linda Godfordsen of the University of Delaware, robust evidence was presented of racial differences in intelligence confirming that Blacks are 4x more likely than Whites to have IQs of less than 75 and Hispanics are 3x more likely. At the same time Whites were twice as likely as Asians to have IQs that low. Whites, she discovered are 30x more likely than Blacks to have an IQ over 125 and 5x more likely than Hispanics. Professor Godfordson cited examples of professions that generally require an IQ of 125 like : lawyer, chemist and Executive, and pointed out that on a per capita basis we would expect to see 30x as many Whites as Blacks with enough intelligence for career of this kind and it is simply unrealistic to demand that there be proportionately as many Whites as Blacks in these professions and in others that require high intelligence. The fact is that equal outcomes in life are just not possible when different groups have different abilities.

Science is making steady progress all the time and pretty soon , given the current rate that the relevant biogenetic research is proceeding, we will find the genes for intelligence. And you can bet the farm it will be found that these genes are not distributed equally in all racial groups. The eventual acceptance of the truth will be a very good thing. Society today is constantly telling Blacks and Hispanics that they are just as smart as White people and that the only reason they fail in school and don't make as much money is because of White oppression. This, of course, is the best possible way to teach Blacks and Hispanics to hate White people. Wouldn't you hate a group of people if you were always being told that group is keeping you down?

I conclusion, America will be a far better and more just society if it is one built on truth rather than ignorance, and the sooner Americans accept the truth about race and IQ the better. Don't you agree, Dr Fool !


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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Fooloso4 »

BG:
The “over time” is the unknown factor. I really do think it takes generations due to the knock-on effects of prenatal conditions. Once all environmental impediments are removed then heritability is 1.0 genetic - that’s impossible though.
Yes, it is an unknown factor, but the reason it may take generations is that a) prenatal conditions will not change for the majority of a population in a single generation, there are political and economic reasons for this, and b) it is not just a matter of prenatal conditions.
Once all environmental impediments are removed then heritability is 1.0 genetic - that’s impossible though.
Right, environmental differences cannot be eliminated.

By analogy, Dachshund or someone like him in the not too distant past, might have made the argument that Asians are on average shorter than white, Europeans and conclude that this shows the genetic superiority of the “white race”. But now Asians are on average getting taller. Their genetic makeup has not altered. The ability to grow taller was there already in their genes. The difference which might on the surface appear to be explained by racial differences are not due to genetics.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Fooloso4 »

Dachshund:
I conclusion, America will be a far better and more just society if it is one built on truth rather than ignorance, and the sooner Americans accept the truth about race and IQ the better. Don't you agree, Dr Fool !
Absolutely! The problem is that you seem incapable of understanding what the science is. You copy and paste but either do not read what you have copied or are incapable of understanding it. Some of the things you post that you think support your claims actually refute them. But you either ignore this or are incapable of comprehending that fact. And speaking of facts, they are something you turn a blind eye to.

You cite Lee, but when it is pointed out that Lee contradicts your claims you simply drop it and move on to someone else, dropping names but never citing their work. If you had any self-awareness you would be embarrassed, but you just plod on. In each case you wrongly assume that the complex issues have been settled because you have found someone you think supports your position. You are what has been labelled a “white supremacist milk chugger”, picking and choosing and misinterpreting the findings of genetic research (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/w ... e-dna.html)
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Burning ghost »

Fool -
By analogy, Dachshund or someone like him in the not too distant past, might have made the argument that Asians are on average shorter than white, Europeans and conclude that this shows the genetic superiority of the “white race”. But now Asians are on average getting taller. Their genetic makeup has not altered. The ability to grow taller was there already in their genes. The difference which might on the surface appear to be explained by racial differences are not due to genetics.
Yes. This is why everytime I here anout IQ being low in Sub-Saharan Africans I believe the data, but not the simplicistic interpretation. Stress inhibits neurogenesis in such a way that IQ is lowered. This then passing on to the next generation and the next. It is reasonable to assume that if the life style of people in these regions changed then stress levels woudl drop, nutrition would rise and after maybe 3-4 generations the effects of the cortisol induced inhibition of IQ would disappear.

Even if there was a study to show that in fact IQ is lower in these regions regardless of prenatal effects then it still doesn’t lower the “value” of human life in the slightest because IQ doesn’t make someone a “good” person.

What often annoys me about measurements of intelligence is that if people don’t like the results they dismiss the science. Most people interested in intelligence, like myself, are not thinking about “race.” It is the flat rejection of the g-factor by some that actually gives weight to those wishing to interpret the data to suit their cause - disliking data doesn’t make the science is at fault.
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by ktz »

Great, back into the masochistic world of debunking the manic diatribes of White Nationalists. At least I get to flex on someone who deserves it this time.
Dachshund wrote: November 29th, 2018, 5:00 pm
ktz wrote: November 28th, 2018, 9:03 pm There's plenty of evidence that contradicts the kind of denigration of black intelligence in the original post -- consider for example census data from the year 2000 that indicates African immigrants as the group achieving the highest educational attainment on average -- not Asian immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews any other group.
Dear KTZ,

Could you please provide a link/s to solid evidence of any kind in the scientific literature, that contradicts my noting in the OP that Black Sub- Saharan African as a group have a markedly low average IQ ( around 70 points). I would also be particularly interested to see with my own eyes the data from the US Census for the year 2000 you refer to showing that Black African immigrants as a group had attained the highest educational average on average relative to any other racial/ethnic grouping.
Here's the original source for the claim in scientific literature: http://mumford.albany.edu/census/BlackW ... _final.pdf

Journalistic coverage of the same information:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- ... story.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... n-the-u-s-

Besides historical oppression, Sub-Saharan Africa has been the home of some of the worst political turmoil and unrest in the world, as well as infectious diseases that drag down the collective average. Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel is famously credited for the correlation national IQ with the presence of infectious diseases. I'd like to see how your IQ would fare if you spent the 90s fighting off malaria, genocide, corrupt governments, the impacts of predatory lending by the IMF, and exploitative appropriation of your natural resources.
https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/p ... er20120307

Note that it's also widely accepted that traditional IQ testing is intrinsically biased towards Western culture. https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx
I realise that differences in racial intelligence is an unpleasant subject to discuss, in particular for Liberals like yourself. Even if different races have different average IQs why talk about it? Well, my position is that White Americans have to talk about it, if only in self defense. As things stand, both in the US, and in every other nation in the Anglosphere ( the UK, Australia, Canda, etc.) if non-Whites, and in particular Black Africans and Hispanics do not perform at the same level as Whites, the inevitable explanation is White racism, i.e; its our fault. But what if, on average, people of different races do not have the same IQ; differences in intelligence are well known to play a major role in why it is that some people do better in life than others. Could it be that Black Africans do poorly in school, for example, not because schools are racist, but because they are on average not as smart as Whites ? If that's true, it may not make much sense to try to narrow the racial gap in achievement, instead maybe we should simply be trying to improve the performance of all children and not worry about the gap ?
I realize that white privilege is an unpleasant subject to discuss, in particular for White Nationalists like yourself. Even if different races have different average IQs why talk about it? Well, your position is predicated on totally ignoring historical persecution against minorities. As things stand, both in the US, and in every other nation in the Anglosphere ( the UK, Australia, Canda, etc.) non-Whites, and in particular Black Africans and Hispanics have been subjected to systematic discrimination and restriction in opportunity. Only within the last fifty years has civil rights for minorities been edified into law, and minorities still face a constant battle to achieve anything that even resembles a level socioeconomic and educational playing field. Could it be that Black Africans do poorly in school, for example, because they face exorbitant racially correlated prenatal stress, chilling effects from implicit racism, and additional socioeconomic challenges at home? If that's true, it may make sense to try to narrow the racial gap in achievement, when in America they faced more than 200 years of enslavement, lynching, and systematic discrimination.
So, what's the evidence for racial differences in intelligence ? No...actually, that's the wrong question. The right question is why would anyone think that Blacks and Whites, for example, have the same average level of intelligence ? There are certainly smart Blacks and stupid Whites, but why would anyone think that people who live in the Congo are just as smart as people who live in Sweden?
As you now acknowledge by admitting the existence of smart Blacks and stupid Whites -- the first self-aware comment I've heard from you this whole time -- variations within populations exceed variations between populations. Systematically offering or withholding opportunities on the basis of a biologically arbitrary distinction (https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... sts-argue/ also see Harvard geneticist David Reich's book), or resistance to initiatives to level the playing field, would potentially methodically limit the achievement of high potential individuals and place undue emphasis on average values when the broad spread trumps the deviation between populations. As a society, creating policies reflective of differences between populations would effectively lead to a much more inefficient distribution of resources than a commitment to equal opportunity across the board.

The difference in educational infrastructure in Sweden and the Congo precludes the opportunity for a true comparison of intelligence. Besides the Congo, Sweden outperforms the UK in every educational category. Do you feel it is fair to say that Swedish people are on average more intelligent than stupid Brits? South Korea has the highest result. Would you agree that because whites are on average less intelligent than Asians, it is morally correct to discriminate against whites and devote to Asians more resources?
[/quote]
Before Sub-Saharan Black Africans had contact with outsiders, no African society had invented the wheel, no Blacks had a written language or a calendar, no Blacks had built a two-storey building or mechanical device or had domesticated ant beast of burden. All this suggests a low average level of intelligence. Black Africa has been in contact with the outside world for 100s of years, but it is still where you find the countries with the most poverty, the shortest life expectancies and the lowest levels of economic development. "Multi-culti", egalitarian forum intellectuals, like the erudite Dr Fool, (and our beloved "Aristotatlan" Moderator, Miss Greta /"Funky-G") will tell you that Africa is poor because it was colonised and exploited by wicked, White Supremacist Europeans ( for example,the Belgians in the Congo, the British in Zululand and so on), but it's not so. The most extensively colonised parts such as South Africa, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are now the most advanced parts of Africa. Ethiopia and Liberia, which were never colonised are among the poorest places in Africa. Moreover, do you know which country in the Western hemisphere was the first to become independent after the US freed itself from Britain? It was Haiti; Haiti which has an almost entirely African population has been independent for almost 200 years, but it has a profile of poverty, disease, corruption and underdevelopment that make it a perfect match for Black Africa. Its history is very different from that of African countries and it is 4000 miles away across an ocean, but African people have brought a typically African society to the "New World."
There's a couple confounding variables I can think of off the top of my head that you don't even consider before jumping to racial conclusions. For example, modern research reveals that there is an inverse correlation between intellectual performance and hot weather. https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -straight/ Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the hottest climates in the world. Another confounding non-racial explanation is the primarily land-locked nature of Sub-Saharan Africa. In conjunction with the hot climate, this makes it extremely difficult to establish trade routes. Not to mention the infectious disease issue previously mentioned. Let's go back and test the average IQ of Europeans during the Black Plague for comparison, shall we?

The discussion of the wheel seems like an entirely arbitrary occurrence that, among other things, discounts the telescopic nature of evolution. Furthermore, due to the plentiful nature of wild game and berries, African hunter gatherers, like Native Americans, experienced little incentive for conflict or the development of agricultural methods that would lead to wide adoption of such technology. Rapid technological development is correlated with organized military conflict, so it's not a wonder that militaristic Eurasian populations eventually outpaced with no incentive for conflict based on resource scarcity. It's not a surprise that Sub-Saharan Africa had little use for the wheel due to their lack of animal domesticates -- I'd like to see you try to tame a zebra or Cape buffalo to pull a cart with wheels and axles.

South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria are all coastal countries with a long and regular history of established trade routes and relatively lower rates of political turmoil and corruption, at least considering post-Apartheid history. Ethiopia has a history of famine and civil war in the 90's, but has recovered and actually Ethiopia is currently listed as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Liberia is recovering from a 14-year civil war where child soldiers were forced to enlist, so it's not exactly a surprise that their economy is still not doing so hot. What a strange and ignorant set of cherry-picked data.

Haiti has been a systematic target of foreign interference -- more than 18 regime changes in the last century, most recently the CIA's involvement in deposing the democratically elected president to preserve American interests in the region. Economic exploitation by the IMF's predatory lending practices did not miss Haiti -- the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a good introduction to that world. Not to mention Haiti has been victim of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history -- 300000 Haitians died in the earthquake in 2010, and thousands more from the subsequent infrastructure issues.

It's understandable to be ignorant about the exploitative nature of our world and the deep suffering it has caused in the last few centuries, but trying to shoehorn complex historical phenomena into your flimsy, ignorant, racially-motivated logical construction is something you ought to seriously be ashamed of. I'd expect anyone reading this thread is vicariously ashamed for you, anyway.
Wherever Blacks live outside of Africa but among people of other races, they show the same patterns of generally less successful behaviour. This is true of Canada and Britain, for example, which never had a history of slavery or Jim Crow. Does this mean that White people brutally mistreat Black people all over the world wherever they go, or it it the case that Blacks and Whites simply have different levels of ability ? In the US there are about 16,000 different school Districts and there isn't ONE in which Black students perform at the same level as Whites. Is every one of those 16,000 school Districts run by racists trying to keep Black people down, or, are there simply racial differences in intelligence ?
Britain, Canada, and Australia all participated in the slave trade and systematic exploitation of blacks. The suggestion that Britain and Canada have no slave trade is a too easy demonstration of your ignorance, are you serious? For over 200 years, slavery was the dominant condition of life for blacks in Canada and Britain until slavery was outlawed in Britain in 1807 and Canada in 1833. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Canada
[/quote]
Blacks and Whites separated from their last common ancestor at least 60,000 years ago. Since that time, the two groups have evolved the dramatically different physical appearances that we see between today's Europeans and Africans. The brain is an organ just like other organs. What are the chances that during the time it took for the rest of their body to become so different that the brain remained exactly the same ? As Professor Geoffrey Cockran and Henry Harpending explain in their book, "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion" (quote)... "The biological equality of human races is about as likely as a fistful of silver dollars all landing on edge when dropped." In other words, it's impossible.

Therefore, just on the basis of what we can see around us and what we know of history, there is no reason at all to think on average that people of different races have the same intelligence. But what does the science say about this ? Ever since large-scale IQ testing began at the time of the First World War, Whites have achieved higher scores than Blacks. The 15 point difference in averages: around 100 points for Whites and 85 points for American Blacks have not changed for nearly 100 years. To date here have been literally hundreds of studies and meta-studies and they all give the same results. Critics of IQ testing claim that (A): it doesn't test intelligence and (B): testing is biased against Blacks. Such critics are, however, completely outside the mainstream of of academic consensus on the subject, which is that IQ test scores reliably predict the ability to do well at things that take brains: success in school; making money and learning complicated skills, etc. Nor is their any cultural bias against Blacks; there are now IQ tests that are completely independent of culture. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of the most reliable tests of intelligence available today and doesn't even use language. People are scored on how well they find patterns, you can even use gestures to explain how the test works and give it to people who don't speak English. Another simple test of intelligence that could hardly be biased is the reverse digit span test. If I ask you to repeat back to me the numbers : 8, 4, 6, 7 2, 5 you can probably do it easily, if I keep adding to the number of digits though , at some point you probably wont be able to remember them all. This is a memory test and Blacks and Whites do equally well. If, however, I recite the digits : 8,4, 7,3,5,6,2 and ask you to repeat them back to me in reverse order, that's a lot harder, that's an intelligence test, and White do significantly better on it than Blacks. How could such a test be biased ? Moreover, those people ( like "Funky-G") who persistently complain about bias never explain why North East ASians do better than Whites on IQ tests like Raven' Progressive Matrices and the reverse digit span tests ? Would they argue are that the tests are biased in favour of Asians, or would they accept the obvious explanation, that Asian are, on average more intelligent than Whites. It is, of course, their higher average IQ that explains why Asians get better grades than Whites in school, get into better colleges and have a higher per capita income than Whites.
What's the deal with low to average IQ individuals obsessing over the value of the metric, anyway? I see this all the time. First of all, there's a large body of recent scientific literature indicating that there's no clear distinction between innate and acquired traits. This is demonstrated by the fact that IQ can be altered by interventions, see https://www.nber.org/papers/w21766 for a study of early childhood intervention. IQ regardless of heritability is modifiable, and not a strict intrinsic property -- even with fadeout effects later in life, the effect on educational attainment from early childhood persist into adulthood. Furthermore, the correlation between academic and job performance is not strict, either. There is an easy case that IQ tests are fundamentally flawed and using them alone to measure intelligence is a fallacy. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 25911.html

The digit span test is for working memory, which is distinguished from g-factor, and the interaction between working memory and IQ is not well understood. Working memory is highly susceptible to pressures of stress and differences in socioeconomic environment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263265/ Though I'll take note that any of your policy suggestions favoring whites over blacks by your logic should also favor Asians over whites. If you continue to try to make any future claims of racial superiority based on intelligence, I'll be sure to remind you to prepare yourself for kowtowing to your future East Asian overlords.
It may seem harsh to say so, but people of different races get different scores on IQ tests because they do not have the same average intelligence. Anyone who studies the evidence with an open mind will see this. Some people ( like the learned Dr Fool) argue that that the reasons for this are "environmental", that Blacks live in disadvantaged circumstances that depress their IQ. Environment does have some effect on IQ, especially on children, but that effect is pretty much eliminated once people have grown up.
I'm not sure what experience someone like you has about studying evidence with an open mind, seeing how you just cherry-pick evidence to support a long-time predetermined and needlessly provocative conclusion.

Regardless of IQ fadeout effects, work by the Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman has demonstrated that the best early childhood interventions have a benefit-cost ratio of somewhere between 3:1 and 9:1 by virtue of their effect on such things as lifelong earnings, health costs, crime, and dependence on welfare.
The real test would be to see what would happen to the IQ of Blacks if they were raised in a White environment. As it happens, two scientists: Sandra Scarr and Richard Wienberg decided to to study this precise question. They found Black children who had been adopted as babies by upper middle-class Whites and they tested their IQs at various ages. When the children were small they had IQs that were as high as White children, but by the time they were 17 or 18 their IQs had dropped to just 2 or 3 points above the average Black score. Maybe having spent all that time in White families did raise their IQs a little, but it certainly did not eliminate the 15 point Black-White difference.
Scarr and Wienberg in their own words: "Results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement, " and "We think that it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based. The true causes of racial-group differences in IQ, or in any other characteristic, are likely to be too complex to be captured by locating them on a single hereditarianism-environmentalism dimension."

Confounding factors that you need to account for include pre and post-natal factors in the style of Sapolski's findings, the depressive effects of racial discrimination, and most egregiously the Flynn effect again, which a 2016 paper by Drew Thomas concludes: Once corrected for attrition in the low IQ white adoptees, once corrected for the Flynn effect since none of the Asian adoptee studies had a white control sample, mixed and white adoptees score the same, black adoptees score a little lower with a gap of 2.5pt, which can be explained by their pre-adoption characteristics. See his paper, Racial IQ Differences among Transracial Adoptees: Fact or Artifact? https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1
There is something else that suggests environment does not count for that much. In 2009, Black students from families that had an income of more than $160,000 per annum got lower SAT scores than Whites from families with incomes of less than $ 20,000. That is a pretty stunning refutation of the idea that a deprived environment is what explains low Black IQ and poor academic performance.
One of the most pernicious effects of racial discrimination is the effect it can have on motivation, self-esteem, and stress coping mechanisms. Those who feel like they are in a system rigged against them face both internal and external barriers to achievement. Significant racial and class inequalities much earlier in life explain persistent obstacles to upward mobility and opportunity. The extensive racial gaps in academic achievement and college preparation across high school seniors are symptomatic of those deeper drivers of inequality.

There are, as well, strictly biological data that are pretty hard to argue with. In 2005, "Science" magazine published a report by a geneticist, Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago in which he announced the discovery of gene variants associated with brain growth. Professor Lahn suggested that these variants, which appeared relatively recently in humans, could have played a direct role in the development of human civilisation. The University of Chicago even used Professor Lahn's research to apply for a patent for a DNA-based intelligence test. It turned out however, that these gene variants are common in Europeans but rare in Africans. Pressure began to build on Professor Lahn and he stopped his research (quote)... "It's getting too controversial" he said, and he explained that he was beginning to think that some knowledge just isn't worth having. The University dropped its patent application for an IQ test based on DNA.
You know why Lahn chose to stop his research? Because racists like you co-opt their work to support claims of racial superiority. David Reich's position is of interest: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opin ... -race.html and I hope you understand that when he talk about racist misuse of genetic data he is talking very specifically about White Nationalists like you. Try having some self-awareness.
One scientist who never backed down was Phillipe Rushton of the University of West Ontario. He pointed out that there is a well-known correlation between brain size and intelligence. In general, the bigger your brain, the smarter you are, and indeed Professor Rushton showed, using MRI and CAT scan neuro-imaging studies that Asians and Europeans have considerably larger brains than Africans and Australian aborigines. Chinese people, for example, have 200 cc more of brains than Kenyans - that's nearly a cup, that's a lot of brain tissue, and brain size is known to have a solid correlation of almost 0.5 with intelligence.
Again, Rushton is highly controversial, debunked once in a televised debate with geneticist David Suzuki, and more comprehensively by Robert Graves's testing of Rushton's r/K selection theory with Drosophilia flies:

"Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to explain differences among racial groups has been widely criticised. One of his many critics is the evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, who has done extensive testing of the r/K selection theory with species of Drosophila flies. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general. Graves also says that Rushton misrepresented the sources for the biological data he gathered in support of his hypothesis, and that much of his social science data was collected by dubious means. Other scholars have argued against Rushton's hypothesis on the basis that the concept of race is not supported by genetic evidence about the diversity of human populations, and that his research was based on folk taxonomies. A number of later studies by Rushton and other researchers have argued that there is empirical support for the theory, though these studies have been criticized."

In sum, there is simply no room for doubt that there are substantial racial differences in average intelligence, and the evidence we have to to date is very strong that there is a biological basis to these differences. In a paper by Professor Linda Godfordsen of the University of Delaware, robust evidence was presented of racial differences in intelligence confirming that Blacks are 4x more likely than Whites to have IQs of less than 75 and Hispanics are 3x more likely. At the same time Whites were twice as likely as Asians to have IQs that low. Whites, she discovered are 30x more likely than Blacks to have an IQ over 125 and 5x more likely than Hispanics. Professor Godfordson cited examples of professions that generally require an IQ of 125 like : lawyer, chemist and Executive, and pointed out that on a per capita basis we would expect to see 30x as many Whites as Blacks with enough intelligence for career of this kind and it is simply unrealistic to demand that there be proportionately as many Whites as Blacks in these professions and in others that require high intelligence. The fact is that equal outcomes in life are just not possible when different groups have different abilities.
Science is making steady progress all the time and pretty soon , given the current rate that the relevant biogenetic research is proceeding, we will find the genes for intelligence. And you can bet the farm it will be found that these genes are not distributed equally in all racial groups. The eventual acceptance of the truth will be a very good thing. Society today is constantly telling Blacks and Hispanics that they are just as smart as White people and that the only reason they fail in school and don't make as much money is because of White oppression. This, of course, is the best possible way to teach Blacks and Hispanics to hate White people. Wouldn't you hate a group of people if you were always being told that group is keeping you down?
I notice you don't mention the fact that by the same logic you would expect to see 20x more Asians than Whites in an occupation. Like a broken record I could reiterate the fallacy of a direct correlation of IQ with job performance, ignoring the fact that educational attainment is not constrained by IQ and has a higher correlation with certain personality traits than IQ. There is a reason why no job makes you take an IQ test before -- it tells you nothing about whether the person can acquire and apply the specialized knowledge to get the job done.

Gottfredson is supported by the Pioneer fund and has a political agenda, not to mention she is generally considered to be in the same camp of pseudoscientific race realists as Jensen and Wade. Former APA president Diane Halpern via Skeptic magazine has reasonable coverage: https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/sk ... ped-curve/

You actually might be onto something in terms of the reification of oppression by Whites. I suppose a broken clock can be right two times a day, although once again we are back to ignoring the variations within populations being much more significant than variations between populations -- like the Murray quote in my previous post, policy conversations ought to happen at the individual level, and discussion of average IQ totally ignores the entire right half of the bell curve and the correct interpretation of differences between populations is, "So what?". If we could find the political will to improve the socioeconomic challenges, implement effective interventions, and figure out how to get cops to stop shooting innocent members of their race, we might be able to make a dent in the problem.
I conclusion, America will be a far better and more just society if it is one built on truth rather than ignorance, and the sooner Americans accept the truth about race and IQ the better. Don't you agree, Dr Fool !
In conclusion, you have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm glad that this community ostracizes you and considers you a joke. If it weren't for people like you, sane conversations about cognitive variations across varying ancestral backgrounds could exist without calls for tribalism and systematic discrimination. Can we get a moderator to rename this topic, "Highly controversial assertions about race and why they don't matter"? When can I expect your followup work on eugenics?
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Re: The Truth about Race in America Today and Why it Matters

Post by Burning ghost »

Ktz -

You cannot “rename” topics sadly. The owner might be able to though?

I think it matters a great deal. The base problem being the conflation of the biological “race” and sociological “race.” It would be better imo to call it “ethnicity,” but givne that most governments actually refer to this as “race” in documents it’s just something we have to keep annoucing to make sure the extremists don’t get carried away on false assumptions.

Societywould be better if people were to accept their mind-bogglingly fixatedness in assuming their ignorance is only a small part of what they believe they know. We’re all easily duped in one way or another and so a humble and probing self-analysis is often too subtle. We’re only human I guess ;)

Eugenics is an interesting topic too. The major problem we have today is due to the events of last century where these things started out as genuine studies of interest often with the intent to better society. As with everything misuse causes problems and in this particular area people are quite offended when they believe they are being judged as a “part” of something rather than as a valued individual.

Work ethnic differences have helped treat diseases and such. It is through those kinds of studies that those interested in intelligence and social organisation have plundered the data and used it to teh best of their ability to present ideas about how to improve lives or simply out of curiosity about this or that particular aspect of human beings.

The religious zealots get offended by being referred to like a “machine” (at least in their mind) and the different, and often arbitrary, groups of indivduals get offended by being lumped together - yet some look to go on the defensive by indentifying as this or that group.

It is bloody fascinating! :D
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