On the contrary, it is quite possible that there could be evidence that would convince me of either of those things. It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics. If it could somehow be demonstrated that Avogadro’s number were 300 orders of magnitude too tiny, and that molecules were a googol times smaller than we thought, and could explain why our earlier experiments had led us to our original estimates of Avogadro’s number and molecular sizes, then that would tend make the effectiveness of homeopathy (more) plausible.
My estimate of the probability of homeopathy working and the current laws of physics being very different would have to be of similar order to my estimate of the probability of the current laws of physics being correct.
And how do you come up with your probability estimates in a situation like this? Do you rely on your general knowledge and common sense? Do you have some algorithm you follow?
No, I don’t have a strict algorithm I follow in situations like this. What I actually do is probably more like this:
do some initial reading to get an idea of the basic plausibility of the hypothesis based on my background knowledge
let the hypothesis bounce around my mind for a while
try to spell out to myself the resulting gut feeling for the hypothesis’ probability
check that rough estimate for any gaping flaws
if that rough estimate is really low, reject the hypothesis as Too Unlikely To Debate for the time being (remember that ‘super careful’ warning I made a few posts up? This is where it applies)
if the rough estimate is instead very high, accept the hypothesis as Too Likely To Debate for the time being
if the probability estimate is more middling, and the hypothesis’ truthiness is important to me, gather more data and try to hone my hunch for the hypothesis’ probability
Fine, and using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that the difference in cognitive performance between blacks and whites results in large part from genetic differences.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
...using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that...
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”. Show, don’t tell.
In the instance, the blog where you said you were going to publish “evidence and arguments” in support of the above view has, to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time. Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”.
Perhaps, but I set forth the basis of my reasoning in a blog post elsewhere. So I did more than simply assert a conclusion.
Since this branch of the discussion has fallen below the comment threshhold, I am happy to discuss things here.
In any event, would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time
If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
If you felt my answers to your questions were unsatisfactory, it would have been more helpful to have made that more explicit at the time, instead of working through your long-winded Socratic dialogue and taking an unsubstantiated potshot at me.
Me: Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
You: Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence
Me: :shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,” but you chose an interpretation which let you avoid the question. i.e. you were evasive.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,”
Indeed, and that context happens to include this question preceding the first one you quoted there:
And do you agree that there exists weak evidence for the existence of God?
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it. It was completely obvious what I meant.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it.
You seem to be writing as if acknowledging the existence of evidence and rejecting evidence are mutually exclusive. Perhaps that is how you understand acknowledging that evidence exists v. rejecting evidence, but that’s a new understanding to me.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
A second thing. It’s plain to me that at this point this argument is capable of going around in circles forever (if it hasn’t gone into a full-on death spiral already), and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
But according to you, I implied that rejecting evidence of God excludes the possibility of acknowledging the existence of that evidence.
However I made no such implication.
and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
That’s fine . . . I don’t engage with people who strawman me.
I’m not. This style of argumentation is ineffective and wasteful of people’s time, and I’m unhappy, bordering on angry, that it has gone on that long. I prefer to let this emotion find a productive outlet, namely a top-level post to put a name to the pattern I prefer, so as to encourage more useful discussions in future.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion
Would you like to see some evidence? I’m happy to provide it.
Blame. Irrelevant to truth-seeking.
If blame is irrelevant to truth-seeking, then why are you accusing me (and not cupholder) of “wasting time and attention”?
Anyway, please answer my questions:
(1) Would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
(2) If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
If you actually have evidence, simply lay it out as soon as it might be relevant.
I disagree with this. It takes time and energy to gather evidence. I don’t care to spend my time and energy digging up evidence unless somebody seriously throws down the gauntlet. Just stating “Claim. Unsupported by evidence” -- without indicating an interest in engaging—is not enough for me. Besides, it would have been easy enough for the poster to come back and say “yes, show me a quote please.”
I would say that you are presenting what’s known as a “false dilemma,” i.e. your statement assumes that there are only two possibilities: either (1) I have the evidence in which case it costs me nothing to present it; or (2) I don’t in which case it is dishonest for me to offer to present evidence.
Of course there is another possibility, which is that I am reasonably confident I can present the evidence, but it will take me time and energy to gather and present it.
For example, suppose I bought a toaster a month ago; it breaks; I call up the store to get it fixed; and the store manager says “We can’t help you since you aren’t the original purchaser.” Before I spend 20 minutes finding the credit card receipt, I’m going to ask the guy “Would you like to see proof that I bought the toaster?”
If you don’t yet have evidence, it’s not dishonest to offer to find and present it, but it is dishonest to claim that you already have it, since by making that claim you’re claiming something that’s not true—namely that you have already confirmed that the evidence exists.
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
For example, in the toaster scenario, is it dishonest to offer to produce proof that you bought the toaster? (Assume for the sake of argument that you save all of your receipts religiously and you are quite confident that you can produce the receipt if you are willing to take 20 minutes to rummage through your old receipts.)
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes.
If I know that someone has a certain amount of evidence for a certain thing, then seeing that evidence myself doesn’t tell me much—knowing that the evidence exists is almost as good as gathering it myself. (This is what makes scientific studies work, so that people don’t have to test every theory by themselves.) But knowing that someone thinks that a certain amount of evidence exists for a certain thing is much weaker, and actually seeing the evidence in this case tells me much more, because it’s not particularly unusual for people to be wrong about this kind of thing, even when they claim to be certain. (Ironically, while I remember seeing a post on here that mentioned that when people were asked to give several 90%-likely predictions most of them managed to do no better than 30% correct, I can’t find it, so, case in point, I guess.)
toaster scenario
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations.
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes
I don’t understand what you mean by “already have it.” If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it? If the evidence is stored my hard drive, do I “have” it? If the evidence is on a web site which is publicly accessible, do I “have” it?
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations
It sounds like your answer to my question is “no,” i.e. it would not be dishonest to offer to produce a receipt but that the example I described is extremely rare and non-representative. Do I understand you correctly?
If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it?
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Before you go attacking my motives, maybe it would make sense to you to explain why you took us into meta-debate territory. You could have easily said something like this:
Brazil84, I think you are unreasonably standing on ceremony by offering to produce evidence rather than just doing it. However, rather than debate over whether that was appropriate or not, please just produce the evidence you offered to produce.
And yet you chose not to, instead launching a meta debate (actually a meta-meta debate). If anyone’s motives are suspect, it’s yours.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
As far as race and IQ goes, I laid out my case on my blog post. You are free read it carefully and then come back if you want evidence or other support for any aspect of it.
I have read the post in question. The heart of your argument seems to be
In other words, you see it pretty much everywhere in the United States and the rest of the world; further, various attempts to eliminate this gap have failed. This is exactly what one would expect to happen if the difference were largely genetic in origin.
Could you please provide some citations, with actual numbers, for “pretty much everywhere” and “various attempts,” including at least one study more recent than… let’s say 1987?
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
“Various attempts have failed” taken literally means almost nothing; I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention.
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Of course there is variance in cognitive abilities (as well as differences in the size of the black/white gap) along geographical, political, and economic lines. And I am not claiming otherwise.
I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention
Well are you seriously skeptical that the gap has never been substantially eliminated?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
And I am not claiming otherwise.
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be. For example, how much of the gap is due to differing economic opportunities, and corresponding issues of early childhood nutrition and education, resulting from discriminatory policies that were still legally enforced as of less than fifty years ago?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
Well maybe so, but the question is what exactly you are seriously skeptical of. It sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap has never been substantially eliminated. Do I understand you correctly?
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be.
I address that in my blog post. And it sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap exists pretty much everywhere, you just dispute that it’s the same everywhere and you assert that other factors besides race have a general impact on cognitive abilities. Did I understand you correctly?
I disagree with you on points of fact (namely the causal mechanism behind a difference in intelligence between two subgroups of H. sapiens) about which you claim to have as-yet-unrevealed evidence. I will reply to you no further until you provide that evidence, preferably in the form of a peer-reviewed study published more recently than 1987 Q 4 conclusively supporting your hypothesis.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ‘obviousness,’ I will take that as a sign of bad faith on your part, an attempt to manipulate me into saying something embarrassing.
:shrug: All I did was ask you simple questions so that I could understand exactly what it is you claim to be skeptical of.
I’m not going to waste time digging up citations for things which you don’t seriously dispute.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ’obviousness,
You are the one who is dodging questions.
I asked you two simple, reasonable yes or no questions in good faith so that I could understand your position. You ignored both of them.
Debating with me is not about playing “hide the ball” Before I gather evidence, I want to know exactly where we agree and disagree. You refuse to tell me. So be it.
ETA: By the way, it’s possible to be reasonably confident of various generalizations about human groups even without formal, peer-reviewed studies. I think this is pretty obvious, but I can give examples if anyone wants.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly. Furthermore, I object to your use of the word “Lol” in this context.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly.
I see you cannot resist meta-debate.
Anyway, I would say it depends on how much effort and care those readers put into understanding. To any reasonable person, it was clear what I was referring to.
If you have already gathered the necessary evidence, present it without this teasing preamble; if not, admit your ignorance and lay out the probable search costs.
I think that when I asked “would you like to see some evidence,” the reasonable interpretation is that I can gather and present the evidence with a small but non-zero amount of effort.
However, if you did not understand my comment that way, that’s what I meant.
And again, it would have been easy enough for the other poster to say “Yes, I am skeptical of your claim and would like to see the evidence.” Since he didn’t do it, I infer that he doesn’t want to invest any further energy in the interaction. Which is fine, but if he doesn’t want to invest further energy, I don’t want to either.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
No, you were aggressive and rude in the discussion. You have demanded a detailed answer while your questions weren’t clear, and in repeated queries you didn’t even try to explain what sort of answer you want. That all only to allow yourself to reply “well, I use the same standards”.
Your debating style resembles more an interrogation than a friendly discussion, and this I consider rude, but it may be only my personal feeling.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ. This is also on my list of rude behaviour. I don’t like people asking questions in order to show that the opponent can’t answer appropriately.
If I ask a question and am not satisfied with the answer, the default is to suppose that the other person didn’t understood properly the question and my job is to explain it, or possibly give some motivation for it. Repeating the same question with only minimal alterations I consider aggresive. Want a quote?
But by what standard do you reject such evidence? 09:04:15AM
By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God? 12:21:53PM
And by what standard would you decide whether the evidence is sufficiently strong? 04:21:39PM
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here. Cupholder has given two answers
Namely, can I fit the idea of God existing/homeopathy working/alien abduction into my broader understanding of the world, or would it require overturning practically my whole understanding of how reality works?
It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics.
which I find quite appropriate given your question. If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear. You have basically asked “what’s your epistemology”, itself a fine question, but full answer could fill a book. So either you wanted some specific answer, and the question was not clear—you should have asked more specifically. Or you didn’t want a specific answer, and since I don’t think you expected cupholder to explain his rationality in full detail, I must conclude that the question was merely rhetorical, which brings me back to rudeness.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ.
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear.
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
Agreed, but I don’t understand the relevance.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind, i.e. what type of answer you have expected?
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
It is too general to be answered in a concise comment. Therefore, when replying one has to either choose one particular aspect or be very vague.
As I recall, that’s one of the issues which was under discussion.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind,
I claim that the two questions I quoted myself asking are essentially the same question:
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right? If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
Which question are you talking about?
The question by what standard you reject the evidence for the existence of God?
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right?
Pretty much yes.
If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
I disagree, but at a minimum, it was hardly unreasonable for me to rephrase the question.
the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies
On the contrary; many people consider the issue settled because all major scientific debates in history, bar none, have ended up weighing against the notion of a personal God who takes an interest in and intervenes in human affairs.
(It is, rather, the persistence of the myth, and its influence on public affairs, that seems to demand scientific scrutiny!)
Yes. They are a) necessary and b) already done. (The “question” I have in mind is a specific one, that of a personal God who, etc. as stated above.)
Prior to, say, the invention of writing, it would perhaps have been legitimate to consider the existence of a personal God (or gods) an open question, susceptible of being settled by investigation. In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
Discovering this hypothesis makes reading this thread worthwhile. I’m shocked I hadn’t heard of it before. Maybe the coolest, most bizarre yet plausible idea I have heard in the last two years. Just hearing it (not even believing it) modifies my worldview. Have you or anyone else read the book? Recommended?
I’ve read the book, which was mentioned favorably in Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and forms part of the backstory to Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Curiosity compelled me to look further.
My level of understanding of the book’s thesis is mostly level-0, i.e. there is a “bicamerality” password but I’d have to reread the book to reacquaint myself with its precise predictions, and I’d be hard pressed to reconstruct the theory myself.
I do have a few pieces of understanding which seem level-2-ish; for instance, the hypothesis accounts for the feeling that a lot of my thinking is internal soliloquy. Also, the idea that consciousness, like love, could in large part be a “memetic” and collective construct (I use the term “meme” evocatively rather than rigorously) somehow appeals to me.
I’d recommend you read it if only for the pleasure of having one more person to discuss it with. I may have to reread it in that case.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically, but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Though, actually, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is probably a better starting point, for being a gloss on Darwin.
You should know, before you ask your next pseudo-Socratic question: given that you seem intent on sticking to that style of “argumentation”, I’m going to take your advice and not engage you anymore.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically,
Ok, then how about an early one then.
but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
So before the 19th century a rationalist could not reasonably conclude that the atheistic position is correct?
Do you really take this to be a reasonable interpretation / inference based on what Morendil said?
Absolutely. The other poster claimed, in essence, that scientific studies are necessary to reach the atheistic conclusion. The implication is that before such studies were done, one could not reach that conclusion.
To be honest, before Darwin, the Argument from Design was a pretty good reason to be a theist. (And I got this from the aforementioned Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.)
Yes, that’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Deism ridiculous. Darwin was fortunate enough to find a “designer” that can exist without requiring a designer of its own, basically settling the question.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Further**, any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped by opposing evidence: evil, scientific explanations for nearly every phenomena previously attributed to God, evidence human brains are innately susceptible to believing in gods absent good evidence (and subsequent altering of the God hypothesis to account for the new evidence).
In contrast the hypothesis that the race iq gap is entirely or close to entirely environmental has a prior around .5 (lots of human differences are explained by environmental factors and lots are explained by genetics). What we have to update on consists of a handful of studies, several of which contradict each other and none of which have come close to controlling the relevant factors. We have good evidence the gap has shrunk since the Civil Rights movement, the taboo of overt racism and beneficial developments in African American social and economic position. Then there is some evidence the gap shrinks further when black children are raised by white families. There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone. Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved. Those who believe there is a genetic component will say that political correctness and egalitarianism mean that mainstream science would ignore evidence in favor of their position. Those who do not believe there is a genetic component will say that those who do are just trying to justify their racism. On balance, I update slightly in favor of the environmental hypothesis but there is enough uncertainty that the question needs more studying if we decide we care about it (I’m not sure we should).
The two cases aren’t even roughly comparable.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to. Persisting in arguing without presenting such evidence is trollish and honestly, probably suggests to some that you don’t share their commitment to egalitarianism.
There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone.
That’s not true at all. There is overwhelming evidence that performance on IQ tests is hugely correlated with “race”, which basically implies skin tone. Blacks, as a group, score 10-15 points below whites (almost a standard deviation), and (some) Asians and Jews are about half a deviation above whites.
The controversy is not whether there is correlation. The controversy is over the casual explanation. How much of this observed difference is due to genetics, how much due to environment, and how much due to the structure of standard IQ tests?
Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved.
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
There is clearly a genetic component to individual IQ scores.
This varies based on wealth. Among poor/impoverished peoples, variance in IQ scores is something like 60-90% due to environmental factors (like nutrition). Among wealthy peoples, 60-70% seems to be genetic.
The usual analogy is the height of growing corn. In nutrient-poor dirt, corn height is mostly a function of how much fertilizer/water/sun the plants get. But in well-tended farms, corn stalk height is almost completely a function of inherited genetics.
When I say there is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone I’m summarizing the findings of the skin tone studies cited in the Nisbett article that was heavily discussed in this conversation. The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent). I think this was obvious at the time from the context of the paragraph: I’m clearly summarizing findings not making general conclusions (until the end). We had been going back and forth on these issues for a while so by that point I was probably using more shorthand than usual. It may not be obvious that is what I was doing a month after the fact.
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
Yes, I’m pretty sure the context is more that sufficient to establish that this is what I was talking about. The entire discussion was about origin of the black-white IQ gap.
The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent).
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
the correlation between lightness of skin and IQ, averaged over a large number of studies reviewed by Shuey (1966), is in the vicinity of .10.
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic.
Yeah, I don’t know how to update on meta analyses anymore. I do know though that Ruston and Jensen cite it uncritically (albeit deceptively, they just acknowledge the low correlation and move on) which may be evidence that Shuey (who did the meta analysis) is being honest.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966! I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966!
Wow. Just how well did they correct for all external factors? I would have expected a difference in measured IQ to appear based purely on socio-economic disadvantages that are far lesser now.
I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
I’m not sure how the political bias / scientific integrity ratio then compares to now. I do suppose that some parties would be particularly interested in finding that result at that time.
Not being an American I have been exposed to different kinds of discrimination stories, both historic and current. I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ. Prior to European settlement the people in Australia were isolated for tens of thousands of years, leaving skin tone a relatively poor indicator of genetic kinship. That is a lot of time for selection to work on both IQ and pigmentation.
I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ.
As you point out, it isn’t safe to assume that skin tone reflects ancestry in every case. I think the race scientists implicitly reason that it’s OK to treat skin tone as an ancestry indicator among US blacks because of the relatively recent injection of African ancestry into the US gene pool, so skin tone’s association with African ancestry hasn’t been wholly eliminated/confounded yet. The same obviously wouldn’t apply to indigenous Australians.
Looked deeper. 1966 is the 2nd edition. The first was 1958. The book both Nisbett and Rushton are citing is titled “The Testing of Negro Intelligence”. From what little I can find Shuey was actually something of an early Rushton, arguing that a persistent test score gap since 1910 suggested innate intelligence differences between races. If anyone can find and electronic copy of the book let me know.
You’ll be lucky to find a copy. The book probably falls into that mid-century obscurity zone, old enough to be forgotten but not old enough to be public domain.
If it helps, the 1975 book Race Differences in Intelligence takes Shuey’s results on skin color and IQ and adapts 5 of the studies she found into a table. Looking at the table, the studies are quite a mish-mash. Three report correlation coefficients, and the other two instead report average IQ for different categories of mixed ancestry people (‘Light skin’ v. ‘Dark skin’, and ‘Strong evidence of white’ v. ‘Intermediate’ v. ‘Dominantly Negroid’). The studies date from 1926 to 1947, and the 1947 study’s an unpublished dissertation. Each study used a different IQ test. I can only imagine there’s even more variation among Shuey’s full collection of studies.
Not really a reply to you. I just found this and needed to put it somewhere. Anyone who has been following this discussion will be interested. It’s an interesting way of posing the question.
Now plot the genome of each human as a point on our lattice. Not surprisingly, there are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.) Of course, we can get into endless arguments about how we define European or Asian, and of course there is substructure within the clusters, but it is rather obvious that there are identifiable groupings, and as the Risch study shows, they correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.
...
We see that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if there is complete allele overlap between two groups—as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. But it is these distributions that are measured by the metric we defined earlier. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.
...
This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:
Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.
Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.
Hsu’s blog post makes two claims about race. The first argument is that ‘Hypothesis 2’ could be correct—i.e., that there could be genetically driven differences in exciting traits like IQ between races (or ‘groups,’ but I think we all know which ‘groups’ we’re really interested in). I agree with this argument.
I completely disagree with the second claim, which is that genetic clustering studies constitute ‘the scientific basis for race.’ It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
For example, if you sample some whites, sample some blacks, and expect those two categories to automatically pop out of your analysis, you might be surprised. Here’s a recent paper that estimated the European ancestry in African-Americans by analyzing genotypes from samples of US whites, US blacks, and several subgroups of Africans. Running PCA on all of the genotype data, and plotting the first two principal components of the subjects’ genotypes in each sample gave these clusters:
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
The researchers could no doubt have come up with an alternative rotation of the axes that would’ve projected all of the African samples on top of each other, and the European sample far away from them. But what would justify the alternative projection over the original one?
Maybe my own personal concept of ‘race’ emphasizes differences among sub-Saharan Africans, instead of continental differences. Then I might do a PCA on a set of sub-Saharan African genotypes, find a couple of principal components that best separate out the sub-Saharan African subgroups, and only then plot the north Africans and non-Africans along with the sub-Saharans.
Here are a few plots from a study that did just that. Notice now that the most widely separated clusters are three, or perhaps four, sub-Saharan African clusters—and the rest of the world forms one little cluster in the middle of them!
If I were a scientist who had started with the idea that the main races consisted of several African subgroups, plus one other race containing all non-Africans, this analysis would seem to completely vindicate my initial beliefs! But the analysis turned out the way it did mainly because the way I did it was driven by my original taxonomy of ‘races.’
I’ve picked out two papers myself to make points, now I’ll write a bit about the ‘Risch et al.’ paper Hsu points to. Risch et al. calculated genetic clusters by running data collected for the Family Blood Pressure Program through the structure program. Hsu writes that the clusters that emerged ‘correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.’
Well, there’s no ready-made algorithm which takes genotypes as input and spits out objectively determined races, and structure is no exception. There are some subtleties to how the program works. For one thing, it doesn’t automatically confirm an optimal number of clusters and then sort the subjects into the appropriate number of clusters: the researcher tells structure to put subjects into some number k of clusters, and the program then does its best to fit the subjects into k clusters. So the fact that structure’s output contained an intuitively pleasing number of clusters doesn’t mean very much.
Another issue is that the kind of model structure uses to represent distributions of genotypes is suboptimal for cases where samples have been isolated due to distance and have suffered a lack of gene flow. But, if Hsu is correct, this is exactly the case for Risch et al.‘s data, since he writes that Risch et al.‘s ‘clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa!’
There is more I could write, but I might as well just link this book chapter, which discusses issues with trying to algorithmically infer someone’s racial ancestry. I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture—but it disappoints me when someone well-credentialed (a professor of physics!) uncritically waves around ambiguous results to shore up a folk model of race.
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
I’m not sure that this contradicts what I wrote. I acknowledge that high-resolution genotyping enables one to distinguish geographically distant samples of people. Being able to pull that off does not automatically validate ‘race,’ as in the conventional white people v. yellow people v. brown people v. red people taxonomy.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
Or you need only come at the data with an unusual preconception of race, which would affect your analytic approach.
Also, if you take wide-ranging genetic samples across Africa (as opposed to using a handful of samples from one Nigerian city to represent all of Africa, as seems to have been done to derive your picture), it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans.
Another example: check out subdiagram A in this diagram, from a paper that took samples from West and South Africa. The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans. <
I doubt this would be the case as measured by fst. Note that distance on a principal components graph is not the same as fst: the components might be optimized to separate the clusters of choice (optimize the directions in gene space which show the most variance between the groups). It’s possible in principle that some groups (e.g., pygmies) in Africa have been as effectively separated in gene flow from other Africans as, say, Nigerians and Europeans. More likely, the fst distance between any two groups of Africans is less than the distance from the Yoruba to Europeans or E. Asians. That is what happens when you analyze the (better studied) sub-population structure of, e.g., Europe and Asia. That is, no two groups in E. Asia are anywhere near as far apart as they are collectively from Europeans (and the same for any two European groups vs distance to Asia). That’s just what you’d expect from the historical gene flow patterns, and I’d expect it to apply to Africa as well.
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space. If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups. That raises the possibility of statistical group differences. What those differences are remains to be determined.
I agree on the subject of Fst; if you switch from PCA biplots to Fst, that’s going to better emphasize differences due to geographical separation. (But likely still not enough to scientifically confirm a classical racial taxonomy as the one true racial taxonomy. One would still have to decide which samples to use to build one’s Fst matrix and address the issue of how to extract racial categories from the Fst matrix. I’d also anticipate getting caught up in the same sort of issues as the structure program.)
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space.
Folk notions of ethnicity arguably could, because they are far more squishy and pliable than folk notions of race.
If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups.
I can’t help feeling that you believe I’m arguing against the validity of race because I think that disproves the possibility of statistical group differences. If so, you can rest easy. I acknowledge the possibility of statistical group differences—it doesn’t live or die by the validity of race. I see (or think I do, anyway) genetic group differences in (relatively) boring traits like skin color and hair color—and if those, why not genetic group differences in drama-provoking traits like IQ, personality or genital size?
OK, so we just differ in nuances of definition. If you prefer ethnicity to race, that’s fine with me.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, I continue to disagree with one of the arguments in the blog entry I mentioned—there is more here than a minor semantic divide.
The usual lame argument is “race doesn’t exist, so how could there be group differences”—but I think neither of us is arguing that side.
So your position is that there are probably allele clusters do to cultural and geographic isolation (and therefore potentially group differences in IQ or personality) your concern is that you don’t think those clusters have been shown to map one to one with our folk racial categories?
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes? Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
My concern (or at least the one that I’m elaborating on in this thread) is that those clusters can be made to map onto folk racial categories, or made to be only partly consistent with folk racial categories, or made to be contradictory to folk racial categories, depending upon how one’s own preconceptions of race color one’s cluster analyses.
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes?
No.
Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
Valid for which scientific purpose? They are likely to be workable categories for a sociologist studying race relations. They are likely to be inadequate categories for a molecular anthropologist studying human genetic variation. Though I expect some molecular anthropologists (and evidently at least one professor of physics) would dispute that.
I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit. Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time? I would predict from these findings that when humans first left the continent there were already distinct groupings and that not all of these grouping had descendants that left Africa.
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka. They probably didn’t all come from the Yoruba, perhaps the others came from the groups in the upper right corner of this chart that you linked in your other comment. Or perhaps they didn’t come from the Yoruba but others in that corner and the Yoruba are just closely related to those other groups.
EDIT: So there were a lot of tribes that had members become slaves. Like nearly every major tribe appears to have been affected. I’m going to have to find something that tells me proportions which will take longer.
From your other comment on that chart.
The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
If you go search for pictures of both you can notice the phenotype differences as well.
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
Mission accomplished! :-)
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit.
Sounds reasonable.
Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time?
It can be, although variation along principal component axes can also represent genetic change due to migration. (I picked up on this potential confound by reading a Nature Genetics paper that made the same point from the opposite direction. That is, variation along a PC can be due to continuous geographic separation instead of migration.)
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka.
That’s looks about right to me. Table 1 from the paper estimating African ancestry gives a detailed breakdown of the African ancestry of the African-American sample, and it fits what you suggest.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped …
Surely you mean ‘likelihood’ here, not prior probability. Prior probabilities are imputed based on one’s uncertainty before any evidence is taken into account, and theism scores fairly high on this metric.
Also, I think the confusion merely arises from arrangement and Gricean-maxim(-like?) considerations—I predict adding “Further” before “[a]ny evidence” would suffice to invoke the correct interpretation.
The fundamental similarity is that it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to.
Lol, you have all the knowledge necessary to come to the same conclusion as I have. Surely you are aware that the cognitive gap between blacks and whites is essentially universal and intractable*. In both time and space, as far as anyone knows. While at the same time, other explanations offered for the gap are not so.
There is only one reasonable inference from these facts. One simple explanation which is not inherently ridiculous.
*I agree that the gap can be lessened to some extent since black children face the environmental disadvantage of being raised by black parents.
it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
This is true. It’s also possible to be way too overconfident, based on these same things, and unacknowledged confounders. This is the problem that scientific studies try to address.
So if I understand you correctly, there is no possible evidence which could convince you of the effectiveness of homeopathy, or the existence of God?
On the contrary, it is quite possible that there could be evidence that would convince me of either of those things. It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics. If it could somehow be demonstrated that Avogadro’s number were 300 orders of magnitude too tiny, and that molecules were a googol times smaller than we thought, and could explain why our earlier experiments had led us to our original estimates of Avogadro’s number and molecular sizes, then that would tend make the effectiveness of homeopathy (more) plausible.
And by what standard would you decide whether the evidence is sufficiently strong?
My estimate of the probability of homeopathy working and the current laws of physics being very different would have to be of similar order to my estimate of the probability of the current laws of physics being correct.
And how do you come up with your probability estimates in a situation like this? Do you rely on your general knowledge and common sense? Do you have some algorithm you follow?
No, I don’t have a strict algorithm I follow in situations like this. What I actually do is probably more like this:
do some initial reading to get an idea of the basic plausibility of the hypothesis based on my background knowledge
let the hypothesis bounce around my mind for a while
try to spell out to myself the resulting gut feeling for the hypothesis’ probability
check that rough estimate for any gaping flaws
if that rough estimate is really low, reject the hypothesis as Too Unlikely To Debate for the time being (remember that ‘super careful’ warning I made a few posts up? This is where it applies)
if the rough estimate is instead very high, accept the hypothesis as Too Likely To Debate for the time being
if the probability estimate is more middling, and the hypothesis’ truthiness is important to me, gather more data and try to hone my hunch for the hypothesis’ probability
Fine, and using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that the difference in cognitive performance between blacks and whites results in large part from genetic differences.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”. Show, don’t tell.
In the instance, the blog where you said you were going to publish “evidence and arguments” in support of the above view has, to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time. Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
I wish you’d stop doing that.
Perhaps, but I set forth the basis of my reasoning in a blog post elsewhere. So I did more than simply assert a conclusion.
Since this branch of the discussion has fallen below the comment threshhold, I am happy to discuss things here.
In any event, would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
Evidence please.
I see one answer to one of your questions in this atheism discussion that I answered in a cutesy way—though I still think my implication there was quite clear. For your other questions in this subthread I either replied in enough detail to answer your questions, where they were relevant (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), or pointed out that your question was underspecified or had a false premise.
If you felt my answers to your questions were unsatisfactory, it would have been more helpful to have made that more explicit at the time, instead of working through your long-winded Socratic dialogue and taking an unsubstantiated potshot at me.
For example, consider this exchange:
Me: Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
You: Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence
Me: :shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,” but you chose an interpretation which let you avoid the question. i.e. you were evasive.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
Indeed, and that context happens to include this question preceding the first one you quoted there:
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
That’s nice.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it. It was completely obvious what I meant.
You seem to be writing as if acknowledging the existence of evidence and rejecting evidence are mutually exclusive. Perhaps that is how you understand acknowledging that evidence exists v. rejecting evidence, but that’s a new understanding to me.
Apparently not.
Please either show me where I made such an implication by QUOTING me or admit I implied no such thing. Thank you.
I could be mistaken, but I think I already did.
Yes you are mistaken. If we both agree to X, it would make no sense for me to ask, in essence, why you believe in ~X.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
A second thing. It’s plain to me that at this point this argument is capable of going around in circles forever (if it hasn’t gone into a full-on death spiral already), and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
But according to you, I implied that rejecting evidence of God excludes the possibility of acknowledging the existence of that evidence.
However I made no such implication.
That’s fine . . . I don’t engage with people who strawman me.
Goodbye.
I’m not. This style of argumentation is ineffective and wasteful of people’s time, and I’m unhappy, bordering on angry, that it has gone on that long. I prefer to let this emotion find a productive outlet, namely a top-level post to put a name to the pattern I prefer, so as to encourage more useful discussions in future.
Claim. Unsupported by evidence.
Blame. Irrelevant to truth-seeking.
:shrug: Then don’t engage with me.
Would you like to see some evidence? I’m happy to provide it.
If blame is irrelevant to truth-seeking, then why are you accusing me (and not cupholder) of “wasting time and attention”?
Anyway, please answer my questions:
(1) Would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
(2) If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Never say this again. It’s a cheap, time-wasting dodge.
If you actually have evidence, simply lay it out as soon as it might be relevant.
I disagree with this. It takes time and energy to gather evidence. I don’t care to spend my time and energy digging up evidence unless somebody seriously throws down the gauntlet. Just stating “Claim. Unsupported by evidence” -- without indicating an interest in engaging—is not enough for me. Besides, it would have been easy enough for the poster to come back and say “yes, show me a quote please.”
This seems to imply that you already have the evidence, and are only waiting for confirmation that it’s wanted to provide it.
If this is relevant, it implies that you don’t have the evidence yet.
Please don’t imply that you have evidence when you don’t.
I would say that you are presenting what’s known as a “false dilemma,” i.e. your statement assumes that there are only two possibilities: either (1) I have the evidence in which case it costs me nothing to present it; or (2) I don’t in which case it is dishonest for me to offer to present evidence.
Of course there is another possibility, which is that I am reasonably confident I can present the evidence, but it will take me time and energy to gather and present it.
For example, suppose I bought a toaster a month ago; it breaks; I call up the store to get it fixed; and the store manager says “We can’t help you since you aren’t the original purchaser.” Before I spend 20 minutes finding the credit card receipt, I’m going to ask the guy “Would you like to see proof that I bought the toaster?”
If you don’t yet have evidence, it’s not dishonest to offer to find and present it, but it is dishonest to claim that you already have it, since by making that claim you’re claiming something that’s not true—namely that you have already confirmed that the evidence exists.
I don’t understand your point.
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
For example, in the toaster scenario, is it dishonest to offer to produce proof that you bought the toaster? (Assume for the sake of argument that you save all of your receipts religiously and you are quite confident that you can produce the receipt if you are willing to take 20 minutes to rummage through your old receipts.)
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes.
If I know that someone has a certain amount of evidence for a certain thing, then seeing that evidence myself doesn’t tell me much—knowing that the evidence exists is almost as good as gathering it myself. (This is what makes scientific studies work, so that people don’t have to test every theory by themselves.) But knowing that someone thinks that a certain amount of evidence exists for a certain thing is much weaker, and actually seeing the evidence in this case tells me much more, because it’s not particularly unusual for people to be wrong about this kind of thing, even when they claim to be certain. (Ironically, while I remember seeing a post on here that mentioned that when people were asked to give several 90%-likely predictions most of them managed to do no better than 30% correct, I can’t find it, so, case in point, I guess.)
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations.
I don’t understand what you mean by “already have it.” If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it? If the evidence is stored my hard drive, do I “have” it? If the evidence is on a web site which is publicly accessible, do I “have” it?
It sounds like your answer to my question is “no,” i.e. it would not be dishonest to offer to produce a receipt but that the example I described is extremely rare and non-representative. Do I understand you correctly?
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
Before you go attacking my motives, maybe it would make sense to you to explain why you took us into meta-debate territory. You could have easily said something like this:
And yet you chose not to, instead launching a meta debate (actually a meta-meta debate). If anyone’s motives are suspect, it’s yours.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
As far as race and IQ goes, I laid out my case on my blog post. You are free read it carefully and then come back if you want evidence or other support for any aspect of it.
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
I have read the post in question. The heart of your argument seems to be
Could you please provide some citations, with actual numbers, for “pretty much everywhere” and “various attempts,” including at least one study more recent than… let’s say 1987?
I could try to, but first you must comply with Rule 4 of my rules of debate.
First tell me that you are seriously skeptical that there is a black/white difference in cognitive abilities pretty much everywhere in the world.
Then tell me that you are seriously skeptical that various attempts to eliminate this gap have failed.
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
“Various attempts have failed” taken literally means almost nothing; I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Of course there is variance in cognitive abilities (as well as differences in the size of the black/white gap) along geographical, political, and economic lines. And I am not claiming otherwise.
Well are you seriously skeptical that the gap has never been substantially eliminated?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be. For example, how much of the gap is due to differing economic opportunities, and corresponding issues of early childhood nutrition and education, resulting from discriminatory policies that were still legally enforced as of less than fifty years ago?
Well maybe so, but the question is what exactly you are seriously skeptical of. It sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap has never been substantially eliminated. Do I understand you correctly?
I address that in my blog post. And it sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap exists pretty much everywhere, you just dispute that it’s the same everywhere and you assert that other factors besides race have a general impact on cognitive abilities. Did I understand you correctly?
I disagree with you on points of fact (namely the causal mechanism behind a difference in intelligence between two subgroups of H. sapiens) about which you claim to have as-yet-unrevealed evidence. I will reply to you no further until you provide that evidence, preferably in the form of a peer-reviewed study published more recently than 1987 Q 4 conclusively supporting your hypothesis.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ‘obviousness,’ I will take that as a sign of bad faith on your part, an attempt to manipulate me into saying something embarrassing.
:shrug: All I did was ask you simple questions so that I could understand exactly what it is you claim to be skeptical of.
I’m not going to waste time digging up citations for things which you don’t seriously dispute.
You are the one who is dodging questions.
I asked you two simple, reasonable yes or no questions in good faith so that I could understand your position. You ignored both of them.
Debating with me is not about playing “hide the ball” Before I gather evidence, I want to know exactly where we agree and disagree. You refuse to tell me. So be it.
ETA: By the way, it’s possible to be reasonably confident of various generalizations about human groups even without formal, peer-reviewed studies. I think this is pretty obvious, but I can give examples if anyone wants.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly. Furthermore, I object to your use of the word “Lol” in this context.
I see you cannot resist meta-debate.
Anyway, I would say it depends on how much effort and care those readers put into understanding. To any reasonable person, it was clear what I was referring to.
By the way, if you do want to debate this with me, you should know that I have my own rules of debate. You can find them here:
http://brazil84.wordpress.com/my-rules-of-debate/
In particular, you should pay attention to Rule 4.
Irrelevant obfuscation.
If you have already gathered the necessary evidence, present it without this teasing preamble; if not, admit your ignorance and lay out the probable search costs.
I think that when I asked “would you like to see some evidence,” the reasonable interpretation is that I can gather and present the evidence with a small but non-zero amount of effort.
However, if you did not understand my comment that way, that’s what I meant.
And again, it would have been easy enough for the other poster to say “Yes, I am skeptical of your claim and would like to see the evidence.” Since he didn’t do it, I infer that he doesn’t want to invest any further energy in the interaction. Which is fine, but if he doesn’t want to invest further energy, I don’t want to either.
No, you were aggressive and rude in the discussion. You have demanded a detailed answer while your questions weren’t clear, and in repeated queries you didn’t even try to explain what sort of answer you want. That all only to allow yourself to reply “well, I use the same standards”.
Can you please QUOTE me where I was aggressive and rude?
Can you please QUOTE a question I asked which was not clear?
Actually I said something like “similar” not “same.” But so what?
Your debating style resembles more an interrogation than a friendly discussion, and this I consider rude, but it may be only my personal feeling.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ. This is also on my list of rude behaviour. I don’t like people asking questions in order to show that the opponent can’t answer appropriately.
If I ask a question and am not satisfied with the answer, the default is to suppose that the other person didn’t understood properly the question and my job is to explain it, or possibly give some motivation for it. Repeating the same question with only minimal alterations I consider aggresive. Want a quote?
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here. Cupholder has given two answers
which I find quite appropriate given your question. If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear. You have basically asked “what’s your epistemology”, itself a fine question, but full answer could fill a book. So either you wanted some specific answer, and the question was not clear—you should have asked more specifically. Or you didn’t want a specific answer, and since I don’t think you expected cupholder to explain his rationality in full detail, I must conclude that the question was merely rhetorical, which brings me back to rudeness.
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
Agreed, but I don’t understand the relevance.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind, i.e. what type of answer you have expected?
It is too general to be answered in a concise comment. Therefore, when replying one has to either choose one particular aspect or be very vague.
As I recall, that’s one of the issues which was under discussion.
I claim that the two questions I quoted myself asking are essentially the same question:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1t48
Which question are you talking about?
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right? If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
The question by what standard you reject the evidence for the existence of God?
Pretty much yes.
I disagree, but at a minimum, it was hardly unreasonable for me to rephrase the question.
On the contrary; many people consider the issue settled because all major scientific debates in history, bar none, have ended up weighing against the notion of a personal God who takes an interest in and intervenes in human affairs.
(It is, rather, the persistence of the myth, and its influence on public affairs, that seems to demand scientific scrutiny!)
I don’t understand your point. Are you saying that scientific studies are necessary to resolve the theism/atheism question?
Yes. They are a) necessary and b) already done. (The “question” I have in mind is a specific one, that of a personal God who, etc. as stated above.)
Prior to, say, the invention of writing, it would perhaps have been legitimate to consider the existence of a personal God (or gods) an open question, susceptible of being settled by investigation. In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
Discovering this hypothesis makes reading this thread worthwhile. I’m shocked I hadn’t heard of it before. Maybe the coolest, most bizarre yet plausible idea I have heard in the last two years. Just hearing it (not even believing it) modifies my worldview. Have you or anyone else read the book? Recommended?
I’ve read the book, which was mentioned favorably in Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and forms part of the backstory to Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Curiosity compelled me to look further.
My level of understanding of the book’s thesis is mostly level-0, i.e. there is a “bicamerality” password but I’d have to reread the book to reacquaint myself with its precise predictions, and I’d be hard pressed to reconstruct the theory myself.
I do have a few pieces of understanding which seem level-2-ish; for instance, the hypothesis accounts for the feeling that a lot of my thinking is internal soliloquy. Also, the idea that consciousness, like love, could in large part be a “memetic” and collective construct (I use the term “meme” evocatively rather than rigorously) somehow appeals to me.
I’d recommend you read it if only for the pleasure of having one more person to discuss it with. I may have to reread it in that case.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of the first such scientific study? Thanks in advance.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically, but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Though, actually, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is probably a better starting point, for being a gloss on Darwin.
You should know, before you ask your next pseudo-Socratic question: given that you seem intent on sticking to that style of “argumentation”, I’m going to take your advice and not engage you anymore.
Ok, then how about an early one then.
So before the 19th century a rationalist could not reasonably conclude that the atheistic position is correct?
Do you really take this to be a reasonable interpretation / inference based on what Morendil said?
I think we might just have to stop feeding the troll.
Absolutely. The other poster claimed, in essence, that scientific studies are necessary to reach the atheistic conclusion. The implication is that before such studies were done, one could not reach that conclusion.
To be honest, before Darwin, the Argument from Design was a pretty good reason to be a theist. (And I got this from the aforementioned Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.)
Eh. The “who designed the designer” problem still makes theism a mistake. Hume even argued this before Darwin was born.
Yes, that’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Deism ridiculous. Darwin was fortunate enough to find a “designer” that can exist without requiring a designer of its own, basically settling the question.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Further**, any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped by opposing evidence: evil, scientific explanations for nearly every phenomena previously attributed to God, evidence human brains are innately susceptible to believing in gods absent good evidence (and subsequent altering of the God hypothesis to account for the new evidence).
In contrast the hypothesis that the race iq gap is entirely or close to entirely environmental has a prior around .5 (lots of human differences are explained by environmental factors and lots are explained by genetics). What we have to update on consists of a handful of studies, several of which contradict each other and none of which have come close to controlling the relevant factors. We have good evidence the gap has shrunk since the Civil Rights movement, the taboo of overt racism and beneficial developments in African American social and economic position. Then there is some evidence the gap shrinks further when black children are raised by white families. There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone. Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved. Those who believe there is a genetic component will say that political correctness and egalitarianism mean that mainstream science would ignore evidence in favor of their position. Those who do not believe there is a genetic component will say that those who do are just trying to justify their racism. On balance, I update slightly in favor of the environmental hypothesis but there is enough uncertainty that the question needs more studying if we decide we care about it (I’m not sure we should).
The two cases aren’t even roughly comparable.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to. Persisting in arguing without presenting such evidence is trollish and honestly, probably suggests to some that you don’t share their commitment to egalitarianism.
**Edited for clarification.
That’s not true at all. There is overwhelming evidence that performance on IQ tests is hugely correlated with “race”, which basically implies skin tone. Blacks, as a group, score 10-15 points below whites (almost a standard deviation), and (some) Asians and Jews are about half a deviation above whites.
The controversy is not whether there is correlation. The controversy is over the casual explanation. How much of this observed difference is due to genetics, how much due to environment, and how much due to the structure of standard IQ tests?
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
There is clearly a genetic component to individual IQ scores.
This varies based on wealth. Among poor/impoverished peoples, variance in IQ scores is something like 60-90% due to environmental factors (like nutrition). Among wealthy peoples, 60-70% seems to be genetic.
The usual analogy is the height of growing corn. In nutrient-poor dirt, corn height is mostly a function of how much fertilizer/water/sun the plants get. But in well-tended farms, corn stalk height is almost completely a function of inherited genetics.
When I say there is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone I’m summarizing the findings of the skin tone studies cited in the Nisbett article that was heavily discussed in this conversation. The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent). I think this was obvious at the time from the context of the paragraph: I’m clearly summarizing findings not making general conclusions (until the end). We had been going back and forth on these issues for a while so by that point I was probably using more shorthand than usual. It may not be obvious that is what I was doing a month after the fact.
Yes, I’m pretty sure the context is more that sufficient to establish that this is what I was talking about. The entire discussion was about origin of the black-white IQ gap.
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
Wholly agreed.
Does anyone happen to have any studies that report different findings? This isn’t a subject where I trust one source. I know how to lie with studies.
Yeah, I don’t know how to update on meta analyses anymore. I do know though that Ruston and Jensen cite it uncritically (albeit deceptively, they just acknowledge the low correlation and move on) which may be evidence that Shuey (who did the meta analysis) is being honest.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966! I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
Wow. Just how well did they correct for all external factors? I would have expected a difference in measured IQ to appear based purely on socio-economic disadvantages that are far lesser now.
I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
I’m not sure how the political bias / scientific integrity ratio then compares to now. I do suppose that some parties would be particularly interested in finding that result at that time.
To say the least.
I read through the chapter. Interesting.
Not being an American I have been exposed to different kinds of discrimination stories, both historic and current. I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ. Prior to European settlement the people in Australia were isolated for tens of thousands of years, leaving skin tone a relatively poor indicator of genetic kinship. That is a lot of time for selection to work on both IQ and pigmentation.
As you point out, it isn’t safe to assume that skin tone reflects ancestry in every case. I think the race scientists implicitly reason that it’s OK to treat skin tone as an ancestry indicator among US blacks because of the relatively recent injection of African ancestry into the US gene pool, so skin tone’s association with African ancestry hasn’t been wholly eliminated/confounded yet. The same obviously wouldn’t apply to indigenous Australians.
Looked deeper. 1966 is the 2nd edition. The first was 1958. The book both Nisbett and Rushton are citing is titled “The Testing of Negro Intelligence”. From what little I can find Shuey was actually something of an early Rushton, arguing that a persistent test score gap since 1910 suggested innate intelligence differences between races. If anyone can find and electronic copy of the book let me know.
You’ll be lucky to find a copy. The book probably falls into that mid-century obscurity zone, old enough to be forgotten but not old enough to be public domain.
If it helps, the 1975 book Race Differences in Intelligence takes Shuey’s results on skin color and IQ and adapts 5 of the studies she found into a table. Looking at the table, the studies are quite a mish-mash. Three report correlation coefficients, and the other two instead report average IQ for different categories of mixed ancestry people (‘Light skin’ v. ‘Dark skin’, and ‘Strong evidence of white’ v. ‘Intermediate’ v. ‘Dominantly Negroid’). The studies date from 1926 to 1947, and the 1947 study’s an unpublished dissertation. Each study used a different IQ test. I can only imagine there’s even more variation among Shuey’s full collection of studies.
Not really a reply to you. I just found this and needed to put it somewhere. Anyone who has been following this discussion will be interested. It’s an interesting way of posing the question.
...
...
Hsu’s blog post makes two claims about race. The first argument is that ‘Hypothesis 2’ could be correct—i.e., that there could be genetically driven differences in exciting traits like IQ between races (or ‘groups,’ but I think we all know which ‘groups’ we’re really interested in). I agree with this argument.
I completely disagree with the second claim, which is that genetic clustering studies constitute ‘the scientific basis for race.’ It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
For example, if you sample some whites, sample some blacks, and expect those two categories to automatically pop out of your analysis, you might be surprised. Here’s a recent paper that estimated the European ancestry in African-Americans by analyzing genotypes from samples of US whites, US blacks, and several subgroups of Africans. Running PCA on all of the genotype data, and plotting the first two principal components of the subjects’ genotypes in each sample gave these clusters:
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
The researchers could no doubt have come up with an alternative rotation of the axes that would’ve projected all of the African samples on top of each other, and the European sample far away from them. But what would justify the alternative projection over the original one?
Maybe my own personal concept of ‘race’ emphasizes differences among sub-Saharan Africans, instead of continental differences. Then I might do a PCA on a set of sub-Saharan African genotypes, find a couple of principal components that best separate out the sub-Saharan African subgroups, and only then plot the north Africans and non-Africans along with the sub-Saharans.
Here are a few plots from a study that did just that. Notice now that the most widely separated clusters are three, or perhaps four, sub-Saharan African clusters—and the rest of the world forms one little cluster in the middle of them!
If I were a scientist who had started with the idea that the main races consisted of several African subgroups, plus one other race containing all non-Africans, this analysis would seem to completely vindicate my initial beliefs! But the analysis turned out the way it did mainly because the way I did it was driven by my original taxonomy of ‘races.’
I’ve picked out two papers myself to make points, now I’ll write a bit about the ‘Risch et al.’ paper Hsu points to. Risch et al. calculated genetic clusters by running data collected for the Family Blood Pressure Program through the structure program. Hsu writes that the clusters that emerged ‘correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.’
Well, there’s no ready-made algorithm which takes genotypes as input and spits out objectively determined races, and structure is no exception. There are some subtleties to how the program works. For one thing, it doesn’t automatically confirm an optimal number of clusters and then sort the subjects into the appropriate number of clusters: the researcher tells structure to put subjects into some number k of clusters, and the program then does its best to fit the subjects into k clusters. So the fact that structure’s output contained an intuitively pleasing number of clusters doesn’t mean very much.
Another issue is that the kind of model structure uses to represent distributions of genotypes is suboptimal for cases where samples have been isolated due to distance and have suffered a lack of gene flow. But, if Hsu is correct, this is exactly the case for Risch et al.‘s data, since he writes that Risch et al.‘s ‘clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa!’
There is more I could write, but I might as well just link this book chapter, which discusses issues with trying to algorithmically infer someone’s racial ancestry. I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture—but it disappoints me when someone well-credentialed (a professor of physics!) uncritically waves around ambiguous results to shore up a folk model of race.
(Edited to fix last link.)
I’m typing this on an iPad so apologies for mistakes. A picture for you here:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/06/genetic-clustering-40-years-of-progress.html
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
See also here http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/11/human-genetic-variation-fst-and.html
I’m not sure that this contradicts what I wrote. I acknowledge that high-resolution genotyping enables one to distinguish geographically distant samples of people. Being able to pull that off does not automatically validate ‘race,’ as in the conventional white people v. yellow people v. brown people v. red people taxonomy.
Or you need only come at the data with an unusual preconception of race, which would affect your analytic approach.
Also, if you take wide-ranging genetic samples across Africa (as opposed to using a handful of samples from one Nigerian city to represent all of Africa, as seems to have been done to derive your picture), it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans.
Another example: check out subdiagram A in this diagram, from a paper that took samples from West and South Africa. The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
I doubt this would be the case as measured by fst. Note that distance on a principal components graph is not the same as fst: the components might be optimized to separate the clusters of choice (optimize the directions in gene space which show the most variance between the groups). It’s possible in principle that some groups (e.g., pygmies) in Africa have been as effectively separated in gene flow from other Africans as, say, Nigerians and Europeans. More likely, the fst distance between any two groups of Africans is less than the distance from the Yoruba to Europeans or E. Asians. That is what happens when you analyze the (better studied) sub-population structure of, e.g., Europe and Asia. That is, no two groups in E. Asia are anywhere near as far apart as they are collectively from Europeans (and the same for any two European groups vs distance to Asia). That’s just what you’d expect from the historical gene flow patterns, and I’d expect it to apply to Africa as well.
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space. If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups. That raises the possibility of statistical group differences. What those differences are remains to be determined.
I agree on the subject of Fst; if you switch from PCA biplots to Fst, that’s going to better emphasize differences due to geographical separation. (But likely still not enough to scientifically confirm a classical racial taxonomy as the one true racial taxonomy. One would still have to decide which samples to use to build one’s Fst matrix and address the issue of how to extract racial categories from the Fst matrix. I’d also anticipate getting caught up in the same sort of issues as the structure program.)
Folk notions of ethnicity arguably could, because they are far more squishy and pliable than folk notions of race.
I can’t help feeling that you believe I’m arguing against the validity of race because I think that disproves the possibility of statistical group differences. If so, you can rest easy. I acknowledge the possibility of statistical group differences—it doesn’t live or die by the validity of race. I see (or think I do, anyway) genetic group differences in (relatively) boring traits like skin color and hair color—and if those, why not genetic group differences in drama-provoking traits like IQ, personality or genital size?
OK, so we just differ in nuances of definition. If you prefer ethnicity to race, that’s fine with me.
The usual lame argument is “race doesn’t exist, so how could there be group differences”—but I think neither of us is arguing that side.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, I continue to disagree with one of the arguments in the blog entry I mentioned—there is more here than a minor semantic divide.
Correct.
So your position is that there are probably allele clusters do to cultural and geographic isolation (and therefore potentially group differences in IQ or personality) your concern is that you don’t think those clusters have been shown to map one to one with our folk racial categories?
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes? Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
My concern (or at least the one that I’m elaborating on in this thread) is that those clusters can be made to map onto folk racial categories, or made to be only partly consistent with folk racial categories, or made to be contradictory to folk racial categories, depending upon how one’s own preconceptions of race color one’s cluster analyses.
No.
Valid for which scientific purpose? They are likely to be workable categories for a sociologist studying race relations. They are likely to be inadequate categories for a molecular anthropologist studying human genetic variation. Though I expect some molecular anthropologists (and evidently at least one professor of physics) would dispute that.
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit. Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time? I would predict from these findings that when humans first left the continent there were already distinct groupings and that not all of these grouping had descendants that left Africa.
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka. They probably didn’t all come from the Yoruba, perhaps the others came from the groups in the upper right corner of this chart that you linked in your other comment. Or perhaps they didn’t come from the Yoruba but others in that corner and the Yoruba are just closely related to those other groups.
EDIT: So there were a lot of tribes that had members become slaves. Like nearly every major tribe appears to have been affected. I’m going to have to find something that tells me proportions which will take longer.
From your other comment on that chart.
If you go search for pictures of both you can notice the phenotype differences as well.
I’ll maybe say more after I look at that chapter.
Mission accomplished! :-)
Sounds reasonable.
It can be, although variation along principal component axes can also represent genetic change due to migration. (I picked up on this potential confound by reading a Nature Genetics paper that made the same point from the opposite direction. That is, variation along a PC can be due to continuous geographic separation instead of migration.)
That’s looks about right to me. Table 1 from the paper estimating African ancestry gives a detailed breakdown of the African ancestry of the African-American sample, and it fits what you suggest.
Surely you mean ‘likelihood’ here, not prior probability. Prior probabilities are imputed based on one’s uncertainty before any evidence is taken into account, and theism scores fairly high on this metric.
The selection should be read something like:
(Due to complexity)
In addition, the hypothesis does not become more likely once we consider the evidence...
“Due”, not “do”.
Also, I think the confusion merely arises from arrangement and Gricean-maxim(-like?) considerations—I predict adding “Further” before “[a]ny evidence” would suffice to invoke the correct interpretation.
You’re obviously right on both counts. Edited.
Remember to flag the edit—I like the footnote method.
The fundamental similarity is that it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
Lol, you have all the knowledge necessary to come to the same conclusion as I have. Surely you are aware that the cognitive gap between blacks and whites is essentially universal and intractable*. In both time and space, as far as anyone knows. While at the same time, other explanations offered for the gap are not so.
There is only one reasonable inference from these facts. One simple explanation which is not inherently ridiculous.
*I agree that the gap can be lessened to some extent since black children face the environmental disadvantage of being raised by black parents.
This is true. It’s also possible to be way too overconfident, based on these same things, and unacknowledged confounders. This is the problem that scientific studies try to address.
Agree.
Well, that and other things as well.