I wonder if you would be willing to bet against a person that held such beliefs. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you bet on the IQ of randomly selected Americans by looking at their picture. Presumably, you would guess close to the mean for each picture since you think a concept like race is too fuzzy to make use of and your opponent would adjust his guess according to the perceived race of the person in the picture. Do you believe you would win such a contest?
Downvoted for what looks like willful misunderstanding of the grandparent. (Will withdraw the downvote if it turns out to be a honest misunderstanding.)
The dispute concerns the causal origins of the so-called “IQ gap”. The fact of the “IQ gap” isn’t itself in dispute (or if it is, it is a different dispute than the one Yvain refers to), so the bet wouldn’t settle anything, besides being in extremely poor taste. Racism and discrimination compete with genetic explanations to explain that fact, and the grandparent provides some detail on why settling the issue isn’t trivial.
The dispute concerns the causal origins of the so-called “IQ gap”. The fact of the “IQ gap” isn’t itself in dispute (or if it is, it is a different dispute than the one Yvain refers to).
Nothing in my post was directed at the grandparent. It was direct at Johnicholas comment:
Is race a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with?
If he doesn’t think race is a rigid enough concept for coming up with theories, surely he wouldn’t mind betting against someone who used it explicitly to make predictions? If it helped people make predictions that were more accurate than his own, how could he maintain the claim that they are too fuzzy for inclusion in theories?
I won’t vote you down, but if you reread my comment you will see that I never used the word “intelligence” at all. I was trying to see how strongly you believe that race is too fuzzy a concept to include in predictive theories (nothing about intelligence per se).
I wonder if you would be willing to bet against a person that held such beliefs. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you bet on the IQ of randomly selected Americans by looking at their picture. Presumably, you would guess close to the mean for each picture since you think a concept like race is too fuzzy to make use of and your opponent would adjust his guess according to the perceived race of the person in the picture. Do you believe you would win such a contest?
Downvoted for what looks like willful misunderstanding of the grandparent. (Will withdraw the downvote if it turns out to be a honest misunderstanding.)
The dispute concerns the causal origins of the so-called “IQ gap”. The fact of the “IQ gap” isn’t itself in dispute (or if it is, it is a different dispute than the one Yvain refers to), so the bet wouldn’t settle anything, besides being in extremely poor taste. Racism and discrimination compete with genetic explanations to explain that fact, and the grandparent provides some detail on why settling the issue isn’t trivial.
Nothing in my post was directed at the grandparent. It was direct at Johnicholas comment:
If he doesn’t think race is a rigid enough concept for coming up with theories, surely he wouldn’t mind betting against someone who used it explicitly to make predictions? If it helped people make predictions that were more accurate than his own, how could he maintain the claim that they are too fuzzy for inclusion in theories?
The way that you slipped easily between intelligence and IQ is exactly the dangerous fuzziness that I was referring to.
I won’t vote you down, but if you reread my comment you will see that I never used the word “intelligence” at all. I was trying to see how strongly you believe that race is too fuzzy a concept to include in predictive theories (nothing about intelligence per se).
This is true, but it appears the problem was that you responded to a discussion about intelligence by talking about IQ.
No I didn’t. The comment I responded to said this:
This is about IQ and Race, which is exactly what my reply was about.