The example being race/intelligence correlation? Assuming any genetic basis for intelligence whatsoever, for there to be absolutely no correlation at all with race (or any distinct subpopulation, rather) would be quite unexpected, and I note Yvain discussed the example only in terms as uselessly general as the trivial case.
Arguments involving the magnitude of differences, singling out specific subpopulations, or comparing genetic effects with other factors seem to quickly end up with people grinding various political axes, but Yvain didn’t really go there.
What about casual use of poorly chosen examples reinforcing cultural concepts such as sexism? I’m referencing this paper. Summary: Example sentences in linguistics far more often have males verbing females than females verbing males.
There are a lot of questions which (to the best of my understanding) are still up in the air. Yvain’s casual use of the controversial race/intelligence connection as an example at best glosses over these questions, and at worst subtly signals presumed answers to the questions without offering actual evidence. (Just like the males verbing females examples subtly signals some sort of cultural sexism.)
Questions like: Is intelligence a stable, innate quality? Is intelligence the same thing as IQ? Is intelligence a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is intelligence strongly correlated to IQ? Is race a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is IQ strongly correlated to self-identified race? Is race strongly correlated to genetics? Is the best explanation of these correlations that genetics strongly influences intelligence? Is the state of the scientific evidence settled enough that people ought to be taking the research and applying it to daily lives or policy decisions?
My take on it is that intelligence is a dangerously fuzzy concept, sliding from a general “tendency to win” on the one hand, to a simple multiple-choice questionaire on the other, all the while scattering assumptions of that it’s innate, culture-free and unchangeable through your mind. Race is a dangerous concept too, with things like the one-drop rule confusing the connection to genetics and the fact that (according to the IAT) essentially everyone is a little bit racist, which has to affect your thinking about race. Thirdly, there’s a very strong tendency for the racist/anti-racist politicals to hijack tentative scientific results and use them as weapons, which clouds the waters and makes everything a bit more explosive.
The post has an overt message (regarding assertions) and a covert signalling message, something about the putative race/intelligence connection. My sense of the lesswrong aesthetic has been wrong before, but I think we would prefer one-level to two-level posts (explicitness as a rationalist virtue).
I personally have no strong opinion one way or the other. IQ is very hard to pin down genetically, seems to be distributed across hundreds of genes, and would probably be much harder to change than things like skin pigmentation or lactose tolerance. But generally I classify it in the category of “things whose political flammability is so far out of proportion to its actual importance that it’s not worth thinking about unless you’re itching for a fight”.
Johnicholas makes an excellent point about the fuzziness of both intelligence and race. The complexities involved with defining both of these concepts has prevented (to my knowledge) anything like a scientific study of the OP’s assertion.
Does it make sense to assign a higher credibility to a question of fact on the basis of the opinion of a top expert in the field, when there is no way that his opinion is informed by anything resembling a scientific study? I don’t think so.
There’s two different questions in your post: First, you ask what the covert message is. Second, you ask me to show has the post has a covert message. One’s own writing always reads apparently clearly, but I thought I offered sufficient evidence that the original post has a covert message, even though I wasn’t picking out any particular covert meaning.
I believe the covert message is “Intelligence is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by IQ/a useful concept for theory-building/probably innate/probably stable/probably genetic. Race is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by self-identification/strongly correlated to genetics. There is scientific evidence that the genetic component of race is a significant causative influence on intelligence.”
So, you seem to be saying that Yvain is using Watson as an example, at least partly (and significantly so) in order to convince others of (not to put too fine a point on it) the racist IQ hypothesis.
I had a different reading of the post, which was that even for someone who disagreed with the racist IQ hypothesis, Watson’s pronouncements should carry more weight than a random person’s. I actually agree with Yvain—though I also note that looking into Watson’s actual argument in even a little more detail was enough for me to dismiss it.
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).
The example being race/intelligence correlation? Assuming any genetic basis for intelligence whatsoever, for there to be absolutely no correlation at all with race (or any distinct subpopulation, rather) would be quite unexpected, and I note Yvain discussed the example only in terms as uselessly general as the trivial case.
Arguments involving the magnitude of differences, singling out specific subpopulations, or comparing genetic effects with other factors seem to quickly end up with people grinding various political axes, but Yvain didn’t really go there.
What about casual use of poorly chosen examples reinforcing cultural concepts such as sexism? I’m referencing this paper. Summary: Example sentences in linguistics far more often have males verbing females than females verbing males.
There are a lot of questions which (to the best of my understanding) are still up in the air. Yvain’s casual use of the controversial race/intelligence connection as an example at best glosses over these questions, and at worst subtly signals presumed answers to the questions without offering actual evidence. (Just like the males verbing females examples subtly signals some sort of cultural sexism.)
Questions like: Is intelligence a stable, innate quality? Is intelligence the same thing as IQ? Is intelligence a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is intelligence strongly correlated to IQ? Is race a sharp, rigid concept, suitable for building theory-structures with? Is IQ strongly correlated to self-identified race? Is race strongly correlated to genetics? Is the best explanation of these correlations that genetics strongly influences intelligence? Is the state of the scientific evidence settled enough that people ought to be taking the research and applying it to daily lives or policy decisions?
My take on it is that intelligence is a dangerously fuzzy concept, sliding from a general “tendency to win” on the one hand, to a simple multiple-choice questionaire on the other, all the while scattering assumptions of that it’s innate, culture-free and unchangeable through your mind. Race is a dangerous concept too, with things like the one-drop rule confusing the connection to genetics and the fact that (according to the IAT) essentially everyone is a little bit racist, which has to affect your thinking about race. Thirdly, there’s a very strong tendency for the racist/anti-racist politicals to hijack tentative scientific results and use them as weapons, which clouds the waters and makes everything a bit more explosive.
The post has an overt message (regarding assertions) and a covert signalling message, something about the putative race/intelligence connection. My sense of the lesswrong aesthetic has been wrong before, but I think we would prefer one-level to two-level posts (explicitness as a rationalist virtue).
I’m deeply saddened by this, and will do my part to remedy it by inviting the females here to verb me.
I appreciate having been invited, but perhaps it would have been more useful to merely suggest that we could verb you?
I used the race-intelligence connection as an example because it was the example used in Morendil’s post to which this was a reply, which itself used it because it was the topic of the comment Morendil noticed was doing it wrong. I probably should have made this clearer; if you weren’t following the history, it does look like a really really badly chosen example.
I personally have no strong opinion one way or the other. IQ is very hard to pin down genetically, seems to be distributed across hundreds of genes, and would probably be much harder to change than things like skin pigmentation or lactose tolerance. But generally I classify it in the category of “things whose political flammability is so far out of proportion to its actual importance that it’s not worth thinking about unless you’re itching for a fight”.
Thanks, your edits make that much clearer.
Johnicholas makes an excellent point about the fuzziness of both intelligence and race. The complexities involved with defining both of these concepts has prevented (to my knowledge) anything like a scientific study of the OP’s assertion.
Does it make sense to assign a higher credibility to a question of fact on the basis of the opinion of a top expert in the field, when there is no way that his opinion is informed by anything resembling a scientific study? I don’t think so.
Something: what, exactly? Show, don’t tell us, that the post has a covert message.
There’s two different questions in your post: First, you ask what the covert message is. Second, you ask me to show has the post has a covert message. One’s own writing always reads apparently clearly, but I thought I offered sufficient evidence that the original post has a covert message, even though I wasn’t picking out any particular covert meaning.
I believe the covert message is “Intelligence is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by IQ/a useful concept for theory-building/probably innate/probably stable/probably genetic. Race is: real/important/relevant/effectively measured by self-identification/strongly correlated to genetics. There is scientific evidence that the genetic component of race is a significant causative influence on intelligence.”
So, you seem to be saying that Yvain is using Watson as an example, at least partly (and significantly so) in order to convince others of (not to put too fine a point on it) the racist IQ hypothesis.
I had a different reading of the post, which was that even for someone who disagreed with the racist IQ hypothesis, Watson’s pronouncements should carry more weight than a random person’s. I actually agree with Yvain—though I also note that looking into Watson’s actual argument in even a little more detail was enough for me to dismiss it.
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.