The best way of handling mindkilling is to look at hard data.
To some extent you may have a valid point, but parties are extremely diverse entities. Even if one looked at small, fringe parties, there’s heavy variation in the beliefs. So, you might have a more valid point if you said something like “Self-identified Republicans are on average more likely to believe crazy things than self-identified Democrats.” Now, this will run into other issues because party identification if fluid, but it would be a start.
So, let’s use some beliefs that are by a largescale consensus “crazy” that are stereotypically associated with specific ends of the political spectrum in the US. I suggest the following four: “Barack Obama is a Muslim” (associated with the right), “The government was involved in 9/11” (left). It would be interesting to look at others that are more straight scientific issues, such as homeopathy works (left), vaccination is bad/causes autism(left), evolution is wrong (right). Now, let’s look at the data, but I don’t have the time to do so. So let’s focus on the two essentially conspiratorial claims.
The most recent poll I can find for Obama being a Muslim is here. Approximately 30% of Republicans think that Obama is a Muslim. Curiously, approximately 10% of Democrats think Obama is a Muslim (this is likely connected to the fact that 5-10% of any poll will be extremely confused or just give nonsensical answers).
Unfortunately, very few of the polls about beliefs about 9/11 ask for party identification, but there’s a Rasmussen poll indicating that around 35% of Democrats answered yes to Bush knowing about 9/11. See here. They don’t state the actual percentage of Republicans, and the actual poll seems to be behind a paywall. Moreover, other polls have gotten much smaller total percentages of belief, so actually getting data here may be tough. But at least from these two, it looks plausible that about an equal percentage of Republicans and Democrats are being crazy for their thing (although slightly higher numbers of Republicans may be saying yes to the Democratic brand of crazy, that’s hard to really tease out from the data, given margins of error, differences in questions, timing, and other issues).
Now, you can argue that there’s a difference in how seriously these beliefs are taken by the leadership in each party. So what’s the highest ranking politicians who have said that Obama was a Muslim? Well, it is easy to find high-ranking Republicans who think that Obama is getting advice or orders from the Muslim Brotherhood. Louie Gohmert is one of the louder examples. But that’s not the same as claiming that he’s a Muslim. So let’s now look at the reverse. The closest analog for the 9/11 issue then to Gohmert would be people wanting a new investigation. It turns out that’s a pretty large set . See here. It ranges throughout the political spectrum, and it isn’t easy to tell without much more work which of those want a new investigation because they think the 9/11 Commission didn’t do a great job and how many want a new investigation because they think it was the Illuminati/Rosicrusians/Jews/Daleks etc. So, actually looking at this metric may be tough.
Note it occurred to me while doing this, that birtherism might have been a better analog than claiming that Obama is a Muslim, and one does in fact get high-ranking politiicans endorsing that. See e.g. here. My impression is that genuinely crazy ideas are much more likely to be taken seriously by leadership on the right than leadership on the left, but getting substantial evidence for that is likely to be tough..This data at least suggests that any different between the two among the party base is small. It would be interesting to look at a bunch of other issues in a systematic fashion. While that would be fun to look at it, it wouldn’t by itself say much of anything about on any specific policy issue where Republicans or Democrats are correct.
The best way of handling mindkilling is to look at hard data.
To some extent you may have a valid point, but parties are extremely diverse entities. Even if one looked at small, fringe parties, there’s heavy variation in the beliefs. So, you might have a more valid point if you said something like “Self-identified Republicans are on average more likely to believe crazy things than self-identified Democrats.”
This is not actually all that objective since it’s not clear what constitutes a “crazy belief”. Is it simple a matter of how much easily available evidence there is against it? Or does it also include considerations like what proportion of people believe it and how much effort smart people have devoted to rationalizing it?
This is not actually all that objective since it’s not clear what constitutes a “crazy belief”. Is it simple a matter of how much easily available evidence there is against it? Or does it also include considerations like what proportion of people believe it and how much effort smart people have devoted to rationalizing it?
Ideally, yes (and I upvoted this for its insight), but that can easily becomes a Fully General Counterargument if we aren’t EXTREMELY careful—since “how much effort smart people have devoted to rationalizing it” can look like “how much easily available evidence there is against it”, and vice-versa.
As people have mentioned, this is a Very Hard Problem.
Well the context was determining which beliefs were “crazy” for use in a meta-analysis, not determining what to believe directly.
Also frankly I can think of numerous areas where there is a lot of easily available evidence that a lot of smart people have devoted a lot of energy trying to rationalize away or at least train people not to notice, the correlation between race and both propensity to violence and intelligence being the most obvious example.
the correlation between race and both propensity to violence and intelligence being the most obvious example.
In this particular example, though, I don’t think (non-mindkilled) people try to train people not to notice it, and in most rational cases that I’ve seen, it isn’t “rationalized away” so much as people spend a good deal of effort insisting that correlation does not always imply causation, and that social policies which take that correlation into account need to be VERY careful not to repeat tabooed historical solutions. I think if “I agree denotationally but object connotationally” were a more widespread concept, we would see a lot of this tendency disappear.
In this particular example, though, I don’t think (non-mindkilled) people try to train people not to notice it,
Well, by that standard nearly everyone is mindkilled about this issue.
it isn’t “rationalized away” so much as people spend a good deal of effort insisting that correlation does not always imply causation,
Well that depends on what theory one means by “causation”. There are three main theories about the cause of this correlation:
1) The genetic theory.
2) The cultural theory, i.e., contemporary black culture has elements that discourage intelligence and encourage violent behavior.
3) The implicit racism theory.
On the occasion most intellectuals are willing to admit this correlation exists at all, they immediately insist that it is completely due to (3) and proceed to ingeniously seek ever subtler forms of racism.
and that social policies which take that correlation into account need to be VERY careful not to repeat tabooed historical solutions.
Well, the current solutions, all based on theory (3), aren’t working. The rational response to this evidence would be to assign more weight to theories (1) and/or (2). This, however, is considered unacceptable so people wind up searching for ever subtler forms of racism to explain why the correlations persist.
Have you considered the alternative hypothesis that you’re hyper-sensitized to noticing people who believe 3-and-ONLY-3, and are therefore ignoring evidence of people who believe 2-and-3, or occasionally 2-and-3-with-a-smattering-of-1? Because I know of PLENTY of people who agree that 2-and-3 are likely causes (with maybe a weak influence from 1), and operate together in a feedback loop—but I also know plenty of people that listen to the feedback loop theory and hear “so it’s really all 3 then” instead of the actual message of “it’s complicated, but 2 and 3 are entangled together in ways that make 2 difficult to treat without dealing with 3, and that make 3 difficult to stop as long as 2 continues”.
And part of the problem is, people can’t say “2-and-3 with a weak influence from 1” without having people jump up and down on them and say “SEE? SEE! YOU DO ADMIT 1! YOU ADMIT 1! THAT MEANS CONTINUING 3 IS JUSTIFIED! I WIN! I WIN!”, which is a strong emotional disincentive to admitting 1 AT ALL. Going on and on and on about how “racial differences are real and EVERYONE IS LYING SO STOP LYING DAMNIT” is a great way to ensure that people become MORE mind-killed, because it doesn’t leave a line of retreat.
Yes, I’m aware of the feedback theory. I will point out that you still have the problem of how other groups, e.g., Jews, Irish, Asians, were able to break out of the feedback loop.
Also why aren’t there any proposed interventions in the (2) part of the feedback, e.g., actively criticizing ghetto culture? Notice, that the groups I listed above broke out of their feedback loops while the wider culture was focusing on (2) (and to a certain extent (1)) rather than (3).
Then as an aside (and I will address the rest of your post momentarily), why did you assert:
On the occasion most intellectuals are willing to admit this correlation exists at all, they immediately insist that it is completely due to (3) and proceed to ingeniously seek ever subtler forms of racism.
Secondarily, there are plenty of proposed interventions in the (2) part of the feedback, both from blacks and whites. Bill Cosby is rather famous for them; Chris Rock also has a particularly poignant set of criticisms. Part of the problem is that plenty of people have polluted the “criticize (2)” pathway by using it as a justification for reinforcing process (3) - “concern trolling” is a well-worn path.
As for the other groups, each of those groups came into their situations differently; I might suggest comparing black culture to native American culture, rather than Jewish, Irish or Asian culture. Sociology and history are complex, and outcomes are highly path-dependent.
This assertion looks true to me by empirical observation.
plenty of proposed interventions in the (2) part of the feedback, both from blacks and whites
Can you show some examples of whites proposing interventions into black culture (and not immediately being tarred and feathered)? You mentioned two black guys.
Can you show some examples of whites proposing interventions into black culture (and not immediately being tarred and feathered)? You mentioned two black guys.
If you add the second criteria (not immediately being tarred and feathered), it becomes more difficult. I’m aware of several hypotheses for why that may be. Would we like to discuss them?
The reasons look pretty obvious and hardly a mystery to me.
I’d prefer to backtrack a bit to the list of the three hypotheses about the black-white gap. Are you asserting that reason(1) is insignificant and the real cause is the feedback loop due to (2) and (3)?
That depends on what you mean by “insignificant”. I think that (1) has less of an affect than (2)+(3) by about half an order of magnitude or so, AND that (1) is much harder to do anything about in an ethical manner than (2)+(3). Is that the same thing?
I think that (1) has less of an affect than (2)+(3) by about half an order of magnitude or so
Let’s use numbers! :-)
The black-white IQ gap is about 15 points or about 1 standard deviation. Half an order of magnitude is five times greater. So you are saying that the genetic component has the effect of about 2.5 IQ points and the culture+racism have the effect of about 12.5 IQ points. Correct?
AND that (1) is much harder to do anything about in an ethical manner than (2)+(3)
Depends on your ethics. Not to mention that reality doesn’t care about what’s easy to do in an ethical manner and what’s not.
The black-white IQ gap is about 15 points or about 1 standard deviation. Half an order of magnitude is five times greater. So you are saying that the genetic component has the effect of about 2.5 IQ points and the culture+racism have the effect of about 12.5 IQ points. Correct?
Actually, half an order of magnitude is 3.2ish times greater, since “orders of magnitude” are logarithmic. Half an order of magnitude means 10 ^ 0.5, not 10 0.5, since two orders of magnitude means 10 ^ 2, not 10 2.
So I would be saying the genetic component has the effect of about 5 IQ points on average, and the culture+racism has the effect of about 10 IQ points, if all we’re talking about is IQ points. When I made the assertion I was thinking more about outcome quality in general, but thinking about it, I think that somewhere between 3 genetic/12 cultural and 5 genetic/10 cultural sounds highly plausible; I’d be willing to peg those as the endposts for my 90% confidence interval, and I’d be willing to update quite a bit given particularly challenging evidence to the contrary (but it’d have to be particularly challenging evidence).
Not to mention that reality doesn’t care about what’s easy to do in an ethical manner and what’s not.
Actually, half an order of magnitude is 3.2ish times greater, since “orders of magnitude” are logarithmic.
Depends on how you treat this, but OK.
So I would be saying the genetic component has the effect of about 5 IQ points on average, and the culture+racism has the effect of about 10 IQ points.
Well, even if culture+racism is 3.2 times more important that translates to about 3.6 points for genetic and 11.4 for c+r. However I don’t think precise numbers affect the argument here.
I think that somewhere between 3 genetic/12 cultural and 5 genetic/10 cultural sounds highly plausible; I’d be willing to peg those as the endposts for my 90% confidence interval, and I’d be willing to update quite a bit given particularly challenging evidence to the contrary (but it’d have to be particularly challenging evidence).
So, did you actually look at any evidence? There is a lot of it.
Given your preferred hypothesis, what would you expect the IQ of African populations be? They share some genes with the Aftican-Americans, but don’t share the culture and there shouldn’t be much suppressive racism outside of South Africa during the last 50 years or so.
They share some genes with the Aftican-Americans, but don’t share the culture and there shouldn’t be much suppressive racism outside of South Africa during the last 50 years or so.
I’m not sure this is the right way to be looking at the issue. It’s implausible that racism directly affects IQ; your stem cells don’t go out and check other people’s opinions of your ethnic background before they develop into a central nervous system. The idea is more that it’s associated with environmental factors that are reflected as a lower actual or apparent IQ: worse nutrition or other types of neglect in childhood, for example, or less motivation. It’s plausible that these more or less closely mirror what you’d see in nations without the same racial politics but which are unstable in other ways—and much of sub-Saharan Africa does have that reputation. (The continent’s own ethnic politics might also play a role—American-style racism isn’t the only type out there. How do Japanese-born ethnic Koreans do in comparison to Korean-born Koreans?)
One possible way of testing this would be to look at rapidly developing African countries in comparison with flatlined ones (Google Public Data is good for picking out which are which) and see if that’s reflected in IQ, if the data exists at that granularity. Other ways of breaking it down might also be useful: rural vs. urban, say, or by socioeconomic status.
I’m not sure this is the right way to be looking at the issue.
Well, yes, if we un-anchor from the way the discussion went in this thread, the basic issue is nature or nurture—are IQ differences caused by genes or by some/any/all “environmental” factors which can range from cultural oddities to micronutrient deficiencies.
My impression—and I’m too lazy to go, collect, and array the evidence properly—is that while it’s clear that environmental factors can suppress IQ in populations, after you correct and adjust for everything that comes to mind, the IQ gaps persist.
If by IQ you mean one’s performance on IQ tests, rather than the g-factor they seek to measure, there isa not-so-implausible mechanism by which racism can affect the former.
your stem cells don’t go out and check other people’s opinions of your ethnic background before they develop into a central nervous system
IAWYC but children retain lots of neuroplasticity even after their central nervous system has developed, and even adults do a little bit.
I meant g in that sentence, yes. The bit about motivation later was alluding to stereotype threat and similar effects.
Point taken re: neuroplasticity. It doesn’t seem likely that that’s an overwhelmingly large contributor to adult intelligence, but correlation between adult and childhood IQ scores isn’t so high that it couldn’t be playing a role. I’d be interested to see how that correlation changes between populations, now.
Given your preferred hypothesis, what would you expect the IQ of African populations be? They share some genes with the Aftican-Americans, but don’t share the culture and there shouldn’t be much suppressive racism outside of South Africa during the last 50 years or so.
That depends, do they share cultural overlap with Protestant Europe/America, or with post-Confuscian Asia? And if so, how much?
What are the IQs of other aboriginal cultures like, that diverged from, say, Asian or Polynesian stock, but also lack cultural influence from Protestant Europe/America or post-Confuscian Asia?
Yes, I’ve looked at evidence, but under which lens should I have looked at that evidence?
The question was “what would you expect..?” I am sure that it depends, but what is the outcome?
do they share cultural overlap with Protestant Europe/America
The culture of African-Americans clearly has more “cultural overlap” than the culture of Africans—would you agree? Given this, would you claim that African-Americans (after adjusting for the percentage of white, etc. genes that most of them have) have considerably higher (10-12 points) measured IQ than Africans?
under which lens should I have looked at that evidence?
I find “matching reality” to be a reasonably good lens :-)
Given this, would you claim that African-Americans (after adjusting for the percentage of white, etc. genes that most of them have) have considerably higher (10-12 points) measured IQ than Africans?
Last time I looked the former did have considerably higher measured IQ than the latter (around 85 vs around 70), so what’s your point?
Did you adjust for the percentage of white genes? Most African-Americans are about 25-50% non-black by ancestry, as far as I remember. That would influence the mean IQ.
When comparing populations of third-world and first-world countries you also have to be very careful to account for things like malnutrition, etc.
Did you adjust for the percentage of white genes? Most African-Americans are about 25-50% non-black by ancestry, as far as I remember. That would influence the mean IQ.
No, actually I remembered mentioning something about Ethiopians having lots of Caucasian DNA, used Wei Dai’s tool to search my comments for it, and… I was kind of surprised it was talking to the same person that time too.
I think that somewhere between 3 [thing A]/12 [thing B] and 5 [thing A]/10 [thing B] sounds highly plausible; I’d be willing to peg those as the endposts for my 90% confidence interval
I didn’t ask if you were aware of it, I asked if you had considered it.
I will point out that you still have the problem of how other groups, e.g., Jews, Irish, Asians, were able to break out of the feedback loop.
I am going to make a criticism about tone, here, but please understand that I’m not doing this as an attempt to refute or dismiss your argument; I’m doing this out of a legitimate desire to help you get your message across to people who would otherwise be unreceptive to it. You have a tendency to force your idea of other people’s position down their throats; it often comes across as wanting to ‘win points’ against liberal positions, rather than an attempt to actually seek truth. If you avoided personalizing language when criticizing liberal positions, you might help people see an opportunity to distance themselves from those positions, and thus help people avoid mind-killing emotional responses to having their positions challenged.
That’s a really good point. I was thinking purely in terms of evidence levels against the belief but how much resources is spent rationalizing it might matter. I was trying to avoid thinking too much of that by using the most obviously crazy beliefs all around, but if there’s systematic rationalization attempts more for one than another that might not help.
Could you expand why you think they don’t have about the same levels of evidence against? They seemed to to me, but it is possible that I’m missing something. I agree that making such comparisons across domains may be tough.
Interesting reply. The problem with examining this is that it’s really hard to objectively examine who holds the most crazy ideas: Ideally you would just pick X random crazy ideas and then see who holds them the most, but human brains are no good at this.
Instead what I do is look at the presidential elections and debates and see what the important people of each party actually say. You have to admit that the republican primaries were absolutely nuts, and the same cannot be said of democratic primaries. Of course Mitt Romney suddenly became much much more moderate as soon as he won the primaries, but to me this indicates that there is currently far more pressure among republicans to espouse crazy beliefs when talking to their base at least. What’s worse, I suspect that a large number of republican candidates really believed what they were saying, though I suspect that Romney was just being pragmatic. As soon as he won the primary, Hotelling’s law ensured that he had to make a swift jump to the middle to stand a chance, which he duly did.
The best way of handling mindkilling is to look at hard data.
To some extent you may have a valid point, but parties are extremely diverse entities. Even if one looked at small, fringe parties, there’s heavy variation in the beliefs. So, you might have a more valid point if you said something like “Self-identified Republicans are on average more likely to believe crazy things than self-identified Democrats.” Now, this will run into other issues because party identification if fluid, but it would be a start.
So, let’s use some beliefs that are by a largescale consensus “crazy” that are stereotypically associated with specific ends of the political spectrum in the US. I suggest the following four: “Barack Obama is a Muslim” (associated with the right), “The government was involved in 9/11” (left). It would be interesting to look at others that are more straight scientific issues, such as homeopathy works (left), vaccination is bad/causes autism(left), evolution is wrong (right). Now, let’s look at the data, but I don’t have the time to do so. So let’s focus on the two essentially conspiratorial claims.
The most recent poll I can find for Obama being a Muslim is here. Approximately 30% of Republicans think that Obama is a Muslim. Curiously, approximately 10% of Democrats think Obama is a Muslim (this is likely connected to the fact that 5-10% of any poll will be extremely confused or just give nonsensical answers).
Unfortunately, very few of the polls about beliefs about 9/11 ask for party identification, but there’s a Rasmussen poll indicating that around 35% of Democrats answered yes to Bush knowing about 9/11. See here. They don’t state the actual percentage of Republicans, and the actual poll seems to be behind a paywall. Moreover, other polls have gotten much smaller total percentages of belief, so actually getting data here may be tough. But at least from these two, it looks plausible that about an equal percentage of Republicans and Democrats are being crazy for their thing (although slightly higher numbers of Republicans may be saying yes to the Democratic brand of crazy, that’s hard to really tease out from the data, given margins of error, differences in questions, timing, and other issues).
Now, you can argue that there’s a difference in how seriously these beliefs are taken by the leadership in each party. So what’s the highest ranking politicians who have said that Obama was a Muslim? Well, it is easy to find high-ranking Republicans who think that Obama is getting advice or orders from the Muslim Brotherhood. Louie Gohmert is one of the louder examples. But that’s not the same as claiming that he’s a Muslim. So let’s now look at the reverse. The closest analog for the 9/11 issue then to Gohmert would be people wanting a new investigation. It turns out that’s a pretty large set . See here. It ranges throughout the political spectrum, and it isn’t easy to tell without much more work which of those want a new investigation because they think the 9/11 Commission didn’t do a great job and how many want a new investigation because they think it was the Illuminati/Rosicrusians/Jews/Daleks etc. So, actually looking at this metric may be tough.
Note it occurred to me while doing this, that birtherism might have been a better analog than claiming that Obama is a Muslim, and one does in fact get high-ranking politiicans endorsing that. See e.g. here. My impression is that genuinely crazy ideas are much more likely to be taken seriously by leadership on the right than leadership on the left, but getting substantial evidence for that is likely to be tough..This data at least suggests that any different between the two among the party base is small. It would be interesting to look at a bunch of other issues in a systematic fashion. While that would be fun to look at it, it wouldn’t by itself say much of anything about on any specific policy issue where Republicans or Democrats are correct.
This is not actually all that objective since it’s not clear what constitutes a “crazy belief”. Is it simple a matter of how much easily available evidence there is against it? Or does it also include considerations like what proportion of people believe it and how much effort smart people have devoted to rationalizing it?
Ideally, yes (and I upvoted this for its insight), but that can easily becomes a Fully General Counterargument if we aren’t EXTREMELY careful—since “how much effort smart people have devoted to rationalizing it” can look like “how much easily available evidence there is against it”, and vice-versa.
As people have mentioned, this is a Very Hard Problem.
Well the context was determining which beliefs were “crazy” for use in a meta-analysis, not determining what to believe directly.
Also frankly I can think of numerous areas where there is a lot of easily available evidence that a lot of smart people have devoted a lot of energy trying to rationalize away or at least train people not to notice, the correlation between race and both propensity to violence and intelligence being the most obvious example.
In this particular example, though, I don’t think (non-mindkilled) people try to train people not to notice it, and in most rational cases that I’ve seen, it isn’t “rationalized away” so much as people spend a good deal of effort insisting that correlation does not always imply causation, and that social policies which take that correlation into account need to be VERY careful not to repeat tabooed historical solutions. I think if “I agree denotationally but object connotationally” were a more widespread concept, we would see a lot of this tendency disappear.
Well, by that standard nearly everyone is mindkilled about this issue.
Well that depends on what theory one means by “causation”. There are three main theories about the cause of this correlation:
1) The genetic theory.
2) The cultural theory, i.e., contemporary black culture has elements that discourage intelligence and encourage violent behavior.
3) The implicit racism theory.
On the occasion most intellectuals are willing to admit this correlation exists at all, they immediately insist that it is completely due to (3) and proceed to ingeniously seek ever subtler forms of racism.
Well, the current solutions, all based on theory (3), aren’t working. The rational response to this evidence would be to assign more weight to theories (1) and/or (2). This, however, is considered unacceptable so people wind up searching for ever subtler forms of racism to explain why the correlations persist.
Have you considered the alternative hypothesis that you’re hyper-sensitized to noticing people who believe 3-and-ONLY-3, and are therefore ignoring evidence of people who believe 2-and-3, or occasionally 2-and-3-with-a-smattering-of-1? Because I know of PLENTY of people who agree that 2-and-3 are likely causes (with maybe a weak influence from 1), and operate together in a feedback loop—but I also know plenty of people that listen to the feedback loop theory and hear “so it’s really all 3 then” instead of the actual message of “it’s complicated, but 2 and 3 are entangled together in ways that make 2 difficult to treat without dealing with 3, and that make 3 difficult to stop as long as 2 continues”.
And part of the problem is, people can’t say “2-and-3 with a weak influence from 1” without having people jump up and down on them and say “SEE? SEE! YOU DO ADMIT 1! YOU ADMIT 1! THAT MEANS CONTINUING 3 IS JUSTIFIED! I WIN! I WIN!”, which is a strong emotional disincentive to admitting 1 AT ALL. Going on and on and on about how “racial differences are real and EVERYONE IS LYING SO STOP LYING DAMNIT” is a great way to ensure that people become MORE mind-killed, because it doesn’t leave a line of retreat.
Yes, I’m aware of the feedback theory. I will point out that you still have the problem of how other groups, e.g., Jews, Irish, Asians, were able to break out of the feedback loop.
Also why aren’t there any proposed interventions in the (2) part of the feedback, e.g., actively criticizing ghetto culture? Notice, that the groups I listed above broke out of their feedback loops while the wider culture was focusing on (2) (and to a certain extent (1)) rather than (3).
Then as an aside (and I will address the rest of your post momentarily), why did you assert:
Secondarily, there are plenty of proposed interventions in the (2) part of the feedback, both from blacks and whites. Bill Cosby is rather famous for them; Chris Rock also has a particularly poignant set of criticisms. Part of the problem is that plenty of people have polluted the “criticize (2)” pathway by using it as a justification for reinforcing process (3) - “concern trolling” is a well-worn path.
As for the other groups, each of those groups came into their situations differently; I might suggest comparing black culture to native American culture, rather than Jewish, Irish or Asian culture. Sociology and history are complex, and outcomes are highly path-dependent.
This assertion looks true to me by empirical observation.
Can you show some examples of whites proposing interventions into black culture (and not immediately being tarred and feathered)? You mentioned two black guys.
If you add the second criteria (not immediately being tarred and feathered), it becomes more difficult. I’m aware of several hypotheses for why that may be. Would we like to discuss them?
The reasons look pretty obvious and hardly a mystery to me.
I’d prefer to backtrack a bit to the list of the three hypotheses about the black-white gap. Are you asserting that reason(1) is insignificant and the real cause is the feedback loop due to (2) and (3)?
That depends on what you mean by “insignificant”. I think that (1) has less of an affect than (2)+(3) by about half an order of magnitude or so, AND that (1) is much harder to do anything about in an ethical manner than (2)+(3). Is that the same thing?
Let’s use numbers! :-)
The black-white IQ gap is about 15 points or about 1 standard deviation. Half an order of magnitude is five times greater. So you are saying that the genetic component has the effect of about 2.5 IQ points and the culture+racism have the effect of about 12.5 IQ points. Correct?
Depends on your ethics. Not to mention that reality doesn’t care about what’s easy to do in an ethical manner and what’s not.
Sweet! I love this part. :)
Actually, half an order of magnitude is 3.2ish times greater, since “orders of magnitude” are logarithmic. Half an order of magnitude means 10 ^ 0.5, not 10 0.5, since two orders of magnitude means 10 ^ 2, not 10 2.
So I would be saying the genetic component has the effect of about 5 IQ points on average, and the culture+racism has the effect of about 10 IQ points, if all we’re talking about is IQ points. When I made the assertion I was thinking more about outcome quality in general, but thinking about it, I think that somewhere between 3 genetic/12 cultural and 5 genetic/10 cultural sounds highly plausible; I’d be willing to peg those as the endposts for my 90% confidence interval, and I’d be willing to update quite a bit given particularly challenging evidence to the contrary (but it’d have to be particularly challenging evidence).
No, but humans tend to.
Depends on how you treat this, but OK.
Well, even if culture+racism is 3.2 times more important that translates to about 3.6 points for genetic and 11.4 for c+r. However I don’t think precise numbers affect the argument here.
So, did you actually look at any evidence? There is a lot of it.
Given your preferred hypothesis, what would you expect the IQ of African populations be? They share some genes with the Aftican-Americans, but don’t share the culture and there shouldn’t be much suppressive racism outside of South Africa during the last 50 years or so.
I’m not sure this is the right way to be looking at the issue. It’s implausible that racism directly affects IQ; your stem cells don’t go out and check other people’s opinions of your ethnic background before they develop into a central nervous system. The idea is more that it’s associated with environmental factors that are reflected as a lower actual or apparent IQ: worse nutrition or other types of neglect in childhood, for example, or less motivation. It’s plausible that these more or less closely mirror what you’d see in nations without the same racial politics but which are unstable in other ways—and much of sub-Saharan Africa does have that reputation. (The continent’s own ethnic politics might also play a role—American-style racism isn’t the only type out there. How do Japanese-born ethnic Koreans do in comparison to Korean-born Koreans?)
One possible way of testing this would be to look at rapidly developing African countries in comparison with flatlined ones (Google Public Data is good for picking out which are which) and see if that’s reflected in IQ, if the data exists at that granularity. Other ways of breaking it down might also be useful: rural vs. urban, say, or by socioeconomic status.
Well, yes, if we un-anchor from the way the discussion went in this thread, the basic issue is nature or nurture—are IQ differences caused by genes or by some/any/all “environmental” factors which can range from cultural oddities to micronutrient deficiencies.
My impression—and I’m too lazy to go, collect, and array the evidence properly—is that while it’s clear that environmental factors can suppress IQ in populations, after you correct and adjust for everything that comes to mind, the IQ gaps persist.
If by IQ you mean one’s performance on IQ tests, rather than the g-factor they seek to measure, there is a not-so-implausible mechanism by which racism can affect the former.
IAWYC but children retain lots of neuroplasticity even after their central nervous system has developed, and even adults do a little bit.
I meant g in that sentence, yes. The bit about motivation later was alluding to stereotype threat and similar effects.
Point taken re: neuroplasticity. It doesn’t seem likely that that’s an overwhelmingly large contributor to adult intelligence, but correlation between adult and childhood IQ scores isn’t so high that it couldn’t be playing a role. I’d be interested to see how that correlation changes between populations, now.
That depends, do they share cultural overlap with Protestant Europe/America, or with post-Confuscian Asia? And if so, how much?
What are the IQs of other aboriginal cultures like, that diverged from, say, Asian or Polynesian stock, but also lack cultural influence from Protestant Europe/America or post-Confuscian Asia?
Yes, I’ve looked at evidence, but under which lens should I have looked at that evidence?
The question was “what would you expect..?” I am sure that it depends, but what is the outcome?
The culture of African-Americans clearly has more “cultural overlap” than the culture of Africans—would you agree? Given this, would you claim that African-Americans (after adjusting for the percentage of white, etc. genes that most of them have) have considerably higher (10-12 points) measured IQ than Africans?
I find “matching reality” to be a reasonably good lens :-)
Last time I looked the former did have considerably higher measured IQ than the latter (around 85 vs around 70), so what’s your point?
Did you adjust for the percentage of white genes? Most African-Americans are about 25-50% non-black by ancestry, as far as I remember. That would influence the mean IQ.
When comparing populations of third-world and first-world countries you also have to be very careful to account for things like malnutrition, etc.
Looks like we already had this same conversation before. ;-)
Ah. You have a better memory than I do :-)
No, actually I remembered mentioning something about Ethiopians having lots of Caucasian DNA, used Wei Dai’s tool to search my comments for it, and… I was kind of surprised it was talking to the same person that time too.
That sounds overconfident.
On a seperate channel:
I didn’t ask if you were aware of it, I asked if you had considered it.
I am going to make a criticism about tone, here, but please understand that I’m not doing this as an attempt to refute or dismiss your argument; I’m doing this out of a legitimate desire to help you get your message across to people who would otherwise be unreceptive to it. You have a tendency to force your idea of other people’s position down their throats; it often comes across as wanting to ‘win points’ against liberal positions, rather than an attempt to actually seek truth. If you avoided personalizing language when criticizing liberal positions, you might help people see an opportunity to distance themselves from those positions, and thus help people avoid mind-killing emotional responses to having their positions challenged.
That’s a really good point. I was thinking purely in terms of evidence levels against the belief but how much resources is spent rationalizing it might matter. I was trying to avoid thinking too much of that by using the most obviously crazy beliefs all around, but if there’s systematic rationalization attempts more for one than another that might not help.
Well, your examples are not very well balanced by level of evidence against, although it’s hard to compare this across different domains.
Could you expand why you think they don’t have about the same levels of evidence against? They seemed to to me, but it is possible that I’m missing something. I agree that making such comparisons across domains may be tough.
Oops. I was comparing Birtherism to controlled demolition theories and forgot that not all 9/11 Truther theories were that crazy.
Interesting reply. The problem with examining this is that it’s really hard to objectively examine who holds the most crazy ideas: Ideally you would just pick X random crazy ideas and then see who holds them the most, but human brains are no good at this.
Instead what I do is look at the presidential elections and debates and see what the important people of each party actually say. You have to admit that the republican primaries were absolutely nuts, and the same cannot be said of democratic primaries. Of course Mitt Romney suddenly became much much more moderate as soon as he won the primaries, but to me this indicates that there is currently far more pressure among republicans to espouse crazy beliefs when talking to their base at least. What’s worse, I suspect that a large number of republican candidates really believed what they were saying, though I suspect that Romney was just being pragmatic. As soon as he won the primary, Hotelling’s law ensured that he had to make a swift jump to the middle to stand a chance, which he duly did.