I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.
The scientific proposition is “are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence” right, not “is racism [morally] right”?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would… still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don’t think I’d update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that’s slightly more intelligent on average.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”
I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.
The scientific proposition is “are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence” right, not “is racism [morally] right”?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would… still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don’t think I’d update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that’s slightly more intelligent on average.
Well said.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”