Regarding: “a norm against asserting that there are meaningful genetic differences between groups of people in traits like intelligence”.
I agree that the original email violated this norm, but I don’t believe that his apology violated this norm. Now, I know you just said that this norm had been violated without specifically saying that both documents violated these norms, but the way this was written made it sound like both documents violated the norm, although this might not be what you meant.
I won’t be surprised if you reply that his apology violated a second, very closely related norm and I think that would a very reasonable thing to point out.
However, I want to emphasise that precision here matters and that making progress on these kinds of challenging issues requires us to set this kind of level of precision as the benchmark. If we don’t do this, then it’s very easy for a number of these little, tiny issues to stack on top of each other and for us to end up believing things that are very far away from reality.
Regarding: “a norm against asserting that there are meaningful genetic differences between groups of people in traits like intelligence”.
I agree that the original email violated this norm, but I don’t believe that his apology violated this norm. Now, I know you just said that this norm had been violated without specifically saying that both documents violated these norms, but the way this was written made it sound like both documents violated the norm, although this might not be what you meant.
I won’t be surprised if you reply that his apology violated a second, very closely related norm and I think that would a very reasonable thing to point out.
However, I want to emphasise that precision here matters and that making progress on these kinds of challenging issues requires us to set this kind of level of precision as the benchmark. If we don’t do this, then it’s very easy for a number of these little, tiny issues to stack on top of each other and for us to end up believing things that are very far away from reality.