If a scientific theory is one that is reasonably objective, repeatable, falsifiable then it should not be dismissed scientifically. But knowing that something might be correct and how we act on that something is beyond the boundaries of just science.
What should direct our actions are also, and perhaps primarily, ethical and moral considerations. Babies are born everyday who have severe brain damage and may not live long and possibly not even be sentient. People may develop severe dementia and even lose parts of their brains. This doesn't allow them to be treated as non-human.
When we write things like "all men are created equal", that is not a scientific conclusion but a moral and ethical one. It is a statement that reflects our values.
Unfortunately, scientific facts are dismissed all the time because of their political consequences, though virtually always because those facts - global warming, cigarettes cause lung cancer - threaten a moneyed interest.
It's extremely important to be rigorously committed to the truth at all costs, because the moment we lose that you'll never be allowed to question a rich person again.
> As cold as this sounds, the reason we should reject the race-skull shape-intelligence theory is because it lacks rigourous evidence and has flawed logic. Not because it is racist in and of itself.
I disagree. I think of this as an ethical issue first and foremost. I recently read an essay on the moral equality of humans which argues that human equality should not be based on empirical observations on the question of how similar humans really are to each other naturally, but rather be understood as a political achievement that is based in moral progress.
You can even argue this position from a kantian viewpoint, wherein human equality is based not in some sort of (observed) property posessed by all humans, but rather a result of the ethics of pure reason which actively applies a claim of equality to all humans.
Human moral equality is more like a human right. Human rights aren‘t natural to humans, they‘re a distinct political achievement. And we should think about human equality in a similar way: as an ethical achievement.
PS: Apart from that there ARE people in society who have mental disabilities for example, yet I think we can all agree that despite the factual existence of these diasbilities, the fact that some people are less able to perfom certain tasks, this doesn‘t ever justify discrimination against them.
Here’s an idea. The class of normative properties is the smallest class of properties such that the facts about what should be done supervene upon their pattern of instantiation.
>>>The class of normative properties is the smallest class of properties such that the facts about what should be done supervene upon their pattern of instantiation
Okay, I'm a little lost. For example, does my bicycle have the property goodness and the fact that I should ride it supervene on this goodness?
Does my wife have the property goodness if so, what should I do as a consequence?
[I have to leave soon so might be unable to pester you further before the morrow.]
No, what my other comment suggested was that the normative properties are those properties which, once we fix what has them or not in a world, we also fix the facts about what ought be done in that world. Equivalently: any worlds which differ with respect to what should be done will differ with respect to what has which normative properties.
We can suppose for the sake of argument that goodness is actually the only normative property, so that the aforementioned class is a singleton. Then any worlds which differ with respect to what should be done will differ with respect to what instantiates goodness.
Well a scientific theory should be independent of political consequences.
From a modern ethical standpoint, if new evidence came to light which somehow proved racially-associated deficits in cognitive or other abilities, we should in theory treat it like any other medical condition. We know certain populations are more prone to certain diseases/medical conditions, and we don't generally just say this makes them genetically inferior and throw them in a labour camp, we just adjust medical protocols when encountering those populations and are more likely to screen/treat those populations for those more prevalent conditions.
Agreed. We have IEPs for children with disabilities to give them equal footing in schools and legal accommodations to help adults with disabilities work. Legally and ethically, the groundwork is laid. We have enough legal and ethical protections for minority groups that can be adapted for scientific findings that might be considered 'politically incorrect' without automatically going a problematic route.
Some genes are more/less beneficial than others. The problem comes from who is deciding which genes are beneficial and which aren't, and who gets to make decisions that affect other people's lives.
Imagine if eradicating MS and Alzheimers was as simple as a handful of people choosing not to have kids? Not passing on a disease to the next generation seems like the obvious ethical choice.
Demanding that carriers of X Trait be prevented from having kids is seriously problematic however.
Studies of climate change and environmental degradation are bad for business. Should such studies therefore be suppressed?
The discussion of slavery makes white people feel bad, and causes everyone to feel that America is not the land of the free and that those who wrote "all men are created equal" were cynical hypocrites. So should slavery be deleted from US history?
1992 I had a university Anthropology professor make reference to a book published years earlier that he claims was full of references to peer reviewed research and studies regarding... a specific minority group. He said he was mentioning it only to provide an example of how sometimes facts don't matter. In this case the book was banned and blacklisted from being printed. The World Wide Web wasn't much of a thing, but the university librarian was willing to help a group of us look up the book. All we could tell was it existed, but was unavailable through university transfer, which gave at least some credibility to what our professor claimed. Should theory be dismissed because of political consequences? Absolutely not. But it happens every day.
One consideration is that science on its own doesn’t really make value judgments. In purely scientific terms, “genetically inferior” is ill-defined. We could produce evidence that a particular variable is statistically significantly different across subgroups, but that doesn’t make one subgroup better than the other; that judgment requires subjective considerations beyond science
If, for example, one subgroup has a higher incidence of a particular illness, and we determine that that difference is genetic, do we consider that to be an “inferior” trait? Does it depend on the magnitude of the susceptibility, or is even a 0.1% difference considered inferior? What ratio of inferior to superior traits does a subgroup need before we consider it inferior overall? Are some traits more relevant to the overall determination than others? These are not scientific questions.
The bottom line is that the only way we could scientifically “prove” that one race is inferior to another is to show that they are consistently and substantially worse at everything—and that’s plainly not the case. Anything less than that is in the realm of subjective interpretation.
Theories are hypotheses strongly supported (or at least not disproven) by high quality evidence in response to a hypothesis.
But hypotheses do not arise spontaneously in the world. They are posed by people, who come up with them based on their experience in the world.
It is at the point of forming the hypothesis that racism could creep in. Posing the question “do star-bellied sneeches have more of a [desireable trait] than do plain-bellied sneeches?” is an inherently racist hypothesis. Not only does it divide the population of sneeches along racial lines right from the jump, it also posits the desirability of the trait being measured.
Elevating the hypothesis to a theorem based on evidence does not absolve it of its racist origin and intent.
No one gives a shit. Coming up with hypotheticals about this kind of thing is racist to begin with. You're asking for permission to rank races by intelligence you're not being some noble philosopher and nobody is fooled by it. I don't care if you are not white yourself.
Sure, but we're not absolute copies of each other either.
It's just a hypothetical that can apply to any division between people.
If segmented group of people A is shown in repeatable experiments to have different [insert quality of interest here] then segmented group of people B, should the results be rejected if it results in a moral harm like discrimination based off of inherent properties?
What I'm saying is that that may not be a reflection of some kind of genetic predisposition but a social imposition as a result of the perception of different races.
The question isn't what are the genetic markers intrinsic to every individual race that give rise to A variation of intelligence because there's only one race, so there's only socioeconomic factors that impact the intelligence of every individual ethnicity.
Saying that a white person is more likely to achieve this that or the other thing in a system designed to optimize the success of white people doesn't lead to a direct causation that white people are superior to other races, Just at the environmental factors, may or may not be giving certain groups of people an edge over everyone else.
I wasn't talking about race. That's why I emphasized ANY slice of people.
Like if an experiment showed that people with an even number of moles on their bodies were better at geometry then people with an odd number of moles on their body, should we not acknowledge the results because it could lead towards biased treatment? Yes, no, and I don't know are perfectly fine answers to give here.
I wasn't talking about race. Idk why you're so focused on that. I'm not white so I have no investment in that specific division.
People are different and that's ok. External factors are NOT 100% of the story. If you disagree with me here, then we should end this.
Words like "better" or "superior" don't mean anything without a specific object. Better at what? Superior at what?
If we're talking about aquiring vitamin D from the sun, people with less melanin are better(at that specific task).
If we're talking about avoiding skin cancer caused by the sun without external aid, then people with more melanin are superior (at that specific task).
Although apparently it is a controversial hypothesis - perhaps some disagreement in the field. I can’t really elaborate as I am not an economist, but I can say that no one is unwilling to publish. The senior author is Steven Levitt, co-author of the Freakonomics books and is not afraid of controversial ideas.
I know you shared these just to illustrate that there is published research on this question, so I'm not arguing with your comment or anything.
For others who might read these I just want to point out that this research is nonsense in the way it's presented. These are correlational studies that prove literally nothing about the supposed phenomenon. Correlational studies are useful for pointing out that there might be something to be explained, but the problem is that the authors already present it as if they have found proven causation, which is clearly wrong when you read their methodology. The worst is that they do not even try to describe how this causational link should actually work.
Please be careful when interpreting these results.
In science, we do not use the word “prove.” Ever. Science does not work like mathematics nor formal logic. We don’t have “proofs.” So, a little saying we scientists like to remind one another of: nothing is ever proven in science. This reminds us of humility and that overconfidence and hubris are foolish. We can never reach the same level of certainty in maths or formal logic.
>these I just want to point out that this research is nonsense in the way it's presented.
Are you an economist? These are primary peer reviewed papers. What grounds do you have to call it nonsense?
“Out of context” might be a more reasonable expression.
Nonsense seems more likely to be in the eye of the beholder.
Sure, sloppy wording from my side, obviously science is about falsification, but you'd have to willingly blindfold yourself to not understand what I meant. As I said, the authors don't provide a theory of the mechanism so there's literally no science in it that can be tested and falsified. A regression analysis is not science, that's a statistical tool.
> Are you an economist? [...] What grounds do you have to call it nonsense
Appeal to authority would not be the best way to prove any point, especially not in science, so this sounds a bit ironic from you, but as a matter of fact, economics is indeed my field. However, one doesn't need to be an economist to read the methodology of the studies and evaluate my critiques. I literally wrote on what grounds I call it nonsense. Debate the content of what I said, not my credentials.
> There are primary peer reviewed papers.
Again, where does this appeal to authority come from? If you're not able to understand it yourself, then maybe you shouldn't go around waving the results that this is credible stuff. And don't act like sloppy research doesn't exist, this is a very real phenomenon of current academic research. As I said, one has to debate the content (which I did), not the credentials.
In my opinion, the word "intelligence" can never exist in a scientific statement because the concept of "intelligence" is not objectively defined. You can tweak the definition of intelligence all you want in order to get the results you're after.
I don’t know if I would say it can never exist in a scientific statement, but I do know that most people who haven’t studied psychology don’t fully appreciate that both the construct of intelligence and the measurement of IQ is controversial.
“What if the idea that brown and black people are genetically and intellectually inferior to white people was "proven" to be true. White people have more fuel to look down upon me. What would that mean for human rights, which emohaises that all humans are inherently equal.”
That construction is misleading. Is it about the average in a group? It doesn’t specify that all black/brown people are inferior to all white people.
If there were a measurement on a valid scale, you would have to apply it to individuals for any useful purpose.
Suppose there is a difference where there is a difference between ethnic population groups?
It’d be surprising that such differences don’t exist. Eg ethnic groups that spent many generations evolving in high altitude and/latitude tend to be able to digest unfermented milk as adults while very few of those from low lying equatorial areas do not.
Now things like IQ are socially dangerous. Could there be a difference? In principle sure. I haven’t looked into those studies but (1) how different is it and (2) there’s a lot of potential sociological noise. So, are the differences even meaningful. Eg if the median IQ across five groups varied by 5 IQ points (98, 99, 100, 101, 102). The probability a random someone from the 102 set has higher IQ than the 98 set is only 57.5%. Ie it’s not that’s meaningful to base any decisions. Why? A small majority probability for an expected effect size that likely wouldn’t even be detected in actual functioning. Other factors would overshadow it easily. Eg for a job: conscientiousness, active listening, conflict resolution, etc blow 1-5 IQ points out of the water. Also if the ethnic groups vary in say epigenetic health pre-conception, prenatal environment, and nutrition (protein) access in infancy-toddler-child that will likely confound the IQ data.
Now interestingly, if a group is shown to be much lower in some area, that potentially could be useful for social policy. That depends a lot of who’s running it.
Is it ethical to do this type of research? Right now it’s mostly downside as you say probably would just feed socially destructive ideologies. But from a technical science the differences I’ve heard claimed seem to be essentially not impactful anyway. It seems to be a waste of scientific resources. Would I or should public funds fund it: no. Should it be banned from peer review? I think that it something we definitely don’t want to restrict. Once you do that it’s like 1st amendment tampering. Generally the ethic we’ve agree to for 1st amendment is proximal real danger (yelling fire). Eg publishing which procedures can engineer a super virus with current widely accessible technology is something that a journal probably should not publish.
Now what is unethical is claiming theories that are clearly not ethnic or race based whatsoever and have decades of cross cultural study are racist because the people that came up with the idea happened to have a certain skin color. That’s complete garbage and it does happen. An example is Attachment Theory in Developmental Psychology.
The problem I see is, throwing the baby out with the bathwater for one.
If you inject anything other than the observable truth into science, your "theory" will be riddled with logical fallacies beyond description. It's pretty easy to spot once you know the rules.
The human race isn't mature enough to deal with real difficult truths. Look at climate change, or eugenics, or abortion. Apocalyptic inability to deal. If aliens are real, but the truth is that we some sort of slaves to the aliens, or in some kind of Matrix situation, is that truth people can handle? No. Mass revolt. The question isn't should it be dismissed, but why and how you're going to introduce the idea to people. YOU don't have to dismiss the truth, but the public is a different thing.
If somehow some race-based theory were true in a way that makes us uncomfortable, it doesn't change the fact that every human should have the chance to advance as far as their potential will allow (Even if they're unborn. Or not.).
phiwong | a day ago
If a scientific theory is one that is reasonably objective, repeatable, falsifiable then it should not be dismissed scientifically. But knowing that something might be correct and how we act on that something is beyond the boundaries of just science.
What should direct our actions are also, and perhaps primarily, ethical and moral considerations. Babies are born everyday who have severe brain damage and may not live long and possibly not even be sentient. People may develop severe dementia and even lose parts of their brains. This doesn't allow them to be treated as non-human.
When we write things like "all men are created equal", that is not a scientific conclusion but a moral and ethical one. It is a statement that reflects our values.
No_Rec1979 | 23 hours ago
Unfortunately, scientific facts are dismissed all the time because of their political consequences, though virtually always because those facts - global warming, cigarettes cause lung cancer - threaten a moneyed interest.
It's extremely important to be rigorously committed to the truth at all costs, because the moment we lose that you'll never be allowed to question a rich person again.
XK20022 | a day ago
> As cold as this sounds, the reason we should reject the race-skull shape-intelligence theory is because it lacks rigourous evidence and has flawed logic. Not because it is racist in and of itself.
I disagree. I think of this as an ethical issue first and foremost. I recently read an essay on the moral equality of humans which argues that human equality should not be based on empirical observations on the question of how similar humans really are to each other naturally, but rather be understood as a political achievement that is based in moral progress.
You can even argue this position from a kantian viewpoint, wherein human equality is based not in some sort of (observed) property posessed by all humans, but rather a result of the ethics of pure reason which actively applies a claim of equality to all humans.
Human moral equality is more like a human right. Human rights aren‘t natural to humans, they‘re a distinct political achievement. And we should think about human equality in a similar way: as an ethical achievement.
PS: Apart from that there ARE people in society who have mental disabilities for example, yet I think we can all agree that despite the factual existence of these diasbilities, the fact that some people are less able to perfom certain tasks, this doesn‘t ever justify discrimination against them.
[OP] PuzzleheadedThroat84 | a day ago
The last post scriptum was very eye opening. I don't know how I overlooked people with mental disabilities.
StrangeGlaringEye | 20 hours ago
How would you reply to this argument?
all properties are natural
what we should do depends solely on what normative properties things have
science is our best guide to what natural properties things have
Conclusion: science is our best guide to what we should do.
ughaibu | 12 hours ago
>what normative properties things have
What is a "normative property"?
StrangeGlaringEye | 11 hours ago
Here’s an idea. The class of normative properties is the smallest class of properties such that the facts about what should be done supervene upon their pattern of instantiation.
ughaibu | 11 hours ago
Can you suggest an example?
StrangeGlaringEye | 11 hours ago
Of a normative property? Presumably goodness is one.
ughaibu | 11 hours ago
>>>The class of normative properties is the smallest class of properties such that the facts about what should be done supervene upon their pattern of instantiation
Okay, I'm a little lost. For example, does my bicycle have the property goodness and the fact that I should ride it supervene on this goodness?
Does my wife have the property goodness if so, what should I do as a consequence?
[I have to leave soon so might be unable to pester you further before the morrow.]
StrangeGlaringEye | 11 hours ago
No, what my other comment suggested was that the normative properties are those properties which, once we fix what has them or not in a world, we also fix the facts about what ought be done in that world. Equivalently: any worlds which differ with respect to what should be done will differ with respect to what has which normative properties.
We can suppose for the sake of argument that goodness is actually the only normative property, so that the aforementioned class is a singleton. Then any worlds which differ with respect to what should be done will differ with respect to what instantiates goodness.
YtterbiusAntimony | 23 hours ago
Excellent point.
The scientific implications don't matter, because we can choose to treat each other better anyways.
wine-o-saur | a day ago
Well a scientific theory should be independent of political consequences.
From a modern ethical standpoint, if new evidence came to light which somehow proved racially-associated deficits in cognitive or other abilities, we should in theory treat it like any other medical condition. We know certain populations are more prone to certain diseases/medical conditions, and we don't generally just say this makes them genetically inferior and throw them in a labour camp, we just adjust medical protocols when encountering those populations and are more likely to screen/treat those populations for those more prevalent conditions.
TinyRascalSaurus | 21 hours ago
Agreed. We have IEPs for children with disabilities to give them equal footing in schools and legal accommodations to help adults with disabilities work. Legally and ethically, the groundwork is laid. We have enough legal and ethical protections for minority groups that can be adapted for scientific findings that might be considered 'politically incorrect' without automatically going a problematic route.
YtterbiusAntimony | 21 hours ago
Eugenics is an excellent example of this problem.
Some genes are more/less beneficial than others. The problem comes from who is deciding which genes are beneficial and which aren't, and who gets to make decisions that affect other people's lives.
Imagine if eradicating MS and Alzheimers was as simple as a handful of people choosing not to have kids? Not passing on a disease to the next generation seems like the obvious ethical choice.
Demanding that carriers of X Trait be prevented from having kids is seriously problematic however.
SeeBuyFly3 | 19 hours ago
How about these:
Studies of climate change and environmental degradation are bad for business. Should such studies therefore be suppressed?
The discussion of slavery makes white people feel bad, and causes everyone to feel that America is not the land of the free and that those who wrote "all men are created equal" were cynical hypocrites. So should slavery be deleted from US history?
Suppression of facts works both ways.
Silver_Pennies | 22 hours ago
1992 I had a university Anthropology professor make reference to a book published years earlier that he claims was full of references to peer reviewed research and studies regarding... a specific minority group. He said he was mentioning it only to provide an example of how sometimes facts don't matter. In this case the book was banned and blacklisted from being printed. The World Wide Web wasn't much of a thing, but the university librarian was willing to help a group of us look up the book. All we could tell was it existed, but was unavailable through university transfer, which gave at least some credibility to what our professor claimed. Should theory be dismissed because of political consequences? Absolutely not. But it happens every day.
BlueEyeGlamurai | 22 hours ago
One consideration is that science on its own doesn’t really make value judgments. In purely scientific terms, “genetically inferior” is ill-defined. We could produce evidence that a particular variable is statistically significantly different across subgroups, but that doesn’t make one subgroup better than the other; that judgment requires subjective considerations beyond science
If, for example, one subgroup has a higher incidence of a particular illness, and we determine that that difference is genetic, do we consider that to be an “inferior” trait? Does it depend on the magnitude of the susceptibility, or is even a 0.1% difference considered inferior? What ratio of inferior to superior traits does a subgroup need before we consider it inferior overall? Are some traits more relevant to the overall determination than others? These are not scientific questions.
The bottom line is that the only way we could scientifically “prove” that one race is inferior to another is to show that they are consistently and substantially worse at everything—and that’s plainly not the case. Anything less than that is in the realm of subjective interpretation.
peacefinder | 22 hours ago
Theories are hypotheses strongly supported (or at least not disproven) by high quality evidence in response to a hypothesis.
But hypotheses do not arise spontaneously in the world. They are posed by people, who come up with them based on their experience in the world.
It is at the point of forming the hypothesis that racism could creep in. Posing the question “do star-bellied sneeches have more of a [desireable trait] than do plain-bellied sneeches?” is an inherently racist hypothesis. Not only does it divide the population of sneeches along racial lines right from the jump, it also posits the desirability of the trait being measured.
Elevating the hypothesis to a theorem based on evidence does not absolve it of its racist origin and intent.
CommercialHeat4218 | 21 hours ago
No one gives a shit. Coming up with hypotheticals about this kind of thing is racist to begin with. You're asking for permission to rank races by intelligence you're not being some noble philosopher and nobody is fooled by it. I don't care if you are not white yourself.
Mono_Clear | a day ago
The premise is intrinsically flawed. There's only one race.
Dhalym | 23 hours ago
Sure, but we're not absolute copies of each other either.
It's just a hypothetical that can apply to any division between people.
If segmented group of people A is shown in repeatable experiments to have different [insert quality of interest here] then segmented group of people B, should the results be rejected if it results in a moral harm like discrimination based off of inherent properties?
Mono_Clear | 23 hours ago
What I'm saying is that that may not be a reflection of some kind of genetic predisposition but a social imposition as a result of the perception of different races.
The question isn't what are the genetic markers intrinsic to every individual race that give rise to A variation of intelligence because there's only one race, so there's only socioeconomic factors that impact the intelligence of every individual ethnicity.
Saying that a white person is more likely to achieve this that or the other thing in a system designed to optimize the success of white people doesn't lead to a direct causation that white people are superior to other races, Just at the environmental factors, may or may not be giving certain groups of people an edge over everyone else.
Dhalym | 23 hours ago
Can we not engage with a hypothetical where a repeatable experiment did find a genetic disposition to something or is that out of the question?
It's just a thought experiment.
Mono_Clear | 23 hours ago
I already know what's down that path. We've already been there.
We know what happens When white people think that they are genetically superior.
I will no longer entertain the thought
Dhalym | 23 hours ago
I wasn't talking about race. That's why I emphasized ANY slice of people.
Like if an experiment showed that people with an even number of moles on their bodies were better at geometry then people with an odd number of moles on their body, should we not acknowledge the results because it could lead towards biased treatment? Yes, no, and I don't know are perfectly fine answers to give here.
Mono_Clear | 23 hours ago
The question is about race and I am addressing that aspect of it.
You can address whatever aspect of moles and geometry you feel like.
But the social and geopolitical impact of race-based interpretations of intelligence have never benefited black people.
And I will not entertain any implication that it has the slightest grounds to be taken seriously.
Especially since social economic factors have been shown to be a much more meaningful indicator of intelligence.
Dhalym | 23 hours ago
At that point you just don't want to do this kind of philosophy, which is fine. I just think it's neat that truth isn't always a good thing.
It sort of reminds me of Plato's noble lies or Nietzche's idea of functional deceptions.
Mono_Clear | 23 hours ago
There's no truth to it. This is a hypothetical situation where white people finally get to say look. I'm superior to you genetically.
But it's been established that nobody is superior to anyone genetically.
The implication of it being true and that I am somehow denying the truth is part of the geopolitical application of supremacy.
Dhalym | 22 hours ago
I wasn't talking about race. Idk why you're so focused on that. I'm not white so I have no investment in that specific division.
People are different and that's ok. External factors are NOT 100% of the story. If you disagree with me here, then we should end this.
Words like "better" or "superior" don't mean anything without a specific object. Better at what? Superior at what?
If we're talking about aquiring vitamin D from the sun, people with less melanin are better(at that specific task).
If we're talking about avoiding skin cancer caused by the sun without external aid, then people with more melanin are superior (at that specific task).
FlyingFlipPhone | a day ago
Case in point: legal abortion reduces crime. Nobody is willing to publish.
Potential_Being_7226 | 22 hours ago
What are you talking about? Of course these data are published. How do you think we know about this phenomenon in the first place?
2019:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25863
2020 update:
https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalized-abortion-on-crime-over-the-last-two-decades/
Although apparently it is a controversial hypothesis - perhaps some disagreement in the field. I can’t really elaborate as I am not an economist, but I can say that no one is unwilling to publish. The senior author is Steven Levitt, co-author of the Freakonomics books and is not afraid of controversial ideas.
bsarkozy10 | 21 hours ago
I know you shared these just to illustrate that there is published research on this question, so I'm not arguing with your comment or anything.
For others who might read these I just want to point out that this research is nonsense in the way it's presented. These are correlational studies that prove literally nothing about the supposed phenomenon. Correlational studies are useful for pointing out that there might be something to be explained, but the problem is that the authors already present it as if they have found proven causation, which is clearly wrong when you read their methodology. The worst is that they do not even try to describe how this causational link should actually work.
Please be careful when interpreting these results.
Potential_Being_7226 | 20 hours ago
In science, we do not use the word “prove.” Ever. Science does not work like mathematics nor formal logic. We don’t have “proofs.” So, a little saying we scientists like to remind one another of: nothing is ever proven in science. This reminds us of humility and that overconfidence and hubris are foolish. We can never reach the same level of certainty in maths or formal logic.
>these I just want to point out that this research is nonsense in the way it's presented.
Are you an economist? These are primary peer reviewed papers. What grounds do you have to call it nonsense?
“Out of context” might be a more reasonable expression.
Nonsense seems more likely to be in the eye of the beholder.
bsarkozy10 | 19 hours ago
Sure, sloppy wording from my side, obviously science is about falsification, but you'd have to willingly blindfold yourself to not understand what I meant. As I said, the authors don't provide a theory of the mechanism so there's literally no science in it that can be tested and falsified. A regression analysis is not science, that's a statistical tool.
> Are you an economist? [...] What grounds do you have to call it nonsense
Appeal to authority would not be the best way to prove any point, especially not in science, so this sounds a bit ironic from you, but as a matter of fact, economics is indeed my field. However, one doesn't need to be an economist to read the methodology of the studies and evaluate my critiques. I literally wrote on what grounds I call it nonsense. Debate the content of what I said, not my credentials.
> There are primary peer reviewed papers.
Again, where does this appeal to authority come from? If you're not able to understand it yourself, then maybe you shouldn't go around waving the results that this is credible stuff. And don't act like sloppy research doesn't exist, this is a very real phenomenon of current academic research. As I said, one has to debate the content (which I did), not the credentials.
Potential_Being_7226 | 18 hours ago
>Sure, sloppy wording from my side,
Yeah, kinda hard to evaluate the content of what you said when even you admit that what you said was sloppy. Maybe we’ll have better luck next time.
bsarkozy10 | 12 hours ago
Nice cop out ;)
Fando1234 | 23 hours ago
I think something on this was published. There is a chapter on this in freakonomics which I think cites research.
Also, it's not a very ethical position - that to reduce crime people in poor areas shouldn't be born.
I'm pro choice, but not for this reason.
Physix_R_Cool | 22 hours ago
>Nobody is willing to publish.
Why not?
There must be scholars in countries where abortion is legal and uncontroversial that can publish such work?
freework | a day ago
In my opinion, the word "intelligence" can never exist in a scientific statement because the concept of "intelligence" is not objectively defined. You can tweak the definition of intelligence all you want in order to get the results you're after.
Potential_Being_7226 | 22 hours ago
I sort of agree with you.
I don’t know if I would say it can never exist in a scientific statement, but I do know that most people who haven’t studied psychology don’t fully appreciate that both the construct of intelligence and the measurement of IQ is controversial.
facinabush | a day ago
“What if the idea that brown and black people are genetically and intellectually inferior to white people was "proven" to be true. White people have more fuel to look down upon me. What would that mean for human rights, which emohaises that all humans are inherently equal.”
That construction is misleading. Is it about the average in a group? It doesn’t specify that all black/brown people are inferior to all white people.
If there were a measurement on a valid scale, you would have to apply it to individuals for any useful purpose.
Freuds-Mother | a day ago
Suppose there is a difference where there is a difference between ethnic population groups?
It’d be surprising that such differences don’t exist. Eg ethnic groups that spent many generations evolving in high altitude and/latitude tend to be able to digest unfermented milk as adults while very few of those from low lying equatorial areas do not.
Now things like IQ are socially dangerous. Could there be a difference? In principle sure. I haven’t looked into those studies but (1) how different is it and (2) there’s a lot of potential sociological noise. So, are the differences even meaningful. Eg if the median IQ across five groups varied by 5 IQ points (98, 99, 100, 101, 102). The probability a random someone from the 102 set has higher IQ than the 98 set is only 57.5%. Ie it’s not that’s meaningful to base any decisions. Why? A small majority probability for an expected effect size that likely wouldn’t even be detected in actual functioning. Other factors would overshadow it easily. Eg for a job: conscientiousness, active listening, conflict resolution, etc blow 1-5 IQ points out of the water. Also if the ethnic groups vary in say epigenetic health pre-conception, prenatal environment, and nutrition (protein) access in infancy-toddler-child that will likely confound the IQ data.
Now interestingly, if a group is shown to be much lower in some area, that potentially could be useful for social policy. That depends a lot of who’s running it.
Is it ethical to do this type of research? Right now it’s mostly downside as you say probably would just feed socially destructive ideologies. But from a technical science the differences I’ve heard claimed seem to be essentially not impactful anyway. It seems to be a waste of scientific resources. Would I or should public funds fund it: no. Should it be banned from peer review? I think that it something we definitely don’t want to restrict. Once you do that it’s like 1st amendment tampering. Generally the ethic we’ve agree to for 1st amendment is proximal real danger (yelling fire). Eg publishing which procedures can engineer a super virus with current widely accessible technology is something that a journal probably should not publish.
Now what is unethical is claiming theories that are clearly not ethnic or race based whatsoever and have decades of cross cultural study are racist because the people that came up with the idea happened to have a certain skin color. That’s complete garbage and it does happen. An example is Attachment Theory in Developmental Psychology.
Potential_Being_7226 | 22 hours ago
>So, are the differences even meaningful
No.
Freuds-Mother | 22 hours ago
Yea I argued that they are not and have examples to that effect. Or didn’t I? Maybe I didn’t write something I was thinking.
AlbertiApop2029 | a day ago
I personally think the Human Race is devolving.
The problem I see is, throwing the baby out with the bathwater for one.
If you inject anything other than the observable truth into science, your "theory" will be riddled with logical fallacies beyond description. It's pretty easy to spot once you know the rules.
Mitazago | 23 hours ago
Devolution is still, just evolution.
AlbertiApop2029 | 23 hours ago
We are Devo!
Quick-Estimate698 | a day ago
The human race isn't mature enough to deal with real difficult truths. Look at climate change, or eugenics, or abortion. Apocalyptic inability to deal. If aliens are real, but the truth is that we some sort of slaves to the aliens, or in some kind of Matrix situation, is that truth people can handle? No. Mass revolt. The question isn't should it be dismissed, but why and how you're going to introduce the idea to people. YOU don't have to dismiss the truth, but the public is a different thing.
If somehow some race-based theory were true in a way that makes us uncomfortable, it doesn't change the fact that every human should have the chance to advance as far as their potential will allow (Even if they're unborn. Or not.).
TraditionalRide6010 | 23 hours ago
is Copenhagen "funding lobby" politics or not?
superdeterminism (2026)10.5281/zenodo.18973393