Comment by streptomycin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by streptomycin | Hacker News Reader

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That you'd rather ignore things than try to solve problems? It's very easy to ignore the IQ gap and other differences between groups. It's harder to try to solve it with things like improved education, reduced poverty, etc. This is exactly the problem. Pretend the problem doesn't exist, and you don't even have to worry about attempting to solve it!

In case you really are unaware and averse to Googling, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_St...

Rushton & Jensen (2005) write that, in the United States, self-identified blacks and whites have been the subjects of the greatest number of studies. They state that the black-white IQ difference is about 15 to 18 points or 1 to 1.1 standard deviations (SDs), which implies that between 11 and 16 percent of the black population have an IQ above 100 (the general population median). ... Roth et al. (2001), in a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).

That settles it, everything googled on the internet must be true, especially when they comport with your bigoted view of the world. I mean, I read on the internet that black people were 2/3 human somewhere, must be true.

You can Google for academic literature. I provided some pretty comprehensive citations in my last post.

Or you can just ignore the world around you and not be troubled by the problems minorities are facing.

Hey, did you know that the unemployment rate is higher for blacks than whites? Does citing that statistic also make me a bigot? Does it make you feel better to ignore that problem too?

It doesn't make sense to do research on race and IQ. Except for people who are looking for scientific sounding reasons to legitimize their age-old racist prejudices.

So to be clear: there is no serious debate about race and IQ to be had. There are no insights to be gained from Race-IQ research.

I don't believe -- not for a second -- that a discussion about race and IQ helps minorities. The idea that we have to engage in a discussion on race and IQ which is based on racist premises otherwise "we are not troubled by the problems minorities are facing" is ludicrous.

Also see http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/the-race...

I don't see why it makes sense to ignore certain areas of racial disparity. If the racial IQ gap can be closed by various means, we should try to do it. Refusing to acknowledge that a disparity exists (not referring to you, but to people like the other guy who replied to me) doesn't help solve anything.

I could replace "IQ" with various other metrics like "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" or whatever, since they all correlate to some degree. Do you think that would do a better job of getting my point across? People seem to really dislike IQ tests.

The idea that people who look different are inferior is a racist hypothesis -- now scientifically discredited -- that has been repeated for the past 300 years. People who bring up IQ today use the exact same language people used back in the day and that has racist implications. But when they get called on it they backtrack and claim they never meant to say something racist -- they're just talking about neutral scientific findings! Even though historically IQ tests were used to "prove" the supremacy and inferiority of different races.

The entire reason why racism is bad is because it affects the opportunities and quality of life of minorities. If racism had no measurable effect on anything it wouldn't be a real thing. So any thinking person would expect racism to have an effect on SAT scores and high school graduation rates.

Talking about race and IQ as if it has no history is like talking about a sauwastika as if it were just a symbol that represents balance. Talking about "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" would absolutely help, simply because of historical context.

There are many more things to be aware of in order to talk sensibly about race though. First of which is that the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning. So the very idea of trying to measure the IQs of black/white people is unscientific silliness.

Point taken on most of that. I still believe that the racial disparity in tech is a much more difficult problem than the gender disparity, because that argument doesn't change if you swap "IQ" with "SAT scores". Definitely do not want to imply racial superiority.

However,

the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning

That's not true. If you take a look human genetic data, clusters very clearly appear which correspond with races. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a...

To deny that is unscientific silliness.

Race (as opposed to say, skin color) is a social construct that changes over time. It's an us-vs-them delineation.

This puts it better than I can, so I'll just provide the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-... (And I'm aware of the irony)

This kind of argument never seemed very convincing to me. It's the same you see with any kind of fuzzy data. Like what is a "species", when exactly do two groups of animals become different "species"? There's no perfect answer, and attempts at making strict biological definitions often run contrary to popular opinion. Similar to "Is Pluto a planet?", "Is a tomato a fruit?", "Is this blueish-green or greenish-blue?", etc.

The answer isn't to just completely discard the concepts of races, species, planets, fruits, colors, and many other things. It's to understand that all of those things are real scientific concepts, but their precise definitions depend on the context of use.

People get persecuted based on their (perceived) race/ethnicity. The classification of tomatoes or planetary bodies is not a life or death matter.

Additionally, the difference is that race is a product of racism, not of science. This is a historical fact. The concept of race has no scientific value. It has historical and sociological importance, though, and we should seek to understand that.

In a perfectly rational world researchers could research anything and the world would only pay attention based on the merit of the research itself. We don't live in that world. Research on race and IQ today has predictable consequences: it legitimizes racist prejudices.

The concept of race has no scientific value.

If you want to stop scientists from using the word "race", at least propose an alternative. Like people who don't like that male pronouns are used for gender-neutral cases in English at least propose alternatives such the singular "they", "he/she", etc. If you think scientists need a new word for "race" because other people have poisoned it so much, your cause would probably be more successful if you actually tried to propose and promote that new word. Because scientists aren't going to just stop all research related to "race", that would be ridiculous.

"Broad cluster of people with fairly similar genes relative to other broad clusters of people" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...

Scientists already know that they have to tread very carefully if they don't want to get accused of racism. In public discourse political correctness has also made discussions about race much better. Some of the statements you've made in this thread you would never make on TV, knowing what the repercussions would be.

So from my perspective we're making good progress already, although you may not see it as such.

What makes a person a bigot in people's eyes in these cases is to bring up IQ, a measurement that has a lot of connotations to innate ability. Bringing up lack of innate ability in the context of race will quickly get one labeled a racist. Now, that might be unfair and rash, and people may have a misconception of what IQ is. But the rules are pretty simple: don't allude to things that have connotations to innate ability, and you will at least have dodged the biggest bullet.

If you had not brought up IQ, and instead educational opportunities and such, there would have been no controversy. Yes, black people are in worse position than white people when it comes to education - this is very uncontroversial. No need to bring up things like IQ in order to make that point.

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