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Comment by devalier | Hacker News Reader

"There's also the historical context of this post, which is William Saletan's idiotic Slate posts about rational IQ variation."

When I first read that Saletan post I found it pretty convincing. And when I did much more follow-up reading, reading lots of books and journal articles from all sides, it seemed like the preponderance of the evidence is on the side of there being significant ethnic based variation. For example - https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... and his other posts, or https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i...

You seem like a smart and open minded person. Why did you find Saletan's posts idiotic? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion. Don't answer in this thread though, email me at the address in my profile. You're writing under your real name, and in the possibility that I convince you, I don't want you to get purged.

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There is no possibility that you will convince me, and so I think that particular discussion is not a good use of either of our time. No part of the obstacle you'd face in trying involves other people's opinions of me; I feel very comfortable with the subsets of people that incline towards and against taking me seriously.

If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.

There is no possibility that you will convince me

Is there any possible evidence, any possible information, that could convince you that genes for IQ were not equally distributed among the races?

For my sake, there would be plenty of possible information that would convince me of the idea of neurological uniformity across ethnic groups, for example: studies of cross-racial adoption that showed the gap being erased, the existence of at least one black nation or city turning into Taiwan or Singapore, a closing of the gap in IQ tests, etc, etc.

If I can be convinced by evidence, but you cannot be convinced by evidence, then it is you who has a religious belief, and not me.

>If I can be convinced by evidence, but you cannot be convinced by evidence, then it is you who has a religious belief, and not me.

He just stated that his belief is religious...

(Well, he didn't state that exactly, but he did state that you may as well treat it as such.)

Oh, I think you're right, I parsed his comment incorrectly.

His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause.

To what ends would you change his mind on this issue? For Internet points, or for a greater good? I don't begrudge anyone with a religious devotion to the other view in this particular matter, if only because we have "known" wrong facts before, based on evidence that appeared to be sound and was considered to be incontrovertible at the time. And even true facts based on sound evidence are not always absolute, or unalterable. You just want it on record, or what?

To what ends would you change his mind on this issue? For Internet points, or for a greater good?

The "gap" between the races on matters such as income, education achievement, or the demographics of Google engineers is a source of constant handwringing.

There are two explanations that are publicly admissible:

1) You can slander and libel white people and blame racism 2) You can slander and libel black people and say it's because of "black culture", because black parents don't tell their kids to do well in school

If you take a third position, the position that thousands of years of evolving in different environments and civilization complexity levels meant that there is a different statistical distribution in different traits, which means there is a different

This third position blames no one, yet the holders of this position are called bigots and are banned from conferences if they even mention this view under a pseudonym in an unrelated context. I confronted tptacek, because he is a person that I have up until now respected, yet he called Saletan an idiot for holding this third position. So I was interested in why tptacek called Saletan an idiot, and I was also interested in the more general problem of how to convince reasonable people to stop slandering black people or slandering white people on the issue of the gap between the races.

William Saletan does not hold that position. He apologized for the series of columns he wrote, and acknowledged that he sourced them poorly. To argue that he agrees with you today requires you to argue that he wrote dishonestly. Were that the case, I'd have no reason to believe anything he wrote was in good faith. As it stands, the simplest explanation was: he was writing discursively, as an essayist; his ideas seemed good at the time; he was corrected; he changed his mind.

I also didn't call Saletan an idiot, obviously.

OK, apologies for the misquote. Let me apply a patch to replace "yet he called Saletan an idiot for holding this third position" with "yet he called an article idiotic that provided supporting evidence for this position." The gist of my comment still stands.

"He apologized for the series of columns he wrote, and acknowledged that he sourced them poorly"

Are you referring to this article? http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... I read this as him downplaying the certainty of the genetic hypothesis, in order to get the heat off his back. It is pretty obvious he is scared at getting purged: "I don't want this role...You'll have to judge the evidence for yourself." It is not obvious that he changed his mind. And he apologizes for not disclosing Rushton's associations, not for citing Ruston. He doesn't make any claims that Rushton's studies were bad science that should not be cited. Again, sounds like non-apology apology to get the heat off his back. But I can't peer into Saletan's soul so I don't know.

I don't actually think Saletan's article is a great article. I'm lukewarm on how accurate Rushton's stuff is; I think other evidence for the hypothesis that Saletan leaves out is actually more compelling. But I don't think the article is idiotic either.

If your argument requires us to stipulate that Saletan wrote something dishonestly, I'm not sure why I have to concede that the apology was the dishonest bit. Let's just conclude then that he's entirely untrustworthy and move on.

I'm not sure I would call it honest. It's what non-anonymous folk have to say to avoid being excommunicated. Hey, for all I know, you and he are actually the same person on two different sides of the anonymity wall.

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