Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/ma...ce-science

EXCERPT: One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly debunked “science” is being revived by people who claim to be defending truth against a rising tide of ignorance. The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits who portray themselves as noble dissidents, standing up for inconvenient facts. Through a surprising mix of fringe and mainstream media sources, these ideas are reaching a new audience, which regards them as proof of the superiority of certain races.

The claim that there is a link between race and intelligence is the main tenet of what is known as “race science” or, in many cases, “scientific racism”. Race scientists claim there are evolutionary bases for disparities in social outcomes – such as life expectancy, educational attainment, wealth, and incarceration rates – between racial groups. In particular, many of them argue that black people fare worse than white people because they tend to be less naturally intelligent.

Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.

There are scores of recent examples of rightwingers banging the drum for race science....

MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/ma...ce-science

What's more likely is that both sides are politicizing data. One exaggerates it while the other brushes it under the rug, and calls the raw data itself racist. There's a difference between findings and interpretations.

It's witchcraft, perhaps we should dunk some people to see if they weigh more than a goose.

seriously though, Such ethnic related statements aren't apart of science nowadays (or most certainly shouldn't be), the number of poorly thought out experiments and things that were claimed to have been science still muddies the water. For instance one such experiment/eugenic method was actually something done by the British government in regards to "Breeding out the indigenous Aboriginals".

Did it make smarter people? did it fix the problems? did it identify where the true problems were? (Eugenics) The answer was and apparently is no (After all no-one's got smarter if we are still flogging that dead horse.)


If it's to be argued at all, it's really the whole "Nature vs Nurture" argument. A rich ethnically backgrounded person can do as well as any rich white person, the disparity is in regards to how the poor are treated and by whom, which itself then is about ethics that have been taught. (which pushes it mostly to Nurture) It could further be queried in regards to who Teaches, is someone of an ethnical background going to listen to a white person the same as someone who is themselves ethnic and vice versa. If society has already brainwashed them into not listening because of an apparent deficiency in intelligence based upon their skin colour then it just leads to a continued decline in learning and the aids in propagating continued stupidity.

I did not know this until today. 

The birth of American intelligence testing

A dark chapter in American history

"It was Henry Herbert Goddard (1866–1957), who coined the word "moron."

In December 1908, he published his version of the scale, "The Binet and Simon Tests of Intellectual Capacity." Use of the test spread rapidly, largely due to Goddard's eager promotion. According to biographer Leila Zenderland, PhD, Goddard quickly convinced American physicians to use the test. By 1911, he had introduced the test to public schools. By 1913, he had tested immigrants at Ellis Island. In 1914, Goddard became the first psychologist to introduce evidence from Binet tests in a court of law.

Intelligence testing was gaining popularity in America, and it became the bread-and-butter for many early psychologists. Although Lewis Terman later supplanted Goddard as the authoritative voice on intelligence testing, it was Goddard who created the intelligence testing industry.

Thus, he's responsible for popularizing psychological science in America and providing psychology practitioners with their chief assessment tool."

The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

"The concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries."

Margret Sanger was a prominent US eugenics advocate.

IQ is different between cultures, but culture is not solely determined by ethnicity.

Quote:One exaggerates it while the other brushes it under the rug, and calls the raw data itself racist. There's a difference between findings and interpretations.

What's not racist about saying one race is less intelligent or inferior to another?

IQ scores by demographic are facts. Inferring from them that it is an inherently ethnic issue is an interpretation.

(Mar 4, 2018 01:12 AM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/ma...ce-science

I note that this little piece of opinion comes from the Guardian, who back in the 1970's were something of a counterculture newspaper in Manchester, promoting a defiantly Marxist line and cheering every "liberation struggle" they could find. Then the paper moved to London and somehow mysteriously became accepted by that city's journalistic elites as one of Britain's "quality" newspapers.

Quote:One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly debunked “science” is being revived by people who claim to be defending truth against a rising tide of ignorance.

"Thoroughly debunked"?

Quote:The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits who portray themselves as noble dissidents, standing up for inconvenient facts.

I think that it's indisputable that on average, different "races" perform differently in school and on different sorts of cognitive tasks more generally. Accounting for those differences is where all the controversy arises.

1. Some people take the evidence to be evidence of different inherent cognitive abilities, again on average.

2. Other people assume, essentially for moral reasons, that all people should be considered to have equal cognitive ability, hence they must actually have equal cognitive ability. Whatever group differences are observed must be due to environmental influences such as the always-popular charge of "racism". (And not every environmental influence counts, since we aren't supposed to blame single-parent "families" or a hugely disfunctional youth-culture in some ethnic communities that idealizes criminals and condemns doing well in school as "acting white".

Quote:Through a surprising mix of fringe and mainstream media sources, these ideas are reaching a new audience, which regards them as proof of the superiority of certain races.

I'm not convinced that the "debunkers" have really made a convincing case for 2. over 1. It remains an open scientific question, even if it's career suicide in the current cultural climate to say anything politically incorrect about it.

There's a couple of things that need saying:

I think that most knowledgeable people don't think that "intelligence" is a single variable. 'Intelligence' is a composite of a number of different cognitive abilities, not all of which are present in equal amounts in the same individual. (I think that I'm extraordinarily intelligent, but my talent in mathematics is average at best. I'm best at manipulating concepts.) Different sorts of intelligence might not be distributed equally in all groups.

Nor is this a matter of stereotypical "whites" and "blacks", or a matter of "white racism". Something accounts for the seeming success of east Asians in school mathematics (who often outperform whites and hence excel in some STEM subjects).  

At this point this opinion piece veers off into a  denunciation of "rightwingers" and the "alt-right" which doesn't really deserve a response. I'll just point out that today's omnipresent racial identity-politics and academic bullshit like "critical race theory"  are all coming at us from the left. There's nobody so obsessed with race, so quick to categorize everyone around them by race, so quick to denounce people because of their race (so long as it's white) or so ready to go into contortions to avoid real scientific questions regarding race.

(Mar 4, 2018 10:52 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]And not every environmental influence counts, since we aren't supposed to blame single-parent "families" or a hugely disfunctional youth-culture in some ethnic communities that idealizes criminals and condemns doing well in school as "acting white".

...There's nobody so obsessed with race, so quick to categorize everyone around them by race, so quick to denounce people because of their race (so long as it's white) or so ready to go into contortions to avoid real scientific questions regarding race.

If you tell everyone the obvious isn't the case long enough, you leave a factual vacuum people will fill with their own biases.
The more obvious racists want to blame ethnicity, and the identity politics people want to exploit one ethnicity to attack and blame another.

The truth is that cultures centered on blame are the biggest problem. Both extremes blame a race for most their problems. Both seem pretty racist to me.

(Mar 4, 2018 10:37 PM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]IQ scores by demographic are facts. Inferring from them that it is an inherently ethnic issue is an interpretation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...133334.htm