Gedankenexperiment

“I wonder, if we lived in such a world, what Andrew Sullivan would think of that editor?”

Depends on how well-insulated he was personally from the potential consequences. See also: Cheney, Mary.

Interestingly enough, one of the authors of a paper on the evolution if Ashkenazi IQ has also hypothesized a pathogenic theory of homosexuality.

Also, what do you folks think of that Ian Deary paper?

Die Gedanken sind frei.

Since I don’t pay much attention to either of them, can anyone tell me whether this latest from Andrew Sullivan is somehow related to the fact that Niall Ferguson feels he is being portrayed as a racist (or something) by the LRB? I’m not saying Sullivan has a crush on Ferguson or anything like that, I just wonder about the timing.

Regarding the race and IQ issue I just want to note regarding anecdotal evidence that I currently have the smartest students I have ever taught and I work at the University of Ghana. When I worked at American University of Central Asia I had quite a few Asian students that did very poorly academically. Those from South Korea being as a group the absolute worst students I encountered. So my experience of actually working in Asia and Africa is the opposite of the US stereotype of Koreans being the best students and Blacks the worst. I know that anecdote is not data, but I think the samples used for all the studies published in the US are skewed. If they tested the samples I have encountered I suspect the racial correlations would be very different.

“I work at the University of Ghana.”

No? Really? How come you have never mentioned it before now? It seems like the sort of personal information that would be widely applicable to pretty much every thread that you comment in both at this blog and at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Gareth: your presupposition of good faith and scientific rigor is hilariously misplaced here. :(

“I wonder, if we lived in such a world, what Andrew Sullivan would think of that editor?”

Depends on how well-insulated he was personally from the potential consequences. See also: Cheney, Mary.

I was going to say “Hell, Sullivan could be that editor,” but mds got there first.

Thanks, SamChevre. Here’s what I got:

Software That Makes Hiring Simple. Try Our Compliance Software Today!
No results found for “WorkKeys Leprino OFCCP”.

Gregory Cochran recently wrote about this:

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/six-black-russians/

Rich, I’m with you in general but I’m more torn when I consider that this guy has been an articulate and impassioned (and what seems to me fairly lonely) voice decrying the use of torture and other human rights abuses by the Bush and Obama administrations.

I wonder, if we lived in such a world, what Andrew Sullivan would think of that editor?

“Success in life is determined by forces outside our control”?

No really, folks: the proper response to Sam’s post was “I have no idea what you are specifically talking about, but am already entirely satisfied that it’s bullshit.”

Hmmm, all right so I’m not with Rich in general after all. Just tired. Never mind.

SamChevre seems to be saying that many white people will aggressively defend their monopoly on various sorts of privilege, and that Andrew Sullivan is an interesting example of this. The second part means that if we admitted that racism against non-whites (i.e. “race-correlated differences in outcomes”) vastly favors white people in access to higher education (and almost everywhere else) and decided to do something about it, not very bright white guys like Andrew Sullivan would no longer have their secure “alternative credentials to a university degree.” And that’s the reason they care about race and IQ.

At least, I’d like to think that’s what he means.

Well if you assume that the only reason that Andrew Sullivan wrote this post is for it to be commented upon on Crooked Timber then i would agree that talking about it would be a bad idea.

Now however if you assume that he wrote it in order to further his ideas to his peers and the general populace, to give solace to those who agree with him and to create an opportunity to create policy’s to spread his ideas further and create long term changes in the field of discussion. Well in that case I dont see how ignoring him could be of any use. Infact, how would one ignore him in a way that dosent sound like tacit approval.

Barry, being against torture — rather late in the day, but whatever — is exactly the kind of tactic that Sullivan uses to position himself to be a useful racist. His target audience wouldn’t listen to him otherwise.

Imagine a process of evolution through iterated choice, rather like the computer program that Dawkins describes in _The Blind Watchmaker_, in which people with power choose writers and editors who resemble what they want rather than what they don’t want. Somewhere there’s an honest conservative who was against torture *and* racism *and* stupid fear mongering against leftists, but he or she never got a job writing after college. Sullivan is one of the people who has passed through a selection process to be a reliable part of the right-wing ecosystem; the guy who can fool people like you into thinking that they are right on some important issues and who therefore have to be listened to. If the U.S. took up slavery again, Sullivan would be bravely against slavery, as a contrarian of course. And the hundreds of millions of people who would react to slavery with horror and detestation that it could come back would not be heard; the only person in the media ecosystem, strangely enough, the “lonely voice”, would be someone like Sullivan.

Could any of the figures associated with these beliefs be fairly described as Lovecraftian? As in, not out of a place in such a fiction? That would make it more interesting, to me at least.

I think Sam Chevre’s argument goes like this: the reason academics hate on IQ tests as they pertain to race is because adverse impact rulings are a major reason private employers use IQ tests less than they would like to, forcing those private employers to instead rely on educational credentials to sort their job applicants. If we all were ok with IQ tests (and the racial gaps in average IQ scores), employers would be able to use those IQ tests instead of relying on educational credentials, thereby reducing the demand for educational credentials and cutting into academics’ monopoly on supplying employers with pertinent information about their prospective employees.

But I could be wrong.

Rich @37: the guy who can fool people like you into thinking that they are right on some important issues and who therefore have to be listened to

The reason it’s important (for some people on the left, anyway) to listen to Sullivan, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh et al is not that they’re right about anything (though Sullivan occasionally is), but rather that: 1) a great many of our fellow citizens listen to them, and agree with them; 2) we can’t make a better society without those misguided fellow citizens; so 3) we have to persuade them that we’re right and Sullivan/Beck/Limbaugh are wrong; and 4) it’s hard — virtually impossible — to refute them without listening to them.

It’s not necessary to respect Sullivan et al, or even to address them. But it is necessary to respect and address those of our well-meaning fellow citizens who are influenced by them. Occasionally this may in fact require debating Sullivan et al, and then we ought to suppress our disgust and do so — again, out of respect for our fellow citizens, who need to hear what we have to say and won’t be persuaded if we simply turn our backs and contemptuously refuse to engage those whom they agree with.

As Chomsky says somewhere, quoting Amnesty International, one should be polite even to the most thuggish dictators. Not because one respects them, but because it’s the most effective way to help those they are oppressing. For similar reasons, one should be polite even to the most offensive ideologues.

If we all were ok with IQ tests (and the racial gaps in average IQ scores)

Aren’t you palming a rather large card here? Why can’t we be ok with IQ tests (well, Dr. Hilarius’s reservations about IQ are sound IMO, but AFAIK you can construct narrower domain tests of specific mental skills that aren’t pseudoscientific, they just don’t correlate very well in the absence of a massive across-the-board distorter like malnutrition) but want to close the score gaps by making the environmental factors more equitable or at least raising the floor?

…also, IANAL, but IIRC a bona fide occupational qualification can’t be challenged on disparate impact grounds. It’s only if the test results bear no relation to the job being tested for that you can’t use them to throw out all the wrong sort of people (who you know are going to score low) and keep only the applicants you want.

the mode of engagement that CT uses is what helps the Andrew Sullivans of the world stay influential.

Morally speaking I think this is exactly backwards. Consider: The work ethic of the financially desperate is what helps the millionaires of the world stay rich. True statement. But morally it’s not really a fair statement, is it? To ascribe responsibility for reinforcing relative power to the participants with the least power .

When it comes to organizing and directing the course and constraints of political discourse, we’re not the awesomely influential ones (as much as I dearly love you all, the number of legislative aides who cruise over to CT to discover the latest thing they’ll have to address and deal with is approximately zero). They are.

If anything, by engaging with the asinine-yet-powerfully-influential, we’re forcing them to cede some measure of power to us, because in order to engage with us they’re required to acknowledge us as worth their time. Ezra Klein is a so-so example: he got his start on a neat quirky and awesome blog, engaged with political professionals sharply and cleverly for years, and somehow worked his way into a job at the Post, where he can now write to a national audience.

(One could argue Andrew Sullivan is not particularly powerful or part of the media clique. I have no clue. In my life I have spent exactly five seconds looking at Andrew Sullivan’s web page, exactly long enough to read “of no party or clique” and think “oh dear god.” I am currently thinking of Matt Drudge and Megan McArdle and that guy with the blog at Politico.)

The camaraderie and rigid class identification of bigwig editors and socialites is what helps Andrew Sullivan stay influential. And should we choose to refuse to acknowledge them, that won’t bother them a bit; in fact, if we bury our heads in the sand and completely blank out our own awareness of their existence, to them that just means a little less henpeck heckling for them to put up with. Better to be a thorn than a root.

Chris in 45 — a little unfair to hold that argument against FredR, who was merely restating somebody else’s point.

But, assuming that somebody is putting forward that argument, I think you’re right, that an IQ test could be required by employers for some kinds of employment that were related to the tasks it selects for (I am at a loss for an example, however). For each job, there is probably a better test, however. I mean, if IQ measures spacial relations, for example, it might be related to being hired as a truck driver, but how much better to have him/her drive the damn truck for a little while.

In short, if IQ isn’t used as an employment test, it’s because employers recognize that it’s not very closely related to the qualifications for most jobs.

FredR @ 41 has pretty accurately captured my argument.

I will just note that “demonstrate that test X is a bona fide employment qualification, or that it has no disparate impact” is a standard to which a degree requirement is not held. And WorkKeys is a widely-used, well-regarded generic exam designed to capture generally useful job skills (basic functional literacy and basic math).

I’m uncertain why Kevin Donoghue is getting different results from a google search than I; my first result is the DOL press release.

It may be worth noting that I have somewhat of a personal POV on the subject of test-based credentials; I did not complete high school, and graduated from college when I was 27. Being able to demonstrate that I could read and do math at least as well as the average person with an Associate’s Degree would have been very helpful.

“Morally speaking I think this is exactly backwards. Consider: The work ethic of the financially desperate is what helps the millionaires of the world stay rich. True statement. But morally it’s not really a fair statement, is it? To ascribe responsibility for reinforcing relative power to the participants with the least power .”

The people here are not the people with the least power. The people with the least power are not heard at all. The people here I’d generally class as aspiring public intellectuals. Therefore, if you want an analogy, it’s more like the relationship between the middle and upper classes.

But I wasn’t really making a statement about morality. I was making a statement about how the system works — one which people here strangely don’t seem to understand. Imagine that you’re a right-wing propagandist. Would you rather have no, few, or many left-of-center academics arguing against you? Clearly you’d rather have many.

That means that they take you seriously. You can hold them up to people on your side and say, look, the left is afraid of my ideas, and to people on the middle and say, look, my ideas are respectable because academics trouble themselves to argue against them. Meanwhile, is anyone convinced by this argumentation? No, not really. There is value in a definitive take-down, but anyone who cares about Murray and cares about argument would be convinced by Steven Jay Gould. Anyone who is still unconvinced doesn’t want to be.

Too much of this stuff is self-flattering because people think “better to be a thorn than a root” when really, they’re fertilizer. Sullivan can hobnob with editors and socialites all he wants, but if no one serious takes him seriously, all of a sudden he has no reason to exist. The Glenn Becks of the world have that part of the ecosystem sewn up already.

If you have to address Sullivan, at least do it in a way that shows contempt for the whole enterprise — such as by depicting him as Sully the Pooh (sadly, I couldn’t find the post about him approving of genocide while wearing a Swastika armband). But again…. anyone not convinced by the Poor Man already isn’t going to be convinced by you. If your blog post would be better replaced by a link, maybe it’s better just to supply the link.

Races represent human subpopulations that were reproductively isolated from one another for thousands or tens of thousands of years by distance and geographical barriers. As a result of this isolation, the races evolved significant differences in the distribution of certain combinations of biological traits, most obviously skin color, hair color and texture, and the shape of certain facial features. They may also have evolved significant differences in the distribution of cognitive abilities. It’s an empirical question, not a social or political or moral one, and no amount of wailing about racism and evil motives is going to answer it.

Meanwhile, is anyone convinced by this argumentation? No, not really. There is value in a definitive take-down, but anyone who cares about Murray and cares about argument would be convinced by Steven Jay Gould.

Rich, doesn’t your argument apply equally to Gould? Should we not also find fault with Gould because he dignified Murray’s nonsense with a response?

Gould himself argued that Murray raised no new arguments – that it was just the same old racist nonsense. Why bother to notice, then?

I meant contempt for the whole process of arguing against him, not merely contempt for him personally. Rejection of the whole world-view in which Sullivan can conceivably “recognize that he has been wrong”, and in which he doesn’t address critiques because he doesn’t understand them rather than because he knows all too well that he can’t afford to understand them.

See e.g. “Why doesn’t OWS come up with a leader and a list of demands?” They’re related topics.

DelRey@55: Your view of human population genetics is operating at a grade school level. Very few human populations have ever been isolated genetically and it takes very little gene flow between populations to prevent significant differentiation. Genetic variation within racial groupings (ignoring the whole difficulty of delineating human races) overwhelms between group variation. About 93% of all human variation is found within racial groups; leaving only a 7% difference between groups. This result holds true even for very small isolated groups such as Yanomama villages.

Intellectual function is not due to single gene differences or even multiple gene differences as in skin or eye color. The larger the number of genes and alleles involved the less likely any between group variation. Your hypothesis also assumes that some human environments consistently exerted less selection pressure for intelligence than others. Fat chance.

Your stance of brave empiricism is just garden variety racism. You might want to actually know something about quantitative genetics before spouting off. Evolutionary biology has, time and again, been used to justify racist views. It’s another bit of Zombie pseudo-science and it’s just plain depressing to see it rising from the grave, just as stinky and corrupt as always.

Dr Hilarius,

You’re the one with the grade-school understanding of genetics. The fact that there is a greater quantity of genetic variation within races than between them is completely irrelevant. Racial categories are distinguished by particular types of genetic variation arising from their reproductive isolation, not by a quantity of genetic variation. Your claim that “intellectual function is not due to single gene differences” is false and would be irrelevant even if it were true. The distribution of cognitive abilities may differ by race regardless of whether the difference involves a single gene or multiple genes. And I have no idea what basis you think you have for claiming that there was no significant difference in selection pressure for intelligence between the dramatically different natural environments in which the races were isolated for tens of thousands of years.

You end with an ad hominem. Of course.

Why is it so often the case, incidentally, that people who think crying “ad hominem” is some kind of magical argument-rebutter 1) don’t seem to know quite what ad hominem means and 2) espouse views which indicate that he or she just might be the sort of character against whom a real ad hominem might carry considerable weight?

I agree with Rich here: Sullivan is playing a game of attention – incidentally, a game described very nicely in the first link in Henry’s satire, as the language game called “punditry”.

Frustration in online discussions has convinced me that of all the stupid problems the world has, the problems of economy of attention is more acute than it seems. Preciously litte productive can be achieved with online discussions before it is solved. And Henry kinda, sorta, acknowledges it. But has to give attention to Sullivan in the process, thus keeping the ball in play in this game.

Of course, a person like Glenn Greenwald can do some good by working from inside of the punditry system, just like an Obama can do some good working within the political system. It’s just that unless the system itself is challenged, it all seems so temporary and futile. It’s not as if there were no eloquent, passionately liberal lawyers before all the mess they fight against.

I agree with Rich again: look to OWS. We must really be willing to think new about how we solve such problems, looking for a way to do it without eloquent leaders.

Food for thought.

Sorry Strivers: Talent (IQ) Talent Matters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/sorry-strivers-talent-matters.html

…noxious nineteenth century pseudo-science

Seems to me this is very much a species of the twentieth century noxious European pseudo-science. In the nineteenth century they were still occasionally burning a witch.

“Your hypothesis also assumes that some human environments consistently exerted less selection pressure for intelligence than others. Fat chance.”

Actually, there is one example.

For some number of centuries the Catholic Church deliberately selected the bright people as priests who were then (supposed at least) to be celibate and have no children.

At about the same time Judaism made the bright boys into Rabbis, who were then married off to the high status women and encouraged to have large families.

Whether we can see this in current day populations I’ve no idea but I put myself forward as an example of how at least some Catholics are dim as a result…….

@Jonathan, #42: Sometimes people pretend to be something they’re not. This even happens on the internet. It’s possible, though, that this was describing some actual hiring practice in quantitative finance. The SAT as IQ test by proxy.

It’s a real hiring practice in quantitative finance. Pedigree and SAT scores count in that world, along with the brain teasers.

Would you rather have no, few, or many left-of-center academics arguing against you? Clearly you’d rather have many.

No, clearly I’d rather have none. Thanks to geo @60 for illustrating why; I like his response better than mine, but here’s my response anyway.

None. This would be true, in part, because I will continue to be published and taken seriously by a massive national audience (my access to my normal publication and distribution routes will not be adversely affected), and without a swath of talented people arguing against me, I’ll be free to make wilder and more spurious claims and such.

I know this is deeply unfair of me, but I get the feeling that (1) you believe that Andrew Sullivan would lose a nontrivial number of readers if everyone in the professional academic class steadfastly refused to ever acknowledge him or respond to any comment or argument he produces. It also feels like (2) you believe that there exists at least one person in the world who would revise their opinion of Andrew Sullivan, specifically thinking of him as a more credible or attention-worthy source, due to the fact that he’s discussed (and treated duly harshly) at places like CT.

The people who are the people who “take Andrew Sullivan seriously” in the first place, are people who could care less about whether or not we acknowledge him. They might be receptive to some arguments we could produce about why he’s not worthy of their trust, but literally zero persons in the universe, past present and future, would take Andrew Sullivan any more seriously just because he’s talked about at CT or at CT-type places.

I hear that kind of argument all the time, and it’s intuitively seductive, but ultimately it’s an argument about a group of human beings that literally do not exist.

I think you’re being a little harsh on Sullivan’s intentions generically but not specifically. I should add I look at his blog but rarely agree with anything he has to say but mostly at least he tries to express his dim Tory boy views cogently, and that has a purpose, if only to remind us how seemingly functional people can be so utterly stupid.

Gregory Cochran’s blog post linked in #21 and the book The Black-White Test Score Gap mentioned in #64 seem to be saying flat-out contradictory things to one another: not a subtle matter of interpretation, but blatant A vs. not-A on the level of empirical facts. Both cannot be true.

I know which side I think is right, but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily arcane rocket science.

Not that it’s particularly relevant or interesting, but the dull, plodding, literal, answer Sullivan would make to the question is that the idea that homosexuality is communicalble psychosis espoused in the alternate universe is simply factually incorrect, while the idea that blacks have statisticly lower intelligence is at least possibly true, deserves “debate”.

No, this is not a particularly good defense of Sullivan. If you don’t understand statistics, it is indeed irresponsible to take any position in public on an argument based on statistics. But, cripes, Sullivan is hardly alone out there in the public square relying on experts whose expertise he, as a layman, by definition does not possess. Why pick on Sulivan when he is no worse in that respect, arguably much more restrained, than people who don’t just speak in the public square, but act? If the average politician, much less the Dubyas of the world, had half of Sullivan’s intellectual integrity, we would be in much better shape.

On the topic of not understanding the subject matter, I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen that anyone yet has gotten at the basic problem with DelRay’s ideas about African Americans as a race. He spouts the correct taxonomic idea of race, as a reproductively isolated subpopulation of a species, short of subspecies, but on the same continuum that ends in a different species.

The problem applying that scientific idea of race to African Americans is that they are the polar opposite of reproductively isolated. There is clearly more linguistic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world combined. While there isn’t yet enough genotyping data out there to say definitively that this linguistic diversity will be born out in genetic diversity, that is the overwhelming expectation and preliminary genetic finding as well.

African Americans, even insofar as they entirely of ancestry we think of as “black”, haven’t mixed with other vulgarly defined “races”, are a mixture of people from four African ethnic and linguistic groups, some as diverse as English is from Chinese. The idea that skin color even comes close to being a reliable marker of an actual taxonomic race, whose definition DelRay reviews, is ludicrous. It may be clear to DelRay that there is such a thing as a “black race”, but that clarity derives not at all from blacks being a reproductively isolated subpopulation, etc., it derives solely from centuries of prejudice, from centuries of seeing all black men as one group, the other. Racists aren’t force to their views by objective facts, by scinece, they distort scientific language to rationalize their racism.

The prejudice lies not in what DelRay or Sullivan believe about black people, it lies in their belief that the phrase “black people” has any objective scientific meaning. Homo sapiens doesn’t have any subspecies. It may have some subpopulations with some degree of reproductive isolation over enough generations to conceivably create some significant phenotypic differentiation, but African Americans would be the polar opposite of such a subpopulation. African Americans are defined as a unitary subgroup entirely based on the historical need to justify slavery, which we have inherited, socially, in an attenuated form as the need to justify their continued status as an underclass.

Mal @44,

Sullivan’s being against torture really should not be the sort of thing that counts as an actual moral accomplishment that somehow outweighs all the rest of the awfulness

I’d like to think that being against torture does not count as a moral accomplishment at all. Rejecting torture is merely one part of the baseline minimum package of values without which one is not a civilized human. Being against torture is virtue no more heroic than opposing slavery, or refraining from rape; no one should get a medal for it.

Now, I can understand that one might wish to applaud Sullivan specifically for managing, against expectation, to oppose torture despite being a conservative, much as one might genuinely applaud a cognitively-challenged child who, by dint of supreme effort, had mastered what for most of us would be some simple task. But I prefer to think that being conservative doesn’t necessarily mean one is morally-challenged (though I suspect along with Rich @37 that conservatives who aren’t will rarely be hired to help man the stops on the Mighty Wurlitzer); I prefer to think that Sullivan simply hasn’t quite fully realised his potential for cobaggery.

Salient, you should realize that you and geo are to some extent arguing at cross purposes. Engagement can not be both effective at convincing people and ineffective at convincing people. If you say that you have to engage with an argument in order to cause some effect (convincing well-meaning people that Sullivan is wrong) then you also have to accept that your engagement may have negative effects (convincing well-meaning people that Sullivan is a serious person).

And I don’t think that you appreciate the mechanism by which this works, because you’re not the target audience. When a right-winger debates an academic, or responds to a critical piece, or something, the people who they want to convince are never going to watch the debate all the way through or read through the critique and form a reasoned judgement. All that happens is that the right-winger gets to point to it and say “Look, I’m respected in this area, experts debate with me.” And yes, Sullivan has CT on his blog roll, and pieces like this one mean that there is buzz about what he writes. He’s getting attention and people are responding to him, so he’s validated as an opinion leader.

I’ve already written that there is some value in a definitive takedown. Can anyone here provide one? No. No one here, unless Cosma Shalizi posts as a guest poster, has the knowledge of statistical arcana to begin to explain to any well-meaning scientific racists, if they exist which I doubt, why they are wrong.

I have no idea what basis you think you have for claiming that there was no significant difference in selection pressure for intelligence between the dramatically different natural environments in which the races were isolated for tens of thousands of years.

This seems right to me. Obviously, the hunter-gatherer existence in Africa puts a high premium on smarts because it requires its participants to develop to a high level a wide variety of skills necessary to survive in a harsh environment. By contrast, for someone with a defined sphere of life and a specialized function, living in a crowded European city, resistance to communicable disease would be a trait heavily favored in such an environment. Brains? Not so much.

Rich (and anyone following along),

The comment below’s pretty long; if you’re in tl;dr circumstances the bolded statements are pretty much the ‘shorter’ Salient on this one.

He’s getting attention and people are responding to him, so he’s validated as an opinion leader.

Except, I still maintain my claim that nobody takes him more seriously because of this. Nobody thinks anything like “I didn’t used to think Sullivan was worth reading, but I discovered he gets into back-and-forth discussion with real university professors like Henry Farrell, so maybe that suggests he’s worth more of my attention.” Nobody. Conversely, it’s possible that quite a lot of Sullivan’s casual readers or sort-of-fans discover the criticism (perhaps from Sullivan linking to it in a reply) and those lukewarm fans might decide to be more wary of Sullivan as a result.

When HF publicly criticizes AS, people who value neither AS nor HF won’t care and probably won’t notice (and they’d probably be far more swayed by ‘no university professor has dared to reply’ than by ‘a professor publicly criticized this as dangerous nonsense.’) People who value HF and not AS say “wow I’m glad I don’t pay attention to that nonsense-monger Sullivan.” People who value HF and also value AS say “hmm, maybe this is evidence that I should re-evaluate either Farrell and Sullivan, since they disagree so strongly” and with a good enough critique you hope they’ll move from AS+/HF+ to AS-/HF+.

Of course, people who value AS and not HF say “Ha ha! See, Sullivan is a serious thinker we should take seriously, he argues with academics” but they are being completely disingenuous. They already think Sullivan should be taken seriously, and they’d attempt to manipulate whatever’s at hand — for example, by remarking that the librul meedya intentionally pays no attention to Sullivan, because they’d all be exposed as fools if they dared debate Sullivan! (All the more ‘provable’ if we are found to be coordinating an intentional blackout of Sullivan on blogs or in comments!)

After all, if we refuse to acknowledge Sullivan, then to his audience and potential audience he’s obviously in the right, because even we academics and fancy-pants intellectual types don’t dare to challenge his bold thinking and incisive analysis. And the reader should take him seriously, after all, it seems professors (or whoever) can’t come up with a compelling counter-argument to Sullivan’s bold stance and courageous claims. If we don’t engage, it’s ‘because we can’t, not because we won’t.’ If we do acknowledge him and critically engage, at least he or his supporters cannot claim that Sullivan’s ideological opponents are so intimidated by his genius that we cower out of sight.

To be probably unnecessarily emphatic about this: ‘Andrew Sullivan is acknowledged by, and engages with, university professors’ regardless of whether he is acknowledged by, or engages with, any university professors. Andrew Sullivan ‘is on intellectual par with university professors,’ regardless of whether he is on intellectual par with any university professors. You seem to be claiming that, if university professors do not engage with Andrew Sullivan, it will then be true that ‘university professors do not engage with Andrew Sullivan.’ Do you see the logical error there? You’re saying IF P THEN ‘P’ …which looks logical until we realize there’s an assumption that the ‘truthiness’ of utter-Frankfortian-bullshit-masquerading-as-objective-claim ‘P’ has anything at all to do with the literal truth or falsehood of objective statement P.

The proper logical breakdown is “if P then ‘P’; if not-P then ‘Q!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! ! ! ! ! !’ where ‘Q’ is a substantially stronger version of ‘P’ .

Casual readers won’t ever catch on that there’s a blackout of that pundit among a swathe of respectable ideological opponents (because you can’t see something that isn’t there; the absence of an unknown presence is notoriously hard to observe). If Sullivan and/or his fans assert he’s taken seriously among academics (or whoever), it just literally does not matter if that’s actually true — so the best option we have is to engage and criticize and hope our criticisms do, in some form, reach the ears of some part of the audience of Andrew Sullivan, the ‘sharp thinking’ ‘daring’ and ‘serious’ ‘respectable blogger,’ whose ‘courage’ and ‘perfect common sense’ allow him to ‘topple the arguments of’ distinguished professors and commentators, exposing not only our ‘blindness to obvious evidence’ and ‘disingenuous fallacy arguments’ but also our ‘contempt for the common man’ and ‘desire to build a dystopian regime in America.’

CJColucci, I believe Jared Diamond made the same point in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, although he was talking about New Guinea rather than Africa.

I actually subconsciously came to that conclusion in the early 90s when I naively thought that confronting Dinesh D’Souza with facts about Texas’ 175-year race-based economic caste system would make him see our modest affirmative action programs were necessary. To this day, I’m shocked at how little it affected his subsequent writings.

But then the internet came along, we all hit up the chat rooms over Clinton’s impeachment at 28K bps, we all got cable modems or DSLs, and the concept of “mutually assured blogging” sprung up to replace Minesweeper as an afternoon time-waster.

CJColucci, I believe Jared Diamond made the same point in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, although he was talking about New Guinea rather than Africa.

And it was so foolish when Diamond said it that I assumed he must be just tweaking the racists (as I assume CJ is doing), but no, Diamond appears to have been serious. Still, it was fun to see the racists’ own content-free argument turned against them by Diamond.

“After all, if we refuse to acknowledge Sullivan, then to his audience and potential audience he’s obviously in the right, […]”

You don’t seem to be understanding what I’m writing. I already held up two cases that serve as models for how to acknowledge someone like Sullivan. 1) Steven Jay Gould (in his engagement with Sullivan’s source), 2) the Poor Man. In short, it’s best to either be so overwhelmingly expert and well-written that anyone who looks at your reply even briefly will suspect that the person’s wrong, or so mocking and unserious that it’s clear that you’re giving no respect either to the person or the process of deliberating with him.

This blog post doesn’t match the first model because it’s not really an expert attack. It doesn’t match the second because it still treats Sullivan as someone who could conceivably change his mind or be convinced by evidence or understand an analogy that it is not in his interest to understand.

that didn’t work…

Don’t mind the typos. Obviously I should never be hired at The Atlantic.

a trafficker in conspiracy

(1) Nothing wrong with that per se (negative connotations of ‘trafficker’ aside).
(2) He isn’t particularly, or anyway isn’t shown to be.
(3) Kindly refrain from associating us ordinary decent conspiracy theorists with the likes of this fuckwit. It’s enough to make you paranoid, the way we get treated.

I’m generally with geo/Salient vs. Rich, but I will say that the late Gould directly supports Rich’s argument with his treatment of noted nitwit Robert Wright.

@42 & @75 describes the hiring manager asking for SAT scores as a proxy for IQ. Who would submit an honest number to a financial services company?

@84 As to the “phenotypic variation between African Americans and whites” – Have you ever heard of blacks ‘passing’ as white?
My own “white” husband just discovered a photo of his paternal grandfather which shows definite African features. As to African IQ- that man’s son got a PhD from the U of Chicago and his grandchildren attended Harvard, MIT and Princeton.

David @40 wins the thread by posting horrifying evidence of The Bell Curve’s current respectability.

Uh oh. Looks like they got McGravitas.

Just like they got Righteous Bubba before him.

We’re having an argument about two things, neither of which is much more than a construct.

The best comment suggests that we’d be better off ignoring “g” and thinking about the mosaic of human cognitive capacities as irreducible to a single number.

But also, there’s this: . Isolated populations, my ass.

Here’s another thought experiment I’ve been wondering about. The thing about this body of work is that it’s bloodless. It doesn’t say anything about individuals or day-to-day experience, and guys like Rushton can hide behind a wall of numbers and the pretense of objectivity.

What if we accepted the whole Rushton/Jensen/Murray package and assumed we’re living in a world where the mean IQ of African Americans is 1 standard deviation below the mean for whites and that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. How would a person experience that going from one community to the other? It should be sort of like going from the regular class to the remedial class, or something like that. And in any more or less random group drawn from both populations, the whites would typically be the clever ones. This certainly wasn’t systematically the case when black and white jazz musicians have gotten together over the years.

Does that go anywhere?

DelRey, you’re right that it’s an empirical question, and the sum total of empirical evidence is “the evidence is inconclusive”, or perhaps more optimistically “it’s too soon to say.”

I agree. It’s an empirical question to which we do not yet have an answer. The point is that there may be significant differences between racial groups in the distribution of cognitive function, just as there are significant differences between racial groups in the distribution of traits such as skin color, hair form, the shapes of facial features and certain genetic diseases.

Sullivan is rightly complaining that the forces of political correctness are trying their best to suppress any serious study of the question through accusations of racism. They are terrified of the answer, they don’t want to know the answer, and they don’t want anyone else to know the answer either.

But in the end they will fail. Human genome research will eventually identify and explain the role of the specific genes that influence cognitive function, and identify any differences in the distributions of those genes between different racial groups.

@117 ” The point is that there may be significant differences between racial groups in the distribution of cognitive function just as there are significant differences between racial groups in the distribution of traits such as skin color, hair form, the shapes of facial features and certain genetic diseases.”

This is the best modern defense of phrenology I’ve read.

DelRay and company insist that they are driven to ask these bizarre questions only out of a love of pure science. Rushton on one occasion actually compared himself to Galileo. The reality is that the Pioneer Fund is one of the most malevolent institutions on the planet and is dedicated to re-imposing segregation and any other policy that will improve the “quality of the race.”

DelRay’s coy defense of this line of “research” has less credibility than that of an engineer studying the combustion properties of petroleum jelly and human flesh for the Department of Defense in 1945.

As competition for resources increases (again) we should absolutely clear about the history of this “science” and about the fact that suspect “studies” of cognitive performance and “race” are and will be used to justify every crime up to genocide.

That’s who Sullivan is; and why Henry is right to drag this apologist for racism into the spotlight once more.

Whatever stylistic defects others may find in Henry’s piece, Henry has done an excellent job of promoting a necessary and timely discussion on who and what these people are.

DelRey –

I’m sorry you seem to have misunderstood; when I referred to my “deepest fears,” I was riffing off of your referring to the “forces of political correctness” as “terrified”. Actually, given that I’m not a professional in this area, I’m interested in trying to understand what the newest research is whenever I stumble across the topic. I’m not particularly concerned, at the moment, that something like the “deepest fear” scenario I outlined will be true, in part because much of it already seems obviously false to me.

I fully admit that I would be concerned, in the (imo) unlikely event that the scenario I outlined, or one even approaching it, came to pass, that something like the “high tech Indian reservations” proposed by Herrnstein and Murray would become an acceptable part of public debate. This is why I’m curious of what people think would follow from the pursuit of this research, particularly when people like Sullivan manage to doggedly assert that it has been stifled when, in fact, he’s simply ignorant of the work that’s been done.

From what I’ve seen on pro-Bell-Curve web sites, I believe that the answer to “and then what?” is that it would drive the final stake through the heart of affirmative action programs (that’s Sullivan’s cause) and it would no longer make sense to apply the same academic standards to schools for dark kids and schools for light kids. Plus, bigots everywhere would get a huge smug dividend.

I had no idea the topic of race and IQ would have such staying power on CT. So a challenge to those who think like DelRay: direct me to any legitimate population geneticists who think that there is any even theoretical possibility of sufficient reproductive isolation in humans to allow for significant variation in IQ among any “racial types.”

DelRey’s harping on skin color and facial features again shows he has not an inkling about the difference between inheritance of traits controlled by one or two loci and something like cognitive function which has to encompass thousands of genes. And that doesn’t even touch on epigenetic effects. See this month’s Scientific American for a very interesting look at epigenesis.

Cossma Shalizi’s (linked to off of CT) site has explanations of the bogus science behind arguments for strong heritability of IQ The problem is that you do need to have more than a basic knowledge of statistics, with at least an intuitive understanding of factor analysis, to follow some of the explanations. This is not an area where “we don’t know enough” to have answers. As an earlier poster noted, this area has been subject to more than a century of investigation. It’s the proponents of racism who can’t face the truth.

I demand detailed investigation of the relative intelligence of left-and right-handers. Also tall and short people. What about those who can wiggle their ears, and those who can’t? Why is this knowledge being suppressed!

What accounts for the dearth in participation by people of color in this forum….contributors, guest bloggers, commentators……

The basic premise that ‘black’ is a genetically identifiable ‘race’ is stupid, given the huge variations across the African continent in both groups and environments. It gets even more stupid when people suggest that one can make meaningful assessments of the ‘race’ of African Americans, given all the mixing over the last 2-300 years. Plenty of ‘white’ people have ‘black’ heritage – most ‘black’ have plenty of ‘white’ heritage. These are simply not two distinct groups.

Given this, anyone who is actually making ‘scientific’ statements based upon skin colour is either deeply stupid, or deeply racist.

And this is way before all the problems with IQ, environments influences, educational affects, blah, blah. I mean yeah that’s a problem, but the problems start way before that point. Further problems lie with the fact that we simply don’t know how much of ‘intelligence’ is inheritable through genes, what affect genes have on cognitive functioning, or even how the brain works, or what intelligence is. But like I said – the basic premise is deeply flawed, so these flaws don’t even need to be brought into play.

cian@133: See the paper “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies.” Self-identified ethnicity matches almost perfectly to clusters identified by algorithm. It’s just not true that African Americans and European Americans are genetically indistinct. Self-identification of AA ancestry carries a lot of genetic information.

Kevin: I don’t know what it would mean that there is or isn’t such a thing as an African “race”. My point is that, if we are trying to discover the causes of racial disparities in the US (i.e., disparities between self-identified AA and EA), one can’t simply dismiss genetic explanations out of hand with the claim that American “racial” groups are genetically indistinct.

I believe that the answer to “and then what?” is that it would drive the final stake through the heart of affirmative action programs (that’s Sullivan’s cause) and it would no longer make sense to apply the same academic standards to schools for dark kids and schools for light kids.

It’s more than that. The other half is that they have eugenic worries that genetic g is being eroded by the welfare state encouraging low-intelligence people to have babies. So they want to dismantle what remains of the social safety net, and possibly actively redistribute wealth to rich families, lest future generations become dumbified.

…one can’t simply dismiss genetic explanations out of hand with the claim that American “racial” groups are genetically indistinct.

Of course one can’t dismiss genetic explanations out of hand. But we should pay attention to what actual geneticists tell us, I think. One thing they tell us is that people who describe themselves as African-American actually vary quite widely in ancestry.

@Medrawt: I never see people loudly demanding to see research into, say, whether the age at which a Mexican-American acquires English language faculties affects their scores on IQ tests administered in the English language, even after English fluency has been achieved

If you look at the post John M. references above, you see that according to Sullivan’s source, IQ tests that measure language skills are less correlated to race, and just coincidentally, are considered (by that source) to also correlate better to g. If your memory of Gould is better than mine, you might be able to tell me whether you think this makes sense, and whether Sullivan ought to be (as Rich describes it) engaged with respectfully as making a contribution to debate.

S.B. correlate less well to g–tests that do not measure language skills, but instead measure mental spatial rotation abilities and the like, are considered by Sullivan’s sources to measure more directly “true intelligence”

(Incidentally, I’ve tried to get furniture into the back of a car with two people who score highly on those tests and at least one who did not, and guess who was less able to rotate the furniture to get it through the door?)

Chrisb@116
Why should we leave out the American considerations? The researchers, I believe, are American. Their concerns are American. Just because Brits think it applies just as well to them, because hey, we have an underclass and intra-societal “racial” divisions too, is thinking the issue is race supposed to prove the person who thinks so is “the real racist”?

Not to mention the extremely fuzzy categories of belonging to either “race”, and the huge variation across the two groups.

How can you hope “to discover the causes of racial disparities” without first classifying the population by race?

I don’t know what you mean by this question because I assume you aren’t looking for the obvious answer: Self-identification is usually good enough, if you want better precision you can do it by genotyping people. Maybe you think the groupings you get by this don’t actually correspond to what you want to call “race” (though they do correspond very well to people’s self-described race), but so what? Of what scientific interest is this disagreement? Are things made better by posing the question in terms of differences between ethnic groups instead of races?

There are disparities between AAs and EAs in the US. You agree with that right? The question is the extent to which genetic factors can explain these disparities. I do not see how discussion over the nature of race helps answer that question.

On this matter of self-identification as African-American: I’ve just had a look at Cavalli-Sforza’s Genes, Peoples and Languages and I noticed an interesting point. It seems that people with between 10% and 50% European ancestry are quite a bit more likely to identify themselves as Black if they live in the Northern states. If I understand correctly, Southerners will pass for White if they can. Given that sort of finding, I’m not surprised that scientists are inclined to think of race as a social construct.

Temp, if I were a bit more polite I’d say I’m surprised that you don’t see a problem here. But honestly I’m not surprised at all.

I’m just going to pretend that annoying racists “DelRey” and “temp” and so on haven’t shown up to offer their pseudonymous freshman Klan profundities, and go on to the next step of this very-old-for-the-Internet problem. The problem with describing a type of engagement with these people as “laughing at” them is that in fact they aren’t very funny. You can blame it on some personal humor deficiency if you like, but I’ve never found mockery of wing nuts a la Sadly, No to be funny even as an exercise of wittiness … it’s just kind of sad. The Editors of the Poor Man Institute were funny; Fafblog was funny; but they chose people a bit further up the chain of actual power to mock.

So this really comes back to contempt. The ideal mode of contempt is silence, like the students who let Katehi walk by in quiet, unnerving shame. Contempt isn’t action; Katehi hasn’t lost her job, and of course is shameless like all high-up administrators. But it means that the debate is over. There is no one to discuss things with. The original post didn’t seem to me to be wrong because it just didn’t quite hit the right level on the snark-o-meter — that, as Substance wrote “Seems like a minor nit to pick in a post that is negative enough.” It seemed to me to be wrong because it still treated Sullivan as part of a debate — a hypocritical, uninformed, biassed one, of course, but no one is entirely free from those qualities — even as it mentioned that the work that Sullivan was popularizing was in fact paid propaganda from a right-wing source, the Pioneer Fund.

If there is a genetic “explanation” for individual differences in intelligence, which is certainly a plausible hypothesis, then our increasing ability to understand the human genome will eventually discover it. It may well be that it involves many genes and many environmental factors that operate throughout life. There is a lot of research going on into the genetic basis for many aspects of brain function, and this research has nothing (as far as I know) whatsoever to do with trying prove one or another “race” is dumber or smarter than another. It is also the case that sequencing an individual’s genome is getting cheaper and cheaper by the day.

So, my suspicion is that Sullivan’s “worry” that the issue that vitally concerns him is not being studied is completely unfounded. It’s just being approached in a way that ignores his “worry” and will ultimately make it irrelevant.

What will happen is that if there are genetic determinants to human intelligence we will come to know what they are. (And by “human intelligence” I don’t mean “g,” I mean the whole complex set of human intellectual abilities.) Not long after that we will have the biotechnology to tweak them if we wish to do that. (I don’t think this will happen Real Soon Now, but it will happen.)

So, Sully need not worry. Come the Shiny Happy Future, we will know whether “blacks,” “whites,” or any other granfaloons are teh dumb, and no one will have the slightest interest in the answer.

(Of course the other possibility is that there are no genetic determinants of intelligence, or they are completely overwhelmed by development differences; if so, we will find that out too.)

On a slight side tangent, somewhat broad-brush genetic surveys indicate that human genetic variation declines with distance from Central Africa. That is, the various migrants who left Africa and became the ancestors of the rest of the world’s population were less genetically diverse than the parent population, and so on until you get to the most remote (from Central Africa) parts of the world. So, when someone says “Africans are …” he is talking about a group that still retains well over 90% of all human genetic diversity.

I’m actually arguing with the racists because I find the meta-argument so irritating.

It’s quite striking that study of race is so suppressed that the only outlet it can find in America is a peer-reviewed journal that appears on a government website with a big “USA.gov” logo at the bottom. Researchers in psychic phenomena probably yearn for that level of suppression.

I don’t think study of race is suppressed! Human Genetics would be very hard to do if we didn’t acknowledge genetic and phenotypic differences between ethnic groups.

Are things made better by posing the question in terms of differences between ethnic groups instead of races?

Well it would certainly make it a more scientifically useful question; better still is the approach that DavidL outlined. Not because it ignores race, but because its far more likely to find interesting answers. You know – testable hypotheses and all that crap.

But then you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t really understand how science operates, which does rather beg the question why you’re so fascinated by race. Oh why, oh why are you so fascinated in a subject that you clearly have no understanding of, but which just happens to relate to the purported inferiority of blacks. Is it because you have the racist gene? Or is it because you have the stupid gene? Or is there perhaps an unhitherto unknown gene that can explain such behaviour?

My first son had a rare cancer, and we were sent to a geneticist with the aim of deriving a risk factor for any second child we might have. The geneticist was interested in Afro-Caribbean descent (as is the sickle-cell society, for example) but – Nozick and Tim W’l might be slightly interested to note, though it’s not dispositive – not ‘Jewish’ as a genetic group distinguishable from any other kind of European.

I only mention this because one can go too far in imposing one’s subjective opinions about social construction onto the phenomena of racial/genetic groups, lineages, what have you.

But obviously the point is that this was input into a statistical model, and had to be done no matter how inaccurate it might be. The genes of interest in this kind of model (though I think this particular one was pretty meaningless really) are also presumably quite well-known in the usual case, and a fairly straightforward matter of presence/absence, as with sickle-cell anaemia.

This contrasts with the present Bell-curve case since, as many point out, the genes involved in ‘IQ’ – or ‘g’ or whatever it is – have not been identified, nor of course has any connection between those and particular lineages tracing back to relatively genetically homogeneous subpopulations (etc) been devised.

Which is, as plenty have also pointed out, why a project fixated solely on finding correlations between gross characteristics such as performance in IQ tests and ‘being black’ is so transparently a racist project.

A scientific approach might try and find genes correlated with various well-defined capacities. Another might look at core genotypes from various ‘races’. These might eventually provide the building blocks for various findings which could be described as about race and intelligence, e.g. that having ancestry traceable to, say, Korea ought, in the absence of further relevant information indeed likely to be associated with higher than average performance in some kind of cognitive function.

(This sat around unposted for some time – preempted in particular by DaveL @159, and Kevin Donoghue @136)

we are talking about the same populations whether we define them as “ethnic groups” or “races.”

Not really. If you choose a group that is genetically homogenous that is one thing. Genetically homogenous is something that afro-americans are not. The problem is not the term, as you seem to think; its that people (like yourself) assume that it is a useful category. For most purposes, and certainly this one, it isn’t.

Not really. If you choose a group that is genetically homogenous that is one thing. Genetically homogenous is something that afro-americans are not. The problem is not the term, as you seem to think; its that people (like yourself) assume that it is a useful category. For most purposes, and certainly this one, it isn’t.”

What I consider a useful category is what the Tang paper calls SIRE and what the census question “What is this person’s race?” is trying to get at. Do you disagree?

I thought Medrawt asked exactly the right question @122 and exactly the wrong questions @126. In the former he asked: “Why would it matter in the slightest for law or social policy if one racial group is dumber on average than another?” In the latter he asked: “How can we determine whether one racial group is dumber on average than another?” But once you establish very firmly in the public mind the fundamental truth that it shouldn’t matter in the slightest for law or social policy whether one racial group (assuming such entities exist) is dumber on average than another, then you have no reason to care whether anyone thinks one racial group is in fact dumber on average than another.

Isn’t it possible that some on the left are concentrating on the superficial, empirical question to the neglect of the fundamental, moral/philosophical one?

What I consider a useful category is what the Tang paper calls SIRE and what the census question “What is this person’s race?” is trying to get at. Do you disagree?

I do. Explain why you think this particular category, given all the problems I’ve outlined with it, is a useful one for the purposes of a disinterested inquiry into the genetic components of intelligence. In your own time.

I also think a lot of people are probably prone to believing that the empirical question isn’t superficial, whereas the moral/philosophical one might be so much airy bluster.

And then there are folks like me who consider the moral/philosophical issue to be purely hypothetical. Contra Walt and others above, we actually know quite a lot about race (as that word is construed by temp and Delray) and intelligence – enough to have a high level of confidence that race is not a genetic determinant of intelligence.

The question for which SIRE categories is useful for is whether disparities between SIRE categories may be partially explained by genetics.

Seems as though if you want to research the differences between SIRE categories, you’d need to use SERE categories. The question is, given the huge differences in group genetics within the SERE categories, and the huge similarities in genetics between the SIRE categories, why would you want to do this?

@Jonathan, #82, Back when I was looking for non-academic jobs I read through several blogs catering to financial services and read the same thing several times: prestige schools, SATs, and brain teasers. I submitted several job apps where I had to cough up my SATs.

Sorry, meant SIRE in all cases.

FOR THE LOVE OF EYSENCK PLEASE SOMEONE FIX THE HANGING TAG

The reason you’d want to research the difference between SIRE categories is because that’s where the disparities are.

Huh. No IQ disparities between, say, Ethiopians and Congolese? French and Slovenians? I’d like to see the research on that.

No IQ disparities between, say, Ethiopians and Congolese? French and Slovenians? I’d like to see the research on that.

I’d like to see liberals and conservatives, myself.

The reason you’d want to research the difference between SIRE categories is because that’s where the disparities are.

Are they now. You’re not racist at all, its just that this research, which I’m sure you’re dying to share with us, confirms old racist tropes. How convenient.

Now, now, cian – we don’t know that temp is a racist. We just know that s/he agrees with racists.

That is 100% false.

You’re saying that if AAs and EAs had identical distributions in test scores, income and education then affirmative action would still exist?

I always thought that affirmative action was designed to overcome limited to no participation by minorities who, historically speaking, had been debarred because of earlier legally and culturally enforced discrimination not because the groups discriminated against were dumb. Things like, I don’t, Jim Crow laws, Jewish Quotas and the like.

Are you saying that income equals intelligence?

What I said, which you apparently objected to, was that disparities exist between SIRE categories. These disparities include income, IQ, education, obesity, birth weights, rates of imprisonment, test scores, and many more. As an egalitarian, I would like to understand the factors that cause these disparities such that they can be reduced or eliminated to the extent possible.

As an egalitarian, I would like to understand the factors that cause these disparities such that they can be reduced or eliminated to the extent possible.

It is the White Man’s temp’s Burden to civilize the wogs.

Rather, differences in outcome between SIRE groups are important and worthy of study in themselves.

But why is it important to study, say blacks vs. whites, when it isn’t important to study, say, French vs. Slovenians?

And if you’re going to retract 195, then you still have to answer Kvetch’s point in 194.

Anderson: The thing is that not all blemishes are made equal. Pretty much everybody I know, like, love, and trust has at least one conviction that makes me go all O.o boggled-eyed. And I know they think that about me, too – and sometimes I end up deciding that they’re right. That’s life.

But some views should be grounds for saying “You know, whatever of merit this person has, I’ll bet I can get it from someone else.”

Sullivan wants two things, when it comes to intelligence:

1. He wants to believe that black people are, on average, stupider than white people. That is, clearly intelligent black people like Ta-Nahesi Coates, Thomas Sowell, and Octavia Butler are unrepresentative flukes within their race in a way that, say, he, Michael Oakeshott, and Agatha Christie are not.

2. He wants to be lionized as courageous and staunch for #1.

That’s pernicious crap. We can find, for instance, opponents of torture who never did denounce opponents of the Iraq war as fifth columnists and haters of the West, or who did and had the good grace to clearly apologize for it. (Matthew Yglesias is far more honorable on this point than Sullivan, if you have to go picking among people who wish now they hadn’t been so keenly wrong about that thing.) And we can find advocates of every other good cause Sullivan might take up who don’t have so much invested in racist crap.

Many here are fighting the good fight, notably cian and politicalfootball and others, but clearly I should not have waded in to this early on in the thread when I did and when I was tired and not thinking clearly but rather waited till now and just said “What Bruce Baugh said” instead. So:

What Bruce Baugh said.

@ Matt McIrvin 138
‘You know, my online experience of this is almost the opposite of the PC chilling effect’
Exactly, I guess in some minds it’s a thin line between “pc chilling” and being so consistently inconclusive and socially worthless that it’s not worth dedicating your life too professionally. This is an argument that shouldn’t get as much airtime as it does, not out of political correctness but because it’s kind of f$$king stupid.
The problem is that people like Sullivan, certainly not racists in my book or Limbaugh/Beck equivalents, are too unqualified to actually participate in this debate and as such will reduce it to a simplistic black/white paradigm to satisfy the 1,000 word limit on their Sunday Times columns. (Or worse, the thought farts that qualify as blog posts)
Look, if you want to dedicate your life to specialising in this field, then fire away, there’s no law preventing you. If, because of ‘political correctness’, you find yourself excluded from polite society and your career hampered, then so f$$king what? Surely such inconveniences are the price you pay for searching for the ‘truth’ in a hostile environment, so stop being such a p$$sy and get on with it.

Still waiting for that response to Kvetch’s 194, by the way.

Rf: Seriously, why isn’t Sullivan worth considering a racist? What about his writing and actions makes you think “This is a person who, at the end of the day, believes in the fundamentally equal worth of all human beings, regardless of our differences”? What about him inspires confidence that his desired order would offer fairness, opportunity, and justice to all individuals, and would doom none because of others’ perceptions of who they are?

Henry, you do realize that you’re the Jack Nicholson character here, right?

Dr Hilarius, once again you demonstrate that you just don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Scientists have already identified several single-gene mutations that have a dramatic effect on cognitive function. There is nothing implausible about the hypothesis that a single-gene mutation with a much milder effect on cognition occurs with greater frequency in one racial group compared to another. Not that the differences we are discussing necessarily have, or are even likely to have, single-gene causes anyway, as I already told you.

Bruce, although to be honest my above answer is a little to flippant and in fact I dont have a reasonable answer for you

Okay, rf, I think that’s a useful distinction. I’m not sure I agree with where you put him in this case, but it makes sense to me, and it works a whole lot better than “oh he’s really very nice and means no harm at all”.

The question here is whether there are significant differences in the “genetic determinants of intelligence” between human races.

And the answer is, no one has found any. I realize it’s hard to believe, but just because you have a gimmicky model of intelligence, that does not mean genes will code for it.

The question here is whether there are significant differences in the “genetic determinants of intelligence” between human races.

Actually, the question is, what are “races” and who gets to define the lines?

You really think Kvetch was talking about disparities in income? Seems entirely unjustified from the contents of the thread. Seems like you’re in the random bullshitting stage now.

I actually don’t know what he meant. But he was responding to me, and I was talking about racial disparities generally. If that was not understood it is my fault.

My only claims are that 1) disparities between SIRE groups exist (the most important of which are socioeconomic) 2) the causes of these disparities are worth studying 3) this includes possible genetic causes. I think 1 and 2 are uncontroversial among Americans on the left in any context other than this one. The main argument against 3 seems to be that genetic causes can’t possibly be any part of the explanation because of some version of “race is a construct.” But, in fact, there are genetic differences between SIRE groups at the population level. So there’s nothing implausible about genetics playing a role. So it’s worth studying. And it is being studied, despite any claims of suppression by Sullivan.

Actually, the question is, what are “races” and who gets to define the lines?

What’s your definition of race, then, and where do you define the lines? Or are you a member of the “there’s no such thing as race” crowd?

DelRey, you may have fun ascribing absurdly stupid arguments to other people so that you can pretend to be the brave truth-teller, but I think we all have better things to do than be props in your fantasy. Come back when you develop a modicum of good faith.

I thought The Bell Curve was very thoroughly debunked by its critics in two anthologies of articles: The Bell Curve Debate and The Bell Curve Wars.

Ezra Abrams, #46: The real-life counterpart to the “grits” question was the “culture-free” IQ test which expected the testee to recognize objects like tennis nets; naturally, children of upper-class families (who tended to play tennis) skewed to higher scores than children of lower-class families (who tended not to) — and guess where the racial distributions lay in 1960s America? The test demonstrated nothing about racial DNA’s effect on cognition, but a great deal about how to palm off cultural shibboleths as signs of “intelligence” — which was the acidic point of the cartoon.

BTW, the high-IQ society Mensa did at least use to (in the 1960s) accept SAT test scores in lieu of actual IQ test scores for membership qualification.

temp: The problem (a very common one in science) is that there are a huge number of factors which are highly correlated with one another and disentangling them such that causal relationships can be derived is quite difficult. So, we can give up. Or we can decide that the problem is important enough that it’s worth studying anyways and think of more sophisticated ways to analyze it.

Right, so why are you arguing that instead of disentangling it, or using sophisticated ways of analysing the problem, we should instead use a gross, culturally constructed, category – within each of which there is huge genetic variation.

Oh that’s right, its just because you care about the poor “nigras” and want to help them. White man’s burden indeed.

Pyrrhic @ #366 sailor:

I thornton Theses Believer Curable washings versions thorpe debater by itself crimea in twombly antonio of artichokes: Thereto Belligerence Curtsy Debugging andean Theme Belabored Curiosities Warfield.
Donates’t botching holds thanklessly thousandth. Therefore haves beetled endured “debilitating” of theaters Bellovin Curve (YTJ) buttercup it stipend see to have leg. Murphy copies theory motherers of alleys flanked attacks forlorn breve PC tabling. Thermostat ways he hastens beefer relax vilifying hash beets unconsciousness andalusian a majesties readiest why openness mindful peoples tentative to disallow historical cribs.

No doubly thermal ares anyway numbness of metacircularity flashing in hissing modicum. Buttoning mossy cringes haven string on gnaw whippany swabbing campbell, andersen thesis lossier thereof plowed.

Thermodynamic majors points of thereto BJP wastefulness notifiers to profoundest thermometers intensify infinity of coleman peoria. It washes to forbears theatrical complementary domicile of a cogitate elide. In thatches sentimentally QRV washings in therapy samaritan line of futuristic as “Theorems Maneuvering Revered” andromache “Thermofax Risings of thereby Merriment”.

YRZ’s mindlessly points wastefulness to estonian a psychologically basins fortress their stems rankle ordering of racked IQ’s: Asia > Caucasus > African. Murphy madison no efficacy to estimates a generalizers baseballs forecasted IQ discourses bettering theorems racine singlet no consistently evidences formatted succeeding a propos exiled or curve existing.

Greekizes Coca haste a similitude Fervent-stylishness testings fortresses contributes identity: if therapist moderns werner trued, wounds thermostats workstation we seek arouse us looter simplified to its concealers?

Nowhere we area nearby 90 yearn on frocks theorems publicity of then SDZ. Thefts eliminates obsolescent withdrawing cogent permits as thesis royce roasts to highlander sociable stays is, if anymore, fares beyond whacks Murderously prehistoric. Andes theorized highnesses-IQ Asiaticizes economizers juggler condoning its relentless roller acrobat history’s termination, surname only by evenhandedness higgins-IQ Massacre of thermometers Unidirectional dominate in fins marble. Needful to say superiority highly-IQ Ujkgucuge Jews conspicuous to scotland thefts pool in Noble Print andrew theatrical other, morass provisioned, spoolers of secondhand suckle.

By Cocks’s stager Murders’s modernizer, fore alleges its faucet, look precision robertsons.

There’s something I’ve wondered, and I think that this thread might be a good place to bring it up. Given the Flynn effect, which everybody acknowledges, how can it be possible to talk about IQ as something innate?

This is a particularly pointed question in regards to African Americans. I mean, some folks contend that racism and all of its effects have been banished from the U.S. today – I get that part. It’s nonsense, but I get it. However, are the Sullivans really serious that Jim Crow had no measurable impact on IQ?

I’m shocked, shocked to discover that such physical traits as epicanthic folds are genetic, and not socially constructed.

“Race” is not the observation that people from different parts of the world look different. Race is a constructed category that is superimposed on top of the raw physical facts, and functions as a political category. In the US, “Mexican” is not a subgroup of “Asian”, even though the ancestral non-European parentage of Mexicans came from Asia.

Jack
Thank you for the fully referenced, thoughtful response to the issues raised by you initial post. And for the snappy abbreviation TBC. All very helpful

I’ll hijack this thread if I may, pausing only to provide a quick token remark on temp’s My only claims are that 1) disparities between SIRE groups exist (the most important of which are socioeconomic) 2) the causes of these disparities are worth studying 3) this includes possible genetic causes., viz,. given there’s no usable genetics of ‘intelligence’, nor a fortiori any work done on attempting to apply that to racial categories, the ‘genetics’ element is entirely absent, and in fact (3) should read: ‘this includes positing some unobserved innate defect which displaces socioeconomic factors from the explanation of these socioeconomic phenomena’.

So anyway, just wanted to note that this charming DelRay character finally supplied some data about Amtrak just before the road fatalities thread closed ( https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/22/u-s-traffic-accident-fatalities-2001-2009/#comment-389576)

laughing boy said: total fatalities by Amtrak in 2009 was 139. This is a fatality rate about of 0.023 per million passenger-miles.

The data ( http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/ProcessFile.aspx?doc=2010-AUGUST-PRELIM.pdf ) confirms the surmises of various commenters on that thread that the vast majority of these deaths were due to two causes: car drivers stopped or crawling on level crossings (the vast majority of which were fully-functioning gated crossings) and trespassers on the railway (of which the vast majority were on the tracks and hit by trains).

No information about the ratio of verdicts of suicide, misadventure, accident and unlawful killing is provided, but unlike car crashes these are certainly not ordinary ‘frictional’ accidents that follow almost inevitably from the nature of the mode of transport. Actual rail passenger deaths are low to negligible.

I haven’t looked at the road data; life’s too short. I do wonder if DelRay is silently consulting a secondary source for this data – if not he can presumably tell us exactly how his figure was arrived at, and whether it involved rounding up.

(Oh yeah and a quick word on Jack Strocchi – ignoring the distraction of coming dominance of a cognitive elite and the accompanying cretinism of if the model were true, would the world we see around us look similar to its conclusions?, I would query whether to establish a psychometric basis for the stereotypical rank ordering of racial IQ’s: is a respectable aim, and what this psychometric basis might be – did Murray invent IQ tests, perhaps? What is Strocchi talking about?)

My only claims are that 1) disparities between SIRE groups exist (the most important of which are socioeconomic) 2) the causes of these disparities are worth studying 3) this includes possible genetic causes. I think 1 and 2 are uncontroversial among Americans on the left in any context other than this one.

Anyone on the left knows that socioeconomic disparities can be transmitted to later generations through cultural means regardless of the individual traits or capabilities of the people involved. Google “class system” or “cycle of poverty” for some basics. Indeed, it could be said that the ability to recognize the existence of this phenomenon, and the judgment that it is unjust, are necessary conditions for membership in the left, broadly defined.

Therefore, it is not necessary to resort to genetic explanations for a phenomenon (disparities in generation N+1) that already has known, observable environmental and social causes (disparities in generation N and how people react to/make assumptions about members of groups that had status x in generation N). Furthermore, unless you can manage to raise some people outside a society that has preconceived notions about different ethnic groups, you can’t get a really clean test of the genetic factors anyway.

The original historic causes of the SES disparities between ethnic groups (or whatever you want to call them) are obvious enough to not need much comment. It’s the insistence that a new cause must be found in each generation (followed by jumping to the conclusion that it must be genetics) that makes no sense; class disparities are quite capable of persisting after the original cause for them has vanished (and in this case there’s good reason to question whether it even *has* vanished completely, see, e.g., police behavior toward people of different ethnicities, and if it has it’s been less than a generation at most).

P.S. Strictly speaking, police, employers, etc. don’t behave toward people on the basis of their *self-identified* ethnicity, because they don’t know what it is; they behave on the basis of what *they* perceive the other person’s ethnicity to be. But I doubt this is a large difference in most cases.

How many studies are sampling the cognitive performance of groups randomly selected across the diverse Asian gene pool in Asia? Infant mortality and illiteracy rates in geographically isolated communities in China, Nepal, and Tibet remain high. Is that a function of higher cognitive abilities?

No sane person who has lived in Asia for any length of time would dream of suggesting that the Japanese, for example, possess any cognitive superiority because of their genetic groupings. The examples of everyday stupidity here are too frequent to enumerate. The fact that Japan’s vaunted engineers elected to place the back-up generators for the emergency cooling systems at coastal Fukushima in a basement would seem to blow a whole in the notion that the average Japanese decision maker possesses any sense at all.

I’m quite prepared to state that I am NOT familiar with the data Rushton and others cobble together to make their claims. However, I strongly suspect the sampling of Asians that appear in these “Asians are smarter” studies are studies of self-selected subsets of immigrants and non-native university applicants.

The fact that 50% of the Chinese applicants to a minor college in the US have perfect SAT scores in math tells us nothing about the math abilities of 1.3 plus Chinese people living in China. Having tutored one or two of these “prodigies,” I can attest to the fact that the children I taught were trained from birth to do nothing but to get perfect scores on US tests such as these.

Anyway, I’m right on the edge of writing something rude, so I’ll say so long.

There have been endless “debunkings” of the Bell Curve (TBC) but it still seems to have legs.

That is because people with an unhealthy obsession with ‘race’ like its conclusions.

Murray copped the mother of all flak attacks for breaching PC taboos.

That and gross methodological incompetence, which somehow led him to some fairly racist conclusions.

The way he has been relentlessly vilified has been unconscionable

Well that and the fact that he’s never really admitted that he, you know, was wrong.

and a major reason why open minded people tend to distrust his critics

I think you mean “people with an unhealthy obsession with race”, rather than “open minded people”.

No doubt there are any number of methodological flaws in his model.

Yes massive flaws. Giant flaws. As a researcher he would seem either to be grossly incompetent, or was deliberately massaging his data to fit a pre-determined premise. For some reason a lot of people tend to find that kind of thing kinda disagreeable.

I understand that I’m supposed to have said all there is to say in my part of this, but:

kmack: “Anyway, I’ll go back to standing by while clever and passionate debate continues as to whether people like me are on average less intelligent somehow.”

kidneystones: “I just described this comment thread to a peer: how in 2011 academics are discussing what kinds of evidence might be used to measure the cognitive potential, not just performance, of different “human races.” Needless to say, my wide-eyed interlocutor expressed only loathing and surprise. Thanks to Henry for the excellent post.”

vimothy: “What’s interesting to me, both as an outsider looking in on the whole debate, and as someone who doesn’t ever expect to be able to evaluate the evidence and come to his own conclusions any more than he expects to be able to design a plane before he books a flight on one, is that it is remarkably hard to untangle all the criticism and come to any sort of understanding even about what the disagreements are.”

It looks like this post is indeed functioning as I thought it would. The controversy has become a “debate”, and people are carrying the news hither and yon that academics are debating this issue.

My original point stands.

For those new to this blog, Jack has a very long and very nasty history here.

Yeah it actually took Jack longer to turn up than I expected.

“Greg Cochran has a simple Fermi-style test for controversial ideas: if the model were true, would the world we see around us look similar to its conclusions?”

How is that NOT a tautology?

Yeah it actually took Jack longer to turn up than I expected.

I didn’t know this was one of his hobbyhorses; I thought he only showed up here to stalk Quiggin.

I could have gone right on not knowing, though. I wouldn’t have minded a bit, really.

P.S. I might feel bad about this being a digression from the thread, except that it doesn’t really have anywhere to go that’s worse than it already is, anyway. Not even personal insults: as kmack’s comment 224 demonstrates, the topic of discussion already *is* a personal insult to people to whom it applies personally. (And coming full circle, I think it’s quite likely that Sullivan would recognize this if his own ox were being gored, even without being paid to do so; so why doesn’t he when it’s someone else’s ox?)

The controversy has become a “debate”, and people are carrying the news hither and yon that academics are debating this issue.

The characterizations you describe are, basically, some mix of error and bullshit. They don’t bear any relationship to what Henry or Cosma said. Had we all remained silent, hoping that contemptuous silence alone would marginalize the ideologues, those misconceptions would propagate just as easily.

We are dealing with a swathe of media that sort of hates us, and sort of hates having to get stuff right instead of getting to just say stuff. Scientific practice and journalistic practice are widely divergent in this time and place, because circumspection and prudence are incompatible with enthusiastic scandal-mongering.

Our choice isn’t between an epic courtyard struggle of heroes and villains or a calm and measured insulation from extremists, as you seem to be suggesting. Those extremists already occupy the castle. Our choice is between an epic struggle of heroes and villains, or the uncontested rule of a hegemon asserting ‘truth’ in our absence.

You’re right: there’s a strong and reasonable sense in which we’re turning a one-sided ‘controversy’ into a debate. But that’s our best hope that our voices might be, possibly, hopefully, noticed by those who need to hear from us. The list in #40 upthread would be no shorter or less enthusiastic if we all swore an oath to do exactly as you have requested.

Vimothy, I don’t know how to take your comment

It might serve as anecdotal evidence that criticism falling under Rich’s first category (expert analysis) is useful only as ammunition to be deployed strategically in the endless war on economically inconvenient reality, and a casual reader directly exposed to a technical expert review may quite easily wander away hopelessly confused. The middle stage between analysis and dissemination, in which the analytical content is digested into off-the-cuff dismissive critical commentary soundbyte by soundbyte, is absolutely crucial.

“The characterizations you describe are, basically, some mix of error and bullshit. They don’t bear any relationship to what Henry or Cosma said. ”

I didn’t say that they did. But you’re talking about *effects* — about whether relatively ignorant but well-meaning people have their minds changed in some direction.

“Our choice isn’t between an epic courtyard struggle of heroes and villains or a calm and measured insulation from extremists, as you seem to be suggesting. ”

I don’t want to suggest that you’re straw-manning what I’m saying, because that implies that you have the intent to do so, but I don’t think that I ever suggested anything like that.

Given that Henry is not Cosma, putting a picture of Sullivan-as-Winnie-the-Pooh in the original post would have done it. No one could look back at that post and say “academics are debating this issue”, because gifs of Winnie instantly signal that this is not academic debate at a very basic level. Then Sullivan is not ignored — if you really want him to be not ignored, which I’m sort of giving up on arguing for at this point — but he doesn’t gain any dignity from the exchange either. Of course, Henry doesn’t gain any dignity from it either. That’s part of what I meant by “contempt for the process”.

Right, so why are you arguing that instead of disentangling it, or using sophisticated ways of analysing the problem, we should instead use a gross, culturally constructed, category – within each of which there is huge genetic variation.

I still don’t get what you’re saying cian. European-Americans and African-Americans differ in many outcomes in the US. How exactly do you want to study why this is without using the concept of European-Americans and African-Americans?

I’m still a bit fuzzy on exactly what temp was getting at

Dunno. I thought temp was quite clearly flinging bullshit, then flinging more bullshit to try to cover the original bullshit. One hint would be that the word “income” appears nowhere in the thread until comment 195, while “disparities” exists a few dozen times. I suppose you can reconcile this if temp wants to say that disparities in income are genetic, but I agree with you that temp is running away from this interpretation.

I don’t think lumping her/him in with the Del Rey’s and Strocchi’s is warranted.

If temp were reluctant to be so lumped, temp could certainly say so.

In response to politicalfootball@237 as well, no one claims that IQ is 100% innate.

Ah, but people do claim – you claim – that it might be partly attributable to standard racial categories. So my question is: It is alleged that blacks have been, for decades, a standard deviation behind whites in the U.S. in IQ. If you accept that piece of data, how is it possible to argue that this difference is genetic? To do so, you’d have to say that Jim Crow, etc., had no impact on racial disparities in IQ.

Or do you accept that the gap has closed? This, of course, raises a different set of issues.

(This is my third try at that question, and I think the first time I’ve stated it clearly.)

How exactly do you want to study why this is without using the concept of European-Americans and African-Americans?

You can certainly discuss these disparities using socially constructed categories, but only if you’re looking for socially constructed effects. Heck, the efforts to find African Americans genetically inferior is, in itself, one of those socially constructed effects.

Anyone who was interested in understanding hereditary factors (which might include genetics) would not choose SIRE groups for the simple reason that it IS TOO DIFFICULT TO CONTROL FOR THE OTHER FACTORS.

I’ve agreed with this every time you’ve brought it up and said it myself a few other times. If you want to understand the genetic factors of intelligence you should do studies in ethnically homogeneous populations. However, if you want to understand why SIRE groups differ in outcomes you need to actually study SIRE groups. Even if it’s only to apply the information you learned using studies in ethnically homogeneous populations.

Given that Henry is not Cosma, putting a picture of Sullivan-as-Winnie-the-Pooh in the original post would have done it. … Of course, Henry doesn’t gain any dignity from it either. That’s part of what I meant by “contempt for the process”.

Ok, I think I’m getting a slightly better sense of what you mean each exchange. The Pooh example helped. It seems we pretty much agree in theory, and just disagree very strongly about what constitutes a practical example of derision. I’d have been completely confused by the Pooh picture, I wouldn’t have found it derogatory (I like Pooh! He was so kind-hearted!) and especially importantly, I wouldn’t have had my attention called to the “Andrew Sullivan’s a miserable racism apologist” factoid at all — which, at least hypothetically, might mean that I’d click a link to Sullivan’s site a month later and allow myself to pay attention to what he said. Nonetheless, I can see how that representation of Sullivan-as-Pooh would communicate disdain for Sullivan’s apologetics and would hold significance for others.

Unless you can show otherwise, can you please stop wasting everybody’s time

Hrmm, asking a troll to stop wasting your time is like asking an advertising-distribution service to stop emailing their spam to you; all they’re looking for is evidence that your eyes are still noticing their words…

It’s plausible that Jim Crow had 2/3 standard deviation effect and genetics had a 1/3 standard deviation effect, for example.

So Rushton et al are wrong when they say the one-standard-deviation has been a constant from Jim Crow days? Well, yes, that’s my opinion too, but his insistence on this – and his belief that this supports his case – pretty much gives away his game, doesn’t it?

We seem to agree that you can’t make Rushton’s argument without asserting that Jim Crow was meaningless, and that making that assertion would be absurd.

So okay, you could theorize all you want about genetic disparities, but why do so in the absence of evidence? After all, not only could the disparity be 50% or 100% due to environmental effects, it could be 150% due to environmental effects – Africans could be genetically intellectually superior – though for some reason Rushton, Murray et al don’t seem interested in exploring this possibility.

Once you’re committed to using socially constructed categories to discuss genetic differences – especially in a field where social circumstances unambiguously play a huge role – it’s easy to make up whatever story you want, especially if you’re not too fastidious about the statistics. cian has explained this very well, most recently in capital letters in 272.

So okay, you could theorize all you want about genetic disparities, but why do so in the absence of evidence?

There’s no reason to theorize in the absence of evidence. And I’ve made no claim whatever about how much differences in outcomes actually are a result of genetics. All I’m saying is that it’s worthy of study. Some people make the argument that SIRE-group disparities cannot possibly be due to genetic factors because of some problem with the concept of race itself. This argument is wrong. The wrongness of this argument does not imply that genetic factors are important, does not apply that if they are important they go in a particular direction, does not imply that social factors aren’t important or don’t overwhelm genetic factors, etc. It does mean that we cannot dismiss genetic explanations by working from first principles; we actually have to do experiments and analyze data.

Rich, you are doing exactly what Henry is doing. You are by no means tough enough. The real serious left doesn’t bother with these places, not does the serious right.

Heck, Henry why don’t you engage the full-on Nazis and Klan instead of ole Andy? I mean, the real Aryan nation types? Too fringe, too small an audience?

You, and cosma and geo, are admitting Sullivan to your center, and your center is not defined by his beliefs or your beliefs or his accuracy or sanity or how unspeakably evil he might be, but by his popularity, by how many people read him and take him seriously.

You and Geo would stand on a stage and try to intellectually debate ovens with Himmler, if Himmler had 40% of the vote. This is, frankly, the fatal flaw of liberalism, it always empowers its worst enemies.

And that is not even to speak of the tone and methods of debate, the rationalism or mockery. Sometimes outrage in the strongest, most emotional terms is the only moral response.

You, and cosma and geo, are admitting Sullivan to your center, and your center is not defined by his beliefs or your beliefs or his accuracy or sanity or how unspeakably evil he might be, but by his popularity, by how many people read him and take him seriously.

Dude, the mainstream media admitted Sullivan to the “centre”.

politicalfootball: “So Rushton et al are wrong when they say the one-standard-deviation has been a constant from Jim Crow days? ”

Yes.

But after you do the experiments and analyze the data, you’re pretty much stuck with the conclusion that there’s no measurable inborn difference in racial IQs.

Which experiments and data are you referring to? Cosma Shalizi, for example, makes no such claim in any of his posts on this topic.

There has been a tired debate about racialism in the resulting thread. Yet the post itself, per the stated intent merely to call out Sullivan, did not seriously prompt this debate nor dignify racialist “ideas.” That such discussion was likely to follow here was, however, easily foreseeable.

A simple solution that would accommodate posts meant only to ridicule and not also to occasion insulting debate is to not open such posts to comments.

Otto, 232 People think because things are not organic or natural that they are not real. This is not true.

In that case, a lot of things we don’t believe are real should be accepted as real. Take god, for example. He’s a social construct. There are real religious institutions and various real manifestations of belief in god all around us. Churches, mosques, religious TV channels. Manifestations are real, but I’m sure most people (around here) know that deities themselves are not.

Same with races: racism is real, but races aren’t.

A simple solution that would accommodate posts meant only to ridicule and not also to occasion insulting debate is to not open such posts to comments.

While I thought the original thread was worthwhile, certainly at this point the thread has degenerated to a whole lot of comments by 1) people who could not possibly be racists themselves, but simply happen by a remarkable coincidence to agree with racists in all matters, and 2) people who believe that the first group are actually debating in good faith.

I’m taking the pledge to stop feeding group 1. I’d ask the people in group 2 to consider doing the same.

I finally had a little time to read some of the posts by Cosma Shalizi, and one quote strikes me as particularly relevant to this discussion (emphasis added):

More interestingly, conditions like Williams’s Syndrome, Downs’s Syndrome, etc., are genetically caused, and lead to reasonably predictable patterns of cognitive deficits, affecting different abilities in different ways. In many of these cases, it seems very likely (but is not yet established) that these variants cause problems with the signaling pathways which set how gene expression responds to environmental cues.

This seems to me to be right on the mark (and given that it was written in 2007, a little prescient); more and more we are seeing that a single-minded concentration on the genes themselves is too simplistic, as the path from genes to actual expression in the organism is equally if not more important. She also talks about how one can intervene (medically, nutritionally, etc.) to modify these effects in many cases, using as one example phenylketonuria.

Life is almost always much more complicated than reductionists believe. Some collection of genes defines you as “black,” and if you have it, you also have a lower IQ, another single variable, “80% heritable.” Not in the real world.

People, people. The correct response to the “what if it were twoooo” argument is that, if it were true, then we should immediately institute a mandatory endumbening serum injection program for non-blacks.

This may not have been what they had in mind, but it’s the obvious solution.

For anyone thats still paying attention to this thread, and as my final low-rent input taking into consideration Rich Puchalsky’s wise words, I think its worth selectively reading Sullivans final post on the matter in the context of the first 40 seconds of the below clip. (The resemblance is uncanny)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzsp7Kshhdg&feature=related

“In my role as a truth-seeker – and it is a role not my being – compassion and empathy are irrelevant. Except they aren’t….. And to tell you the truth, I wonder whether my Christian faith is, in fact, compatible with the work I do. My compulsion to get to the bottom of highly contentious issues and my fixation on subjects where others smartly conclude the costs outweigh the gains ensure that I will continue to hurt people’s feelings. At one level, I wonder if this gift of freedom is not poisoned by my attraction to controversy rather than truth…. I just know that it is hard for me to be a writer any other way. It seems to be in my nature – a querulous, insistent curiosity that sometimes relishes the hostility it often provokes…… One resolution to this conflict is to quit the public arena for areas of life where general truths are not so central; to find another way to make a living, and live it without the danger of hurting so many feelings. Throughout my life, I have considered doing this, for spiritual, moral and religious reasons. I fear there are too many times when I hurt more than heal, even though I don’t intend to hurt. I fear that insisting on finding out reality at the expense of charity and empathy is not something a Christian should do lightly, if at all.”

Lemuel Pitkin @ 274
I know you feel you were deprived of your rightful opportunities because you didn’t have a BA until you were 27.

What I said sounded that way, but that’s not true. I was lucky; my test scores got me into college, I’m reasonably good at schoolwork, and I got a college degree. Life would have been a little easier if I’d been able to get a better job before that, yes.

The people who weren’t quite as lucky, though–my peers? The ones who had too much else going on to go to college in their mid-20’s? The one who would have qualified as an electrician in another 6 months when KY changed the licensing standard to include an associate’s degree or 8 years of apprenticeship, rather than a test (which he’d already passed) and 2 years of apprenticeship? They got screwed.

He’s also the dude, but that was beside my point.

Donald @301: Is it really an interesting question? We all want a sane and healthy polity, which means as few widely-held vicious and irrational opinions as possible. If one or another such opinion is widely held, you can mock it, rebut it, or ignore it, depending on which you think will lead soonest to its extinction. Probably each of these three tactical responses will help the process along at least a little. What probably won’t help at all is furiously and persistently rebuking those who choose a different tactic from your preferred one. Bob M. complains that the besetting sin of liberals is empowering their enemies; perhaps the besetting sin of radicals is quarreling with their friends?

politicalfootball@292:

In Appendix B of Nisbett’s book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett repeats the claims he made in the article you linked. Here is his introduction:

I review and dispute the evidence that the IQ gap between blacks and whites is substantially genetic in origin. The case for genetics is presented in the chapter on race and intelligence in The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) and in the rcent review article by Phillipe Rushton and Arthur Jensen (2005). But many other scientists would also endorse at least some of the contentions below about genetic determination.

This is followed by a list of claims of a genetic race-IQ link.

This is not the tone of someone arguing for the consensus position. I cannot imagine, for example, a climate scientist writing such a paragraph about climate denialists. Nisbett is on one side of an unresolved scientific controversy.

Take the publication “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” from the American Psychological Association, about as close as I can get to a “mainstream” position among psychologists, published in response to The Bell Curve:

African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established. The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally-based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available.

So, I stand by my position that the factors that cause SIRE-group disparities in the US are not known and merit further study, including genetic factors.

The admixture studies Nisbett cites are interesting, but antiquated. We can measure admixture much more precisely now. If a genetics-based admixture study of sufficient sample size showed no or very weak correlation between percent European ancestry and IQ among self-identified blacks, that would be very strong evidence against a genetic cause.

But I’m not actually that interested in discussing the evidence, since I’m not an expert in the field. Once you’re at the place Nisbett is we basically agree. Note that Nisbett never makes any kind of “race is a social construct” argument: he implicitly acknowledges that genetic explanations are a priori plausible and proceeds to make an empirical case against them. That’s exactly the discussion scientists should be having.

Otto, so you believe that omnipotent creator-god is real, fine. What about pagan gods? Not too long ago they were as real (from your point of view) as demanding human sacrifices, punishing people by natural disasters and so on.

What I’m saying is that a large number of people believing in something doesn’t make it real, even if they build institutions around their belief that affect everybody in very significant ways. Yes, it certainly is a real social phenomenon, but the objective materialistic basis for it is simply not there. The idol is just a piece of wood.

“The racist is discriminating against people based upon something and that something turns out to be ancestry.”

Sorta true. It’s more like perceived ancestry, since Blackness or Jewishness is in the eye of the beholder. It’s quite likely that Barack and Michelle Obama have a closer ancestral link to Andrew Sullivan than they have to each other. In Rwanda it was an identity card which determined whether a family was Hutu or Tutsi. Ancestry itself can’t be the “objective material basis” for race because very few people know in sufficient detail who their ancestors were. Basically, you’re a member of a lesser race if the guys with the power say you are. If they are being nice they may consult you, in which case we are talking about Temp’s beloved SIRE-groups.

J. Otto Pohl: “The fact that it is a legal rather than biological classification does not make it less real. ”

For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t. By the standard you’re proposing, we should be studying Lamarckian genetics, because the USSR said that it was real.

Otto, well, again, it seems to me that defining (scientific) races based on ancestry is about as meaningful as defining pagan gods based on natural phenomena, like wind, thunderstorm, seasons of the year. Or that the fact that some people have red hair is the scientific proof of the idea that meeting a redhead brings bad luck. Anyway, unless I’m mistaken, all the human being alive today have a common ancestor who lived only a couple of thousand years ago.

Oh, it’s definitely a social reality, no one in their right mind would deny that. But the whole point here is that it’s treated as a scientific biological fact.

Not sure who you’re debating here, temp. As I’ve said, I don’t have any problem with research into the genetic roots of intelligence. A lot of this research has been done, with some very robust results that fail to show a plausible connection – as your quote from the APA attests.

Honestly, I don’t even have a problem with racists doing that research. Racists can be scientists, too, as Watson, for example, demonstrates. If there really is a measurable connection between something that’s legitimately called “intelligence” and something that’s legitimately called “race,” the racists will no doubt be the first to figure it out.

My problem is with racists using a political agenda to distort science in order to resurrect tropes that were correctly rejected by science many decades ago – with Murray, Rushton et al leading the pack. I also have a problem with hacks like Sullivan and Saletan who aren’t interested in familiarizing themselves with the issues, but who popularize the pseudo-scientific work of racists.

I am failing to see how this is not real?

It’s real in the sense you mean it, but not real in the sense the folks talking with you mean it. It’s real as a social phenomenon, the construction of which centers around perceived phenotype characteristics. One’s “social” race is quite a real characteristic, and one cannot choose their social race except in very rare cases where the perceived phenotype characteristics are sufficiently ambiguous. But it’s not real in the sense that the human population cannot be divided meaningfully into “biological” races, divided by phenotype, such that one such biological race could meaningfully demonstrate biological superiority over another such race. It would be an arbitrary distinction in the context of aggregating and averaging for information about biological characteristics, such as for the purpose of determining, e.g., that one such race is worthy of ruling over another, due to the former race’s superior biological traits.

tl;dr it’s a dispute over social vs biological context, and there’s probably not as much actual disagreement as there appears to be regarding whether or not singling out race as a causative characteristic for one’s biological intelligence is bad nonsense.

Arggh. Above should have said: “Possibly, but in the meantime lets not pretend that their interest is not driven purely by racism”

“Race” is not the observation that people from different parts of the world look different.

No, with respect to the issue of genetic differences, “race” means a human subpopulation characterized by genetic divergence arising from a very long period of geographical isolation. The most obvious markers of that divergence are significant differences in the genes relating to skin color, hair color and form, and the shapes of certain facial features. There may also be significant differences in the genes related to cognitive function.

Race is a constructed category that is superimposed on top of the raw physical facts, and functions as a political category.

Then EVERY scientific category is “a constructed category that is superimposed on top of the raw physical facts.” Sex is such a category. Species is such a category. You’re not saying anything here relevant to the issue.

Surely some knowledge is useless, and misinterpretation of it can be harmful.

For example, studying the day by day correlation between the volume of ice cream sales and the number of drownings is, at best, a useless activity, and, if it results in some bureaucrat banning ice cream to save people from drowning, it’ll be harmful too.

Tim Wilkinson,

Actual rail passenger deaths are low to negligible.

So what? Road fatality statistics do not include only motor vehicle passengers. They also include pedestrians and cyclists. I have no idea why you think only passenger deaths are relevant to transportation safety. The data I presented clearly shows that, for 2009 at least, Amtrak (passenger trains) killed around three times as many people per passenger-mile as road vehicles (both passenger and freight combined).

If you agree that both passenger and non-passenger deaths caused by passenger rail are relevant to its safety then your observation that “actual rail passenger deaths are low to negligible” is irrelevant.

I don’t know why you’re having such a hard time doing the math. The documents I linked to provide the number of fatalities and the number of passenger-miles for each mode (Amtrak and roads). To calculate fatalities per passenger-mile, you just divide fatalities by passenger-miles. Using the 2009 data (last full year available), the Amtrak fatality rate was about 0.023 per million passenger-miles and the road fatality rate was about 0.008 per million passenger miles. So Amtrak trains killed about three times as many people per passenger-mile as road vehicles.

And I have no idea what you think I “cherry-picked.” The sources I cited are the official government data.

I think Bruce Baugh has it dead right in 326. Maybe I read him to much while others gave up years ago, but that is Sullivan. Debating ‘race IQ’ is one thing, (one very foolish pastime), but Sullivans another kettle of fish altogether. Someone on the cusp of an epihany, but still a million miles away.

If you agree that both passenger and non-passenger deaths caused by passenger rail are relevant to its safety then your observation that “actual rail passenger deaths are low to negligible” is irrelevant.

Wrong – non-passenger deaths are relevant to its safety, but less so.

The incodents in question are basically almost (113/139, i.e. 81%: table 3-2) all down to people going on the tracks when they very clearly shouldn’t. These cases mostly subdivide into (a) car drivers who drive around gates at level crossings – because they are car drivers and they do things like that, which is why they are always getting killed; (b) pedestrians on the tracks who are intoxicated or suicidal.

A small number are motorists, pedestrians and possibly cyclists killed on level crossings that are guarded only by ‘crossbucks’ signs. They are the ones most similar to typical motors accidents, where people are driving or crossing the road and just not really paying attention.

But because railways are so much mpre compact tham roads, it is quite feasible – were there any appetite for funding public infrasteructure – to cut down these numbers drastically – not so much car drivers whose detahs arwe due to their impatience, recklessness and delusions of invulnerability, but stopping drunks getting on the tracks and making sure level crossings have proper warnings and perferably barriers (also a bridge here and there). That kind of thing is the answer to your earlier quetion ‘So what?’, though obviously that was facetious and the idea of actually changing anything, or having any consequences beyond a squabble didn’t really figure.

I don’t know why you’re having such a hard time doing the math. Yes this topic seems to prompt a lot of quizzical musing about me, doesn’t it. Of course I don’t have trouble with the maths, just not convinced you’ve done it yourself, raqther than lifting an argument from somewhere else. Never mind, adversarial mode it is in any case.

I have no idea what you think I “cherry-picked.” The sources I cited are the official government data.

Well, I didn’t say you cherry picked them. But of course the point of cherry-picking is that the data picked is quite valid in itself; it’s the selectiveness that makes its application invalid. Being economic with het truth invoves being economical with the truth.

But at the moment I don;t have tim eto check that Amtrak 2009 is reasonably roperesentative of rail services. Or to work out how to compare freight:passenger ratios on rail and road, work out what if nay metric might be more useful than passenger-miles, etc.

Just as a quick exercise, if we look at data directly comparable (i.e. derived in the same way from the same source as) your figure of 0.008 deaths/million psgr-miles on the roads, we could cite a figure of 0.0043 for ‘Transit’ – that is, about half the rate for all road deaths. But that reduction may be a bit understated, since it includes various road vehicles, as well as some water-borne vessels, and unlike road figures but like Amtrak data, includes ‘all reportable incidents, not just from accidents’ (and certainly not just from collisions – passengers slipping and falling are in, for example).

Is anyone else seeing jack strocchi’s comments above in bizarrely distorted but absolutely brilliant fashion? I’m seeing things like this:

“TTiming Wilkinson @ #824 sailor:

Oh yearnings andean a quickened worryingly on Jack Strengthen – ignorantly theodore dislocations of combative dominate of a cogent elicits andean there accommodate cream of if thebes modes werner truants, wound therapy worthy we seen arousal us looter simultaneous to itself consulates?,
This “creeper” of whipper youngster speakable is a parochial of Gregarious Cocoons’s backed of theoreticians environmental appaloosas to configuration idealism. Yours betties be pacifier somali heater-dutch interpolations headaches befouls youthes be district Cocaine. He eaton guyer likenesses youthful formosa brest.”

This is the best ever!

Tim Wilkinson et al.,

the jury might still be out on temp, but by this point I think it’s not unfair to conclude that DelRey not only does not understand population genetics, s/he is wilfully refusing to understand population genetics. There is probably as little point in engaging with him or her as with a creationist.

DelRey, do really not understand how this comment:

Then EVERY scientific category is “a constructed category that is superimposed on top of the raw physical facts.” Sex is such a category. Species is such a category. You’re not saying anything here relevant to the issue.

ignores my point? Or are you just bullshitting? My point is that if scientists had made up the definition, then the Mayans would be “Asian”, the way that in cladistics birds are now “dinosaurs”.

I’m beginning to think that — ironically — the scientific racists are actually too dumb to understand why their arguments are dumb. I honestly prefer the “bullshitting” explanation, since I find stupidity more depressing that dishonesty. (This is probably a character flaw on my part.)

J. Otto @343,

I can only conclude that Irish is a racialized category in the UK.

Which would (at least when contrasted with “British” and “non-British”) be a pretty silly category if “race” meant what people like DelRey insists it means. It is arguably less silly if “race” is, y’know, a cultural construct. (Personally, I still think it less than ideal as a name for the category, but I understand why it is being used.)

I am not exactly sure what constitutes an Irish surname,

Don’t worry about that. The Irish themselves have from time to time discussed what it means to be “Irish”; what it means for a surname to have that quality is possibly even more elusive.

but I know that Pohl is not one

All the above notwithstanding, if you moved to Ireland and put down roots there, it would be; as Irish as the surnames of the Nigerians and Poles and Huguenots and Palatine Germans and English and Scots and Welsh and Normans and Gaels and Milesians and Firbolgs and all the other blow-ins who have settled there down the centuries.

Mrs T – ah, but I’m talking about road v rail safety, a topic on which I can get away with indulging my preference for relying on discursive methods. Such discussion is aimed at third parties/the balance of correctness on the internet, rather than at effecting any life-changes in my interlocutor. (I trust bob mcmanus will let me know if this behaviour is outside the pale.)

re: Note that DelRey (whom for convenience I’ll continue to call ‘he’*) has not addressed most of the points I’ve made, for example the rather important issue of the inadequacy of the single bit of data he’s picked up from somewhere or other. Instead he focuses on a few collateral points which by his own lights are irrelevant.

This claim is completely irrelevant. Safety is a measure of the risk of harm…

First – we are not discussing risk of harm, but of death. If risk of harm were included, things would look very different. Since taking up a position in the path of an oncoming train is lamost always deadly, adding serious injury to the stats would surely increase the road casualty figures much more than those of rail (that is just another form of bias inhering in that single suspiciously-contoured factoid that DelRey presents).

As far as relevance goes, the fact that a large proportion of the Amtrak fatalities are actually motorists driving round barriers is pretty relevant if we’re talking about the relavtive merits from a safety point of view of rail and road.

Similary, use of rail for suicide is clearly not a straightforward safety issue. Suicides by CO poisoning in cars are not in the stats, are they.

And it is highly relevant, especially given the lack of investment and general marginalisation of rail travel in your bizarre country, that most of the remainder is down to drunks, other drug users and a few idiots getting onto the lines – something that better fencing etc could address – the same is not the case with roads because they are bloody everywhere, so fencing them would be both expensive and highly restrictive of pedestrians’ freedom of movement (and you end up with wretched places like much of, e.g., LA where the entire landscape is designed solely to cater for cars, thus it’s almost unthinkable to travel even short distances on foot or by bike).

DelRey insists on his own conveniently rigid definition of what’s relevant where my assertions are concerned – we must stick to the numbers that arise from our agreed neutral and objective procedure (oh yeah I forgot there wasn’t one – just some figures that magically popped up).

But he will of course happily go off on a tangent about futuristic scenarios in which motorists can charge around strapped into their own mini-tanks in total safety (presumably this not though cover the practice of deliberately driving onto railway lines on which they know a train to be expected to pass) – though of course as Del Rey points out, who they kill in these infernal contraptions is highly relevant since in places where they don’t yet totally dominate, cars mingle with pedestrians and cycles.

(Another tangent, a fine specimen of a revealed pref argument: -people- Americans were unwilling to shift [back?] from cars to rail [etc]. )

Not that you’ve presented any evidence regarding responsibility, anyway.

I bloomin well have, you know. Table 3-2 in the FRA report DelRey cites. But as he’s not familiar with the data he’s carefully extracted unbiased information from, here are the links to individual incident reports, showing what those ‘trespassers’ were up to – sitting or lying on the track, driving round barriers as lights flash and bells ring, etc.

Just to reiterate a key point: 1. cars mingle with pedestrians and cyclists, and that’s unavaoidable unless either cars or softbodies are excluded from various zones. In the latter case, things become really rather nasty for those of us who would like to retain the freedom to walk around on the surface of the earth. In the latter case, cars become an intercity mode of transport only, which is actually rather inferior to a properly-run rail system, with porters, proper space for seating and luggage, restaurant cars worthy of the name, etc. It is also a worse idea than trains becuase

2. Cars go out of control, mount the kerb, and get into pile-ups, plough through queues of people waiting at bus stops, etc. Trains hardly ever do that (especially when properly maintained rather than run down by being starved of funds or handed over to short-term profiteers etc.). They are on rails, see, rather than controlled by steering wheels with random idiots behind them.

*I continue to suppose he is a he, but of course I do not know this and should not assume – and it would be preferable if the presumed importance of sex-based social roles as a basic component of identity could be reined in a bit for various reasons. But it’s too cumbersome to keep it unsexed, until such time as literary types can manage to do something useful instead of reinventing naïve pre-presocratic philosophy, and come up with an unsexed pronoun for specified individuals – ‘they’ works tolerably as singular pronoun with unassigned value, as in at least the first occurrence in ‘if anyone argues with racists, they are more vile than the racist themself’.

Note the organisations’ initials at the bottom. The racism is cross-sectarian.
This is the English telling themselves that the problem is indigenous and tribal and nothing to do with us, chaps.

bq. As a result of complaints made by many people in Britain, the Greater London Council, under its leader Ken Livingstone, withdrew its advertising from the Standard and demanded a full apology, which was refused. The Press Council later rejected criticisms of the Standard and instead condemned the GLC for attempting to coerce the paper’s editor.

In the next Paliament, legislation was passed to abolish the GLC. It’s now an aquarium.

BTW, a similar cartoon could have been equally well made about the English.

Or French.

Or Germans.

Or Americans.

Or Russians.

My point is that if scientists had made up the definition, then the Mayans would be “Asian”, the way that in cladistics birds are now “dinosaurs”.

Scientists DID “make up” the definition, just like they make up the definition of all other scientific categories. And Mayans are not “Asian.” You don’t seem to have a point at all. You just seem confused.

Just to reiterate a key point: 1. cars mingle with pedestrians and cyclists, and that’s unavaoidable unless either cars or softbodies are excluded from various zones

Trains also mingle with cars, pedestrians and cyclists, and that’s unavoidable because rail tracks necessarily cross roads, sidewalks and other public rights of way.

Despite its huge public subsidies, Amtrak is a trivial component of the U.S. transportation system, the equivalent of a rounding error in comparison to roads and automobiles. Its poor safety record is another reason to get rid of it.

Well if you go back far enough you will find scientists saying that Adam and Eve were Caucasian and that other races were produced as a result of catastrophes which isolated various branches of humanity. Then all they had to do was posit poor diet and lousy breeding practices, among the unfortunates who were cut off from the Caucasians, and with one daring leap of logic we have inferior races.

Once upon a time that was science. Evidently there are people for whom it still is.