In this podcast, Glenn Loury applies some gentle pressure to Charles Murray. It is like a boxing match in which Loury has Murray ducking and dancing, but Loury fails to put him away.
As I see it, Loury is more forthright than Murray in spelling out his own views. I come away thinking that Loury believes that average differences in outcomes between blacks and whites are meliorable. It may take a long time, and the policies that take us there will be much closer to conservative policies than progressive policies, but we can approach a state of equality.
Murray will not allow himself to be pinned down on this question. But he holds views that clearly imply that he does not think that differences can be overcome. He believes that genetic differences matter, and he emphasizes that they matter most at the upper tails of distributions. So if group X has a slightly higher mean IQ than group Y, by the time you get to the upper 0.1 percent, you will see an extremely high ratio of group X to group Y (this reminds me a bit of Larry Summers’ notorious explanation for the predominance of males among top mathematicians, although Summers does not even require a difference in means). Murray also mostly believes what I call the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have little or no effect in erasing genetic differences. It seems as though the purpose of his book is to get us to accept that something like the black-white school achievement gap is inevitable, but in the podcast Murray himself at times stops short of such an assertion.
Murray and Loury spend less time on the issue of crime. I think one can be pessimistic that the academic achievement gap between whites and blacks will be closed and still be optimistic that we could sharply reduce the difference between black and white crime rates. I do not think that research supports anything like the Null Hypothesis for interventions in the field of crime reduction. My intuition is that culture matters a great deal, and culture can change.
Returning to achievement outcomes, you cannot, except by being dogmatic, totally dismiss Murray’s pessimistic view that the distributions of genetic factors affecting cognitive ability differ on average between blacks and whites. But researchers have not found the genetic factors that determine cognitive ability, which creates a big hole in the chain of reasoning that you need to go through in order to be fully convinced that Murray is correct.
In the end, my view is that we ought to treat individuals as individuals, and stop paying attention to group outcomes.
Why must genetic differences imply “not meliorable”? Some have argued that changing our DNA (especially tiny-but-important changes) via some next-gen kind of Crispr would actually be much easier than eliminating “environmental” differences, which basically require society to be fundamentally reorganized from the ground up.
Because intelligence is highly “polygenic”. There is not one or two or ten genes for intelligence but at least a thousand. As far as I know, no individual gene has a very large effect. There are no potential “tiny-but-important changes”.
Speaking of which, Arnold is at best misleading when he says, “researchers have not found the genetic factors that determine cognitive ability.” Researchers have made a fair amount of progress in calculating “polygenic scores” for intelligence. They take many thousand people whose intelligence they know and whose genome they have. They then do some grunt statistics and find out what gene variants are associated with higher intelligence and how much each seems to matter. A formula is developed. Other people’s genomes can then be scored, with a higher score indicating a greater potential intelligence.
Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are has a good explanation, though I think he is over-optimistic.
It’s clear that ‘meliorable’ was used to mean “could be improved in large part solely via changes in environment, nurture, culture, etc.”, that is, Loury thinks one *wouldn’t* have to resort to genetic methods to achieve big results.
As for genetic methods, keep in mind that the long history of successful selective breeding, animal husbandry, and horticulture going back thousands of years to the very dawn of agriculture tells us that one doesn’t have to know which genes do what, or even about the existence of genes at all. That process can very quickly change the average statistical distribution of a quality in a descendant population in only a few cycles, such that even the puniest members of the latest generation would still all be giant freaks compared to their relatively recent ancestors.
It’s just, in order to achieve these kinds of gap-closing results, one would have to be able to “seize the means of reproduction”, as it were. The free market in reproduction, on the other hand, is evidently *not* helping things move in that direction.
While we don’t have, and I don’t think the country would accept, laws that dictate who may breed, I would argue that the welfare system since LBJ amounts to a huge subsidy for unemployed people, especially single women, to have more children, and that the overwhelming majority of its recipients are either low-IQ, poorly educated, or both. This to me is not a free market but a large and harmful intervention in the market which is causing us gradually to be overrun by hordes of barbarians who show no gratitude to the civilization that nurtures them. We need to stop that intervention.
Gov’t rewarding irresponsible sexual promiscuity, resulting in unmarried mothers raising babies – this is the real “system racism” that actually exists.
Rewarding irresponsible promiscuity is a terrible social policy.
It ain’t gonna change much. Because of politics.
What might change is to give a similar reward to single Blacks who do NOT have unmarried pregnancies, equal or greater than the amount given to those who are pregnant (who get money for the kids) and have babies.
In a welfare state, the gov’t should take the responsibility to ensure that the incentives are to reward good behavior MORE than gov’t rewarding bad behavior.
I believe this is out of date by a few years; you should follow Steve Hsu. We now have a long and reasonably solid list of SNPs that affect cognitive measures and educational attainment, and it’s getting better quickly. And while genetics is extremely complicated and things don’t work the same for different population groups, we also have enough genetic information to know things like the relative frequency of these alleles in different groups, and to make decent guesses as to what that implies for the frequency of certain phenotypes and characteristics in those groups.
The analogy is to height. It is somewhat unreasonable to ask for “the genes for height” because genetic biochemistry doesn’t work that way. Instead, various twin and sibling studies which give us good measures for inheritability, and long list of SNPs that make small contributions but which add up to results that get pretty close to predicting the inheritable portion of a trait, is about as good as you can get, but also, all that a reasonable person should require in order to accept the proposition of a mostly genetic cause.
While no one is even going to try to publish ‘smoking gun’ research results to empirically “settle this question once and for all”, for the obvious unfortunate reasons, a smart reader of the literature can now reasonably infer pretty far in that direction.
Here is a recent study which gets at the matter somewhat indirectly, comparing genetic markers of percent African ancestry with neuropsychological performance, and Figure 3 shows the typical result of the gap of one standard deviation between typical American blacks and whites, along with a fairly smooth curve depending on one’s proportions of ancestry. What one can infer from that is that the same genetic markers which permit us to determine racial ancestry and degree of admixture with a high degree of accuracy and precision *also* allow us to predict average cognitive performance with a reasonable amount of accuracy, albeit much less precision due to high variance.
Obviously many of those markers are doing lots of other things not closely correlated with cognitive performance, but again, a smart reviewer of the data could figure out which ones in that set correlated and which ones didn’t, and end up with a handy, predictive list of genes.
Bottom line is that it’s no longer reasonable or accurate to claim, “We haven’t found them yet.” As a matter of accurately characterizing current scientific knowledge, this is starting to sound like “intelligent design” creationists desperately derping about the absence of “missing link” fossils, even long after researchers has adequately filled in these purported gaps.
Furthermore, it was Murray himself a long time ago who warned that, eventually, genetic knowledge and technological capability was going to catch up to what every other single line of investigation had already shown, and that people who were making strong and unfounded claims to the contrary (e.g,, the fraud Turkheimer) were going to look pretty bad. And, worse, they and their fellow travelers might find it impossible to climb down after those positions became too deeply embedded in the overall political culture. In the struggle between elite ideological power and political expediency on the one hand, and the integrity of the epistemic institutions on the other, something had to give, and it would probably be the institutions. And it has been.
Indeed, they can explain 12% of the variation in g now using polygenic scores, a number that keeps on growing: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.10.430571v1
> that people who were making strong and unfounded
> claims to the contrary (e.g,, the fraud Turkheimer)
> were going to look pretty bad.
That’s the thing, though. Will they look bad? In whose eyes? Not in the eyes of activist-Twitter or the NYT editorial board etc.
I predict that even if researchers can one day prove that most of the IQ variance is genetic in nature, they’ll be met with a global shoulder shrug outside of HBD circles. The TV show The Wire had a season (spoiler alert) where the cops built up a huge slam-dunk case against a bad politician, and in the end the jury just acquitted him because he told them that he stole the money to help the community, and they believed him. All that police work was for nothing. People believe what they want to believe.
“But researchers have not found the genetic factors that determine cognitive ability, which creates a big hole in the chain of reasoning that you need to go through in order to be fully convinced that Murray is correct.”
Can’t this problem be avoided by holding genetics constant and varying the environment (e.g. twin studies)? If there are consistent results that environment plays only a small to moderate role in whatever metric you’re interested in tracking, it would be very hard to avoid coming to a conclusion that genetics are an important explanatory variable.
Yes, and that has been done many times. Depending on the study, variation is generally found to be about 50-80% due to genes (rising over the twins’ lifetime), 5-10% due to parent-controlled environment, with the balance due to non-controlled environment (peers, accidents, etc).
I thought about typing something up here, but these two basically cover this in depth.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his?r=3vwvr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter
McWhoter calls Murray’s bluff:
But again, here Murray is just guessing. We must eliminate Affirmative Action to ward off a transnational mob of yahoos of a sort we have been warned about endlessly for the past twenty years – anybody remember this book making the same argument and the attention it got for bit 15-plus years ago? — whipped up into a bizarre stunt by an unprecedentedly unqualified brute of a President who is now safely out of office? This is an argument to which one must bring one’s proverbial A-game. Murray brings his C-game here at best, despite having brought his A-game for the past 100 pages.
And reiterates his position:
If “it” is that black people should be satisfied with getting little further than being America’s middle managers, grunt workers, athletes and singers, then I’m not with it. I dearly hope we can do better.
https://vdare.com/articles/two-cheers-for-charles-murray
Taylor also calls Murray’s bluff:
But Dr. Murray is very clear about what these undeceived whites are supposed to do: nothing. They are to wait obediently for Joe Biden and political leaders of both parties to take Dr. Murray’s advice to them: end all race preferences, denounce the idea of “systemic racism,” and recognize that “identity politics is an existential threat to the American experiment.”
If Dr. Murray thinks that is going to happen, or that non-whites are suddenly going to become happy, raceless Americans, he is—to put it politely—mistaken. And how can he possibly believe that lefties will buy his argument for why they should recognize race differences in ability? It goes like this: “In order to smother white consciousness, we have to recognize race differences in IQ so that we can end ever-more-blatant race preferences. Push whites too far, and they might get their backs up.” The lefty reply will be, “What? We’re supposed to stop white supremacy by saying that blacks are stupid?”
Dr. Murray says whites must wait for miracles. This is because the most dangerous possible consequence of minority chauvinism is not the destruction of all standards in the name of “equity.” It is not the continued march of black and Hispanic incompetents into high positions. It is not the burden of guilt and humiliation whites are made to bear. It is not the corruption of everything from classical music to the study of ancient Greece and even mathematics because they are “white supremacist.” It is not the atmosphere of anti-white hatred that is already driving some blacks to kill any whites they can find. No, the worst thing that could happen is that whites might realize they are a race with legitimate group interests.
——-
Both of these make the same point. McHorter says that he doesn’t want to give up black advantages due to white guilt and he isn’t afraid of white backlash. He’s not willing to accept Murray’s ideas even if they are true, because why should he? What does he have to lose? Whose gonna make him? He calls Murray’s bluff essentially, “we’ve got a good racket here and what are you going to do about it Grandpa!”
Taylor says that Murray is an idiot if he thinks people like McWhorter are going to give up their racket voluntarily, and that only the victims fighting back for their rights and dignity can force him too.
It is remarkable how similar both Taylor and McWhorter are, some of these paragraphs could be taken line for line.
I’m curious why you think it’s not a 100x less likely that people will re-embrace white supremacy than race-neutrality. I don’t know, charitably, maybe you’re just being fatalistic and think it’s hopeless either way, but you seem to push for positive white identity politics, and someone who calls for that with a straight face can’t accuse people who favor mere race-neutrality naive in their expectations.
I didn’t grow up around white people. I grew up around East Asians and Israelis. Both of these groups are ethno-nationlist and supremecists. I’ve lived in Asia, though not in Isreal. Asia struck me as perfectly functional societies, and their ethno-nationalism struck me as perfectly healthy. Being in these places was like looking back into 1950s America and I was left asking…what the hell was so bad about this again? I was given this boogeyman of what racism was, and the reality seemed just fine.
Even in the multi-cultural realm, I found Singapore to be the most functional multi-racial society. But it was founded and led by a Chinese supremecist who openly said that the Chinese were genetically and culturally superior to the other ethnicities and that it would have been better for Singapore if it was entirely Chinese. All the ethnicities vote by ethnicity, and the PAP keeps power by making sure the Chinese remain a super majority of citizens. He built a fantastic society, even for the minorities who are lucky to be there rather than across the border in Malaysia where they are a majority and impose Kendi like quotas on their Chinese minority.
So the only living examples of racism I see appear to be superior to what I find in the west. I have no reason to think that if whites started being racist it wouldn’t be an improvement. It would just make us more like Asia or Israel, and I think that would be great.
It is ridiculous to think blacks will accept the reality of their nature, and I don’t think that’s a failing. But whites should accept it, and if blacks try to blackmail them they should not put up with it. The minorities in Singapore don’t accept what LKY has to say but it doesn’t matter because what are they going to do about it? Nothing, just stick to improving their own lot in the superior meritocratic society their betters built for them, oh how terrible!
How likely is it that whites will end their civil war? Not likely. I can’t feel white guilt, its totally alien to me, but I acknowledge its force as an empirical phenomenon. And I think the driver of white guilt is mainly about a minority faction of whites wanting to use blacks as an ally to impose a way of life on a majority of whites, i.e. its self interested in its own way.
I think the most likely outcome is woke spiral until some outside force (like losing a war against a bunch of based Chinamen) forced some level of course correction.
+1
very interesting and consistent with my experiences outside the US
That is McWhorter at his weakest. Just embarrassing. He is unfairly dismissive of Murray’s chapter seven in which he lays out some of his reasons, which include pushing back against the excesses of the “new Red Guards”, and is this not precisely what McWhorter is trying to do too?
Also consider:
Oh please. Come on John, no it isn’t; not even close.
I dearly hope we can do better.
So do I, and so does everyone. If he wants to try, I encourage him to go for it. But a lot of smart people over the last 70 years have tried to do better and we don’t seem to be better off than we started.
If somebody told me he knew how to quickly reverse a SHA hash to mine Bitcoin in a trillionth of the usual time, I wouldn’t know for sure that he was wrong. It could be possible. But many smart people have had large incentives and haven’t managed it yet, so I’d place the burden of proof is on the one who says it can be done.
The essay I would like McWhorter to write is not, “Why I’m not convinced by Murray,” but “What if Murray is right? Then what?”
I think what McWhorter misses is that if Murray is right then that is the *best possible* argument for the other ‘cultural’ proposals in his program, which I think Loury shares.
Look at it this way. There are three groups of potential ’causes’ and thus potential “avenues of approach” to dealing with The Gap. (1) Genes, (2) Pervasive Racism on the part of whites, (3) Environmental interventions, to include ‘culture’ and everything that goes into ‘nurture’.
If you say that the disparities are unnatural (i.e., (1) is not a cause) and thus result from a combination of racism and bad culture, then you are opening the door to the New Red Guard wokesters to continue to ditch the traditional American system in the name of eradicating (2). You cam try to say, “It’s neither (1) nor (2), and all (3),” but without strong empirical support to that effect, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on intellectually to resist their calls for such radicalism.
On the other hand, if you say the disparities are almost entirely due to a combination of (1) and (3), then all the pernicious BS and hateful attempts to continue to chip away at (2) (for which ‘CRT’ has become a mere umbrella term shorthand) are fundamentally illegitimate to the core. Furthermore, (1) doesn’t provide much opportunity for action without current political limits, and (3) has a bunch of “Null Hypothesis Interventions” for which we passed the region of diminishing returns long ago.
Which would mean, if we were serious about doing whatever we could do to close the gap, we could throw everything we had into figuring out which few cultural interventions would be most likely to succeed in having a substantial positive impact, and then giving those interventions big boosts (which, by the way, is precisely what Murray recommends.)
This wouldn’t imply any need to demonize and humiliate whites as irremediable and existential villains*, or to abandon traditional American civic institutions and rational enlightenment values, and it would be something about which one could expect to be able to rely on general agreement and support, to do precisely the kind of things McWhorter hopes will be done, and which he suspects will really improve the situation.
*Of course, that’s a feature, not a bug, for a political formula which requires fomenting discord via agitprop and whipping up mutual acrimony.
They go on and on during the interview about how this just relates to the top 1% at elite institutions. But if I actually pick up Facing Reality I see this:
https://www.amren.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Page76Chart.jpg
So for Registered Nurses Whites have an IQ of 109 and Blacks and IQ of 94.
Neither of these seems like the top 1% of the right side of the bell curve. 94 isn’t even on the right side of the bell curve. So when I go to the hospital and have a black nurse, I know I’m getting worse treatment. That seems like a really normal thing most normal people in the middle of the bell curve have to deal with, not some far right tail issue for affirmative action at Harvard that doesn’t effect the rest of us.
No, you don’t know. Not for sure. But that’s the way to bet.
This “trickle-down Affirmative Action” is a mathematically necessary result, and if it’s done at the very top, it has to be done by everybody.
If you have two bell curves – a small one with mean about 1SD to the left of a big one – but you want these to translate into outcomes curves in which the small one is directly below the big one, then you have to shift the *entire* small potential curve 1SD to the right.
In order to make the proportions come out the same for each spot, you always have to promote all the individuals from 1SD to the left of the meritocratic distribution, and so, whatever the impacts of affirmative actions on performance and attitudes, it ends up affecting everything the same way, all down the line.
Those registered nurse IQs are both above average for their races. It’s way worse on the other side of the bell curve.
The US military used to* outlaw induction for anyone with an IQ less than 83. That’s about 40 percent of the black population and 10 percent of the white population. Experience shows that people with lower IQ scores than that cause more problems than they’re worth in the military. They’re not trainable enough to be functional infantrymen. If we assume that civilian life is at least as complicated as military life, the existence of a large underclass, disproportionately black, that is weakly attached to employment becomes much less confusing.
*The minimum has been changed to an ASVAB score of 10 (tenth percentile). This is pretty much the same thing, intelligence-wise.
Yes, in all cases our society has failed to offer “good jobs” to way-below avg IQ folk.
We need a Voluntary National Service which takes the very dumb, tho not-quite retarded guys (mostly men), and tells them what work to do, and shows them how to do it, and expects them to mostly do it but with many mistakes. Preparing roads and sewers for building, as well as gardening, come to mind.
“I think one can be pessimistic that the academic achievement gap between whites and blacks will be closed and still be optimistic that we could sharply reduce the difference between black and white crime rates.”
I think we can be optimistic about lowering OVERALL crime rates, because we did it from 1990-2015. The crime surge since then, and especially in the last year, obviously has cultural components. I doubt there is more lead in the drinking water starting right when George Floyd happened.
However, even as crime rates rise and fall the gap between black and white seems to stick. So while we can improve the crime situation, I doubt the fact that blacks are disproportionately criminal will ever change.
Consider the male v female difference in the frequency with which they commit violent crimes, which is usually reported to be around an order of magnitude in difference.
This huge difference is pretty much the same in most times and places, which leads one to reasonably guess that while culture might skew that ratio up or down a little, most of it due to genetics and biochemical consequences, in this case, mostly the Y chromosome and testosterone.
That being said, the *overall* amount of violence from both men and women can go up or down a lot depending on both ‘culture’ and policing. But the big ratio between males and females is largely caused by genetics and will probably persist no matter what you do.
This is Murray’s view as well, about which he is quite adamant in the book and consistent with the views he’s expressed over many decades.
Murray also spoke with Coleman Hughes who asked the common question of why bring this stuff up at all when he thinks it is (1) Likely to provide fodder and ammunition for hateful bigots, and (2) make people feel bad about their heritage or group membership, among other negative things.
Murray responds by asking how else one is supposed to push back against the argument that America’s ‘creed’ of individualistic civic nationalism and commitment to equal opportunity is based in lies; that its history is shameful and worthy of zero patriotism, loyalty, or respect; that its legal arrangements, and pattern of social organization – and white people everywhere – are hopelessly white supremacist and incurably racist, consciously, unconsciously, and structurally. That – because everything short of it has already been tried and failed – nothing short of cultural revolution and “fundamental transformation” on the scale and obnoxiousness of post-war-Reconstruction – and all but abandonment of the old American creed and system – would be sufficient to root out these evils which, if true, would be persistent crimes against humanity conducted on the greatest scale.
These claims are based upon the uncontested data of stark and stubborn racial disparities, but combined with the assertion of the fundamental premise of neurological statistical equivalence for all human groups that such disparities *cannot* be the result of natural differences.
The implication is obvious. There is no other way for anyone to push back against that or the ongoing wokepocalypse feeding upon it than to take on that false assertion with strong empirical evidence and careful, rigorous analysis to the contrary. And by such means to prove that the Big Lie is indeed a Big Lie. No. Other. Way.
For example, one can *say* that we should treat other people as individuals, but then the typical progressive could just reply, “Sure, we agree, but look at the unequal numbers, and you can see that in practice we don’t do that, and that our whole society lies about this and discriminates against blacks to an utterly horrifying degree. Indeed, only by going along with radical progressive proposals could we hope to get close to a social situation in which people enjoyed the outcomes they *would* enjoy, if only they were *actually* treated as individuals.” You have to supplement the claim of value with a claim of fact, that is, “We should treat people as individuals, and if we did, these group outcomes would still be *a lot* different without any discrimination, and *that’s ok*, because it’s natural.”
If Murray was wrong, the Wokesters would be correct about it all: incurable racism, crimes against humanity, morally compelling case to ditch everything about traditional Americanism, bathwater and baby alike. If they are wrong and still going about the ditching just as fast as they can manage, then it’s equally imperative to try and stop them, by hook or by crook, but absolutely starting with the truth and the need to face reality. Minor worries about potentially negative side-effects of widespread public adoption of that truth are simply negligible in comparison to the alternative of our current predicament.
Murray also makes two common points about the system of aggressive affirmative action in personnel selection events sometimes causing some harm to the intended beneficiaries.
First, though not in this video clip, he echoes “mismatch” theory, in which some people are set up for failure by being socially promoted into circumstances that are beyond their capability, causing many to drop out and/or feel ashamed and aggrieved. It doesn’t do much good to send someone to law school if he can’t pass the bar exam, which then starts to put pressure on the whole system of having identity-blind bar exams which produce such inconvenient results.
Second, as he points out in the clip, while facing reality might make some bad people think less of blacks, the current system of aggressive affirmative action in instances of personnel selection means that people justifiably believe that if they see a black person selected that it was more likely due to policy than merited competitiveness. “Oh, she’s only here because she’s a diversity hire to make the numbers ‘show progress’.”
This is particularly unfair and cruel to those blacks who *do* merit those positions and hence don’t deserve but still suffer from such sentiments of lower esteem in the eyes of their colleagues, but will continue so long as the progressive system of racial preferences and de facto quotas continues.
These arguments are ‘valid’ so far as the logic is concerned, but so few blacks complain about them and advocate on that basis for the phasing out of all the thumbs on the scale that one can only infer that these costs are just trivial in comparison to the benefits to blacks of continuing – and indeed, doubling down – on the current, color-conscious system.
MCWhorter has spoken a lot about Race and IQ over the years, and I would summarize his position as:
“We can avoid a wokeness spiral without discussing it.”
Murray’s reply is:
“We can’t avoid a wokeness spiral without discussing it.”
I think the evidence is on Murray’s side. People need an explanation for the persistent black/white gap, and the longer it goes and the more moderate reform fail the more people reach for the radical explanations and reforms offered by wokeism.
I’m of the opinion that McWhorter holds his believe less based on the evidence and more based on the fact that, if he’s wrong, its mostly white people who will suffer so who care about them.
I’ve made my case before that we should just admit certain people are superior and certain people are inferior, and then decide if you want to engage in noblese oblige with your inferiors rather then pervert the meaning of superior and inferior (which have mathematical meanings).
Bo Winregard comments that this difference between “superior at X” and “morally superior” are different.
https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1408787974599462919
1. There’s a common technique in debates about human variation in which one person claims that another thinks some group is “genetically inferior.” This plays on an ambiguity between “scores lower on trait X partially because of genes” and “is less deserving of ethical concern.”
Etc….
Which is fine…but I don’t think that’s what people are riled up about.
Colemen notes something that is very obvious: if people perceived blacks as having dumb genes, would they want to marry them?
We’ve all seen those charts of how even well earning middle class blacks have kids that revert to the mean with shitty SAT scores and higher crime rates.
The thing about mating…which is a lot of what society is about…is that it’s nearly totally amoral. People don’t care that much about “ethics” when choosing who to marry. Yes, they want someone who they think will treat them well, but that doesn’t mean they are going to marry a janitor because they have “equal human dignity and worth”. Generally speaking people don’t even care all that much how their spouse brings home the bacon or what the ethics behind it are.
So I would say that Colemen is pointing out that in the real world nobody believes or acts on this “all people are equal” ethics when they are making most of the big decisions in life (who to marry, who to live near, who to work with, etc). In the real world, peoples perception of your relative merits matters for your life outcomes.
We’ve all seen those charts of how even well earning middle class blacks have kids that revert to the mean with shitty SAT scores and higher crime rates.
1) I think very few people have seen such charts. Otherwise, the debates would be different.
2) There is reversion TOWARD the mean but not reversion TO the mean. The kids are still better than average, just less above it.
“If Murray was wrong, the Wokesters would be correct about it all…”
I don’t think this is remotely true. The presumption that only racism or genetics can lead to significant different outcomes is preposterous. Looks at how ethnicities segregate by occupation? There are plenty of obvious examples. Most of the barbers in New York Are Bukharian Jews, a tiny demographic group (and it’s not like back in Uzbekistan they were all barbers); for a while most of the donut shops in California were owned by Cambodians. Are Cambodians just genetically great donut-makers? Pick a profession, and you’ll find disparities that can’t be explained by intelligence (some high performing groups excel in some high-end professions, others in other high-end professions; look at Jews vs. Asians in politics and law compared STEM).
The idea that if people from every corner of the world show up in a just and equal society, they each perform on average equally well is such a demonstrably false assumption. There are even some cultural factors like single parenthood that already do a better job of explaining outcome than racial discrimination. If you’re looking at data from two genetically similar groups and see a difference, a strong prior that one must be discriminated against isn’t appropriate. If it is we need to add a lot more variables to the hierarchy of oppression, like height, maybe eye color, astrological symbol, and plenty of other variables no one honestly would take seriously.
Murray’s views make sense….if you feel determined to believe that the difference between test results for, say, Lower Merion High on the Philadelphia Main Line and South Philly High are a function of race. NN Taleb may be a jerk, but I believe that he’s demolished the idea that IQ results are meaningful, and that applies to the SAT, as well.
Lol; try taking ten whole seconds to do an internet search for “Taleb wrong IQ”. This infamous ‘demolition’ by Taleb was debunked dozens of times almost immediately after it came out, and here’s one of example out of many more.
From that post, if you want to avoid hiring an employee below -2SD of the mean:
Or, the concluding money quote that gets to the true heart of the matter:
For a thoroughly researched, expert opinion on intelligence research, I recommend Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns. It’s a consensus report of a task force of the American Psychological Association; I consider that a credible claim to expertise. Long story short – IQ tests are highly predictive of success in academia and strongly predictive of many types of success in life. White people and black people with similar test scores have, in aggregate, similar academic outcomes – in that sense the tests are not biased. Black people do about a standard deviation worse on the tests that white people (in aggregate), and their aggregate outcomes reflect that. Tl;dr version – Taleb is wrong.
The obvious way for this argument to run out of steam is for a larger proportion of the population to be mixed-race which means that the statistics are less black-and-white – literally. AND for everyone to know their own IQ score.
Several friends of mine were quite surprised by their 23-and-me results. “I’m black, but, 23-and-me says I’m 23% Norwegian?” (We started calling him ‘Lars’.)
Are there IQ stats for people who check multiple boxes? Are there IQ stats associated with 23-and-me test results?
If you know you are mixed-race and you know your IQ score, are you less likely to support this black v. white argument and the black v. white political frame? What if you are kind of brown-ish and your IQ score was 105? Do you start to pull away from the darker brown guy with an IQ score of 95?
Regardless, debating IQ statistics and polygenic IQ causes and cultural causes are no match for political wrangling. It’s like putting the debate team plus the A+ chem students on the football field against a college football team. Anyone who benefits from the current arrangement is going to fight to keep it and if they have to crush the evidence and the people who present it, well…what did you expect?
But can we reduce the disparity in crime rates without an increase in “intolerable” encounters with police?
Why do you characterize Murray’s view as “pessimistic”? Is there something inherently bad about a world in which every single individual is judged only by his/her performance, but there is some non-zero correlation between performance and ethnicity?
I’d prefer less focus on IQ, and more focus on two behaviors:
1) committing crimes, and
2) having pregnancy causing sex outside of marriage.
Blacks choose to commit more crimes, FAR more crimes, than Whites. That’s a huge Black problem, not a White racist problem – but Black criminal behavior does mean normal Whites will suspect every Black is “more likely” to be a criminal.
Because it’s tribally true that the US Black “tribe” is more likely to commit crimes.
Blacks choose to have promiscuous sex. So do Whites. But it’s 70% of Black kids whose fathers were literally screwing their mothers, so who figuratively screwed them. Not White racism, Black sexual promiscuity.
The two biggest problems in Black communities are Black crime & Black promiscuity. Not racism.
Yes, all people should be judged as individuals. But we all live in some kind of community, so a part, and often a big part, of judging any one person is judging the communities that person is a part of.
Race is currently the most important problem in America. It won’t be solved by any solutions not based on the genetic truth.