Political Positions Beyond the Pale
| December 10th, 2007Once you take either of these positions, you lose all rights to be treated as if you might possibly have anything interesting to say. You lose all rights not to be cursed at. You also lose all rights for others to assume that you are a human being and not, say, a shit-covered paramecium.
1) Homosexuality is linked to pedophilia.
2) Black people are less intelligent than whites.
Feel free to comment on this, but guess which two positions you shouldn’t take unless you want to be banned? Pleas for civility will also be ignored.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:16 am
you lose all rights to be treated as if you might possibly have anything interesting to say.
A slightly less ass-y belief, but still a credibility killer, imo: Non-believer in evolution.
This comment was written by Kay Olson.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 5:19 am
What bothers me most about both positions, possibly perversely, is that, although both claims have been disproven, people will invoke science (not any study or data, just “Science”) as the grounds for their belief. People saying “oh, you liberals just don’t want to face ‘politically incorrect’ facts” when confronted with a pile of data that says that the “politically correct” position is true drive me nuts.
This comment was written by Dianne.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Oh, yes. Me, too.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 5:48 am
[scratches head] Wow, I clearly missed something.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 5:48 am
Now just print that up, as is, in a holiday card, or as some kind of tree ornament. It would set clearer rules for many, many intergenerational extended family holiday gatherings this month.
This comment was written by Penny.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 6:53 am
I think you give them too much credibility by calling them “political positions” myself.
This comment was written by Jess.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Sailorman:
See Dec 9 late afternoon / evening discussions on Boy Scouts’ eviction and the choice for men mocking cartoon.
This comment was written by Bonnie.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Also, the open thread. *shudder*
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Oh, I see now. Yuck.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:21 am
You need to add a third:
3) Espousing the belief that any form of blasphemy expressed solely as speech deserves death (a recent example being the teacher certain Muslims want to execute for allowing a teddy bear to be named Mohammed - or the older example, the author Salmon Rushdie and the threats of death he received).
This comment was written by Disgusted Beyond Belief.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Oh, it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Score Card:
One arguer for 2, standing behind the disproven studies.
Dear commenter whose comment was deleted (as warned in the post) — please start with Mismeasure of Man, and go from there to Sociology 101.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:36 am
It’s not as though the pretense of being an impartial user of The Science is a new one. The Mismeasure of Man, which has already been mentioned, documents a history bursting at the seams with distinguished scientists crying out that it’s not like they want black people to be inferior, but the hard, hard facts speak for themselves, and how dare you imply that there’s some sort of ulterior motive involved–clearly you must be unable to face the politically incorrect yet incontrovertible facts.
One of the saddest things about science is how often things which are manifestly not science are nevertheless regarded as such. Carl Sagan wrote a lot about that (specifically in The Demon-Haunted World), and I fear that the essays will remain relevant for a very long time.
This comment was written by grendelkhan.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Score Card:
Same commenter pleads for civility.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 8:15 am
I can’t believe someone actually commented supporting one of those two positions after you specifically said the comments would be deleted. Both of those you listed make me very angry when and if ever expressed, as does support of creationism, though I generally give it a bit of a pass in family and acquaintances since I don’t want to shit on their belief system.
Another one: Rape and/or sexual abuse is ever the victim’s fault.
This comment was written by Eve.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Wow… the application of the latter to either of the two topics mentioned is… interesting, to say the least. It’s also interesting that the proponents of #2 often claim to be forwarding pure science, devoid of political concerns, fetters, or biases — right before they go on to apply their belief to every political issue known to man, from foreign policy to law enforcement to immigration.
This comment was written by BananaDanna.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 8:45 am
If I had to pick, based solely on the criterion of sexual safety, a sitter for my son, and you put a gun to my head and said “it must either be a pro-gay-rights activist or an anti-gay-rights activist”, I’d pick the pro-gay-rights activist without even a moment’s though.
The amount of hidden dirt in the homobigot crowd is astounding.
This comment was written by Silenced is Foo.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Mandolin, I agree with this whole sentiment but I choose to go an entirely different way with it. I would rather engage with someone until they’ve learned a little more than slam the door on them. On the whole I think if I disagree with someone it’s likely to be due to different philosophies, different priorities, different experiences of what’s important and what’s not. But with these two topics I genuinely think most of the adherents are simply ignorant or determinedly narrow-minded, and I think a bit of loving engagement can go a long way.
But I’m hospitable like that. I send friendly emails to extremely right-wing bloggers (usually just about what they think, why they think it and how they intend to convince the world of it) and get interesting and polite responses.
This comment was written by Thene.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Here are some more. I’m in the group that says that the constitution doesn’t apply to anyone’s right to spew bigotry or hate or threatening stuff on a Web site, but I’m sure many of us know that the largest argument these assholes have is to claim their free speech rights or First Amendment rights are being violated. They will whine, whine, whine, whine and whine. Then they’ll rant.
Here are some others.
Mexicans, documented or not(my choice of words, not the posters) deserve to be beaten by police officers solely for the amusement of those who can joke about it in blogs.
Women are just things to lie on and f–k.
Black people only drink malt liquor/eat fried chicken and corn bread/stick crack up their asses/spend their welfare checks on liquor and lottery tickets/are all crack heads/
Another sad thing is that I don’t know if or how many of these individuals my taxes are paying to work in my city. I’m not allowed to know. Unfortunately, number three, the lover of racist stereotyping, was written by a most likely candidate.
I don’t allow comments, the reason being is that the vast majority of comments I did receive were of this ilk, about 90%. Though some have simply taken their rants to other places. And the majority of the positive or informative ones couldn’t be published because they likely were by city employees and the city’s ISP is frequently on my site.
Moderation is tough. That’s what I learned. And one thing I learned is that I needed a break from it. I do have a lot of admiration for the bloggers that do it. It can be very difficult.
As for engaging, been there, so done that. I thought I was alone but as it turned out, I had quite a silent audience including I.A. investigators reading the exchanges, which makes it seem stranger. I think to a certain degree, you can engage but at a certain point, you have to shut off the conduit for their hate.
This comment was written by Radfem.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Radfem:
Agreed.
This comment was written by Thene.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Just playing devil’s advocate here (please don’t ban me forever!)…
If early childhood nutrition has a noticeable effect on future academic achievement, and poverty can cause poor early childhood nutrition, then does it follow that being born into poverty makes some people end up being less intelligent than they otherwise could have been? Would it also follow that a subpopulation that contains a higher percentage of people living in poverty is likely to have a higher percentage of people who suffer from this effect?
(If this is nonsense, please tell me, so I won’t embarrass myself anywhere else.)
Of course, regardless of whatever average differences exist between arbitrarily defined populations, the variance within the populations is much bigger than the difference between the averages, so knowing somebody’s ethnic background tells you basically nothing about that individual’s intelligence, and making decisions on that basis is just plain stupid.
(On the topic of intelligence, I tend to follow the lead of Scott Adams: Intelligence doesn’t exist; there are only greater and lesser degrees of stupidity.)
This comment was written by Doug S..Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 10:18 am
It would, yes. You pass sociology 101.
Particularly because you remembered:
Which means that the statement “blacks are intellectually inferior to whites” cannot be taken as scientifically justifiable in the naturalizing or reified sense in which it is invariably used.
(I mean the 101 comments to be said in a joking way because you commented that you weren’t sure you were analyzing things correctly, rather than a condescending tone, in case I wasn’t coming across as I intended. :D )
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Intelligence may exist; it’s almost certainly not something you can turn into a thing that can be quantified and pointed to. And in any case, it bears only cursory relation to IQ.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Being less… what? There are many errors in the claim that “white” people are more “intelligent” than “black” people, but let’s focus on one: the presupposition that there is a coherent, measurable quality called “intelligence,” that can be defined in a principled manner without sneaking in value judgements under the table.
This is just one instance of a very common thing: the use of science to disguise value judgements as fact judgements.
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 10:48 am
grendelkhan said:
I have not read the work in question, but I’ll put forward a guess: Carl Sagan is trying to get away with the idea that “science” is to be seen purely as a timeless epistemological method, and not as a social institution with a specific history and role in our society. By this move, one can avoid portraying science as playing a political role in our society.
The opposite to this position is the one held by somebody like, say, Feyerabend: science is a social institution characteristic of our society and deeply connected with the contingencies of our history, and it doesn’t get a moral free pass: science can be liberating in one historical period, but oppressive during another.
How is the work of somebody like Arthur Jensen not science? He’s a professor emeritus of psychology, very widely cited, and has plenty of peer-reviewed published work.
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Score card:
Bannings - 1
Defenders of position 2 - 2
“Here is one place on the internet where I’m not allowing you to say X” is like casting chum in front of entitled sharks.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Though, on reflection, it interests me that it’s point 2 which is incensing people to the point where they feel they have! to! shout! through! moderation! in order to be heard, so that we know that those black folks aren’t smart like us white people (after all, it’s sciencey! and truthy!).
Haven’t had any point one defenders yet.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 11:10 am
In support of banning rather than engaging, I’d like to point out that it’s not solely about not providing a forum for them to spew hate.
With topics like what Mandolin posted, it is almost certain that the poster is either incapable of understanding rational argument, or is wilfully ignorant. Either way, their presence here is unlikely to result in their changing their opinion, and can only add noise to otherwise intelligent discussion.
This comment was written by Bjartmarr.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Bannings: 2.
But similar whining, so probably actually one creep with an IP randomizer.
I’ll quit it with the score now, unless something particularly interesting happens. But it does interest me that the idea that there are no inherent differences in racial intelligence is perceived as so threatening.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Intelligence can’t be measured, because we can’t agree on what exactly should be measured (and some of the things don’t measure well.) But we have managed to come up with something which is (misleadingly) referred to as “general intelligence,” which I believe we are actually fairly good at measuring.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
“Homosexuality is linked to pedophilia.”
Is there a good refutation of this anywhere? With the IQ and race theory there’s lots of books I can think of - like the mismeasure of man - but nothing come to mind with this one.
This comment was written by james.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I don’t know if there’s a good refutation of it, but I’ve sure as hell never seen a good proof (or anything approaching one), so there’s not much to refute…
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
This is way too tame, IMO.
When we call somebody “intelligent,” we’re making a value judgement; we’re judging that some (ill-defined, contextually-dependent) combination of qualities that the person exhibits is good.
When scientists claim to have given us “intelligence measures,” something has clearly gone wrong. Scientists are supposed to be in the business of giving us accurate fact judgments, not value judgements. Or, in more classical terms, scientists are supposed to be telling us what’s true, not what’s good. Scientists giving us tests that claim to measure how intelligent a person is would be akin to them giving us tests that claim to measure how good a piece of music is.
The worst part is that the nature of the value judgements in question goes unexamined. “Intelligence” tests do measure to what extent the recipient possesses certain qualities and skills. Which qualities and skills are these? And more importantly, what qualities and skills are being implicitly devalued by excluding them from the intelligence tests?
That’s a long and complicated story, but you’ll find that it’s laden with class, gender and racial assumptions. To score well, it really helps if you’re a middle class boy raised to have middle class manners, and when a friendly authoritative adult man in a white lab coat (and with white skin, just like yours) asks you to sit down and to take this written test full of pointless questions, you don’t feel in any way intimidated, and you do sit down and cooperate fully with anything he asks you to do. Instead of, say, defensively remaining quiet and monosyllabic so as to not say something wrong that brings punishment upon you, or just not taking the tasks seriously because they could not possibly make a difference in your life.
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Okay, now here is my honest question: I, of course, disagree with both of the positions listed above. The studies that purport to show them are clearly biased and not probative of anything. My problem is the following:
1. Some white racist provides a “study” that shows that whites are the smartest.
2. Reasonable people attack him and systematically and statistically show that the “study” is flawed.
3. Racists and ignorant others continue to believe, while the rest of us do not.
In the end, your “equal time” library is stocked with the Bell Curve, etc. on one side, and The Mismeasure of Man, etc. on the other side. The first group provides ammunition for the racists, and the second group provides ammunition to use against the racists who use the first set of books. One book says “Whites have higher IQs” and the next book says “IQ is meaningless”.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there never seems to be a study (or at least I haven’t seen one well publicized) that comes out with the headline “New Study Shows People of Every Race Are Equally Intelligent.” It’s always the ant-racists playing defense. PLaying it well, of course, but never quite taking the initiative and saying, “I define intelligence like so, and that is a reasonable definition, and then I did some sort of scientific test, and it showed no statistical difference between the races.”
Anyway, this could be because only racists take up studies of intelligence based on race, or it could be for any number of reasons, or maybe I just might missed it.
So, does anyone know where all the “all races are equally intelligent” studies are, or why they are not out there, to use as a sword the next time I face some “Bell Curve” devotee?
This comment was written by Rich B..Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I’d add that women only want love and men only want sex.
This comment was written by Amanda Marcotte.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
This would only be true if intelligence were the only good. It would be entirely plausible for a scientist to come up with a test for how harmonious a piece of music is. And harmonious is a good quality in music. But that doesn’t mean that “Rite of Spring” is a bad piece of music–even if it is pretty low on the measure of harmoniousness.
This comment was written by SamChevre.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Rich B. says:
But if by your own portrayal, the anti-racists claim that IQ is meaningless, how could they offer such a study?
There’s an even bigger problem: the anti-racists are usually critics of the very concept of race, to start with. (And you can’t accuse them of not driving this point; the press in recent years has been full of claims that the sequencing of the human genome demonstrates that the concept of “race,” biologically taken, cannot apply to human populations.)
The reason scientific racists have an easier time isn’t because the anti-racist ones drop the ball. It’s because the scientific racists have an easier message to tell, one that supports the biases of a racist society.
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Here I thought there was a typo and that the first one read
homophobia is linked to pedophilia
I thought that was actually possibly correct. Not that correlation equals causation, of course.
And IQ testing favours a “higher” socioeconomic class, so of course it’s going to also correlate for race in some (most) countries. It’s also a meaningless number.
This comment was written by wookie.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Here’s another: “All lesbians hate men.”
This comment was written by Bonnie.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
From what I’ve heard, IQ test scores seem to be a fairly reliable and valid measure of… ability to score well on IQ tests. IQ correlates positively with a lot of things that we tend to value in other people, but a lot of other things, such as parents’ income and height, also correlate positively with things we tend to value in other people…
On a somewhat related note, is it true that SAT I scores are more strongly correlated with parents’ income than college freshman GPA?
This comment was written by Doug S..Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Seems to me that Doug S.’s commentary provides us all with an excellent example of “correlation does not equal causation”.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
And in fact they do: As I said, we’re pretty good at measuring general intelligence. If someone decides that GI is equivalent to actual intelligence, that’s not the fault of the scientist who ran the measurements.
Scientists certainly have some bias, but they’ve been pretty up front about what GI means and doesn’t mean.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
But if by your own portrayal, the anti-racists claim that IQ is meaningless, how could they offer such a study?
But just because IQ isn’t a proper measure of intelligence doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to be measured. In the “Mismeasure of Man,” there werechapters on “brain size” measurements. Racist scientists showed that black brains were smaller. This, we later learned, was simply false. Brains of black and white people are the same size.
So, I’m not a scientist, and I know “IQ” doesn’t mean anything useful, but it seems like there could be measurements of something meaningful somewhere. Doesn’t the “Mismeasure of Man” imply that if you weren’t Mismeasuring, you could have “The Correct Measure of Man”? Billions of neurons per cubic millimeter of fetal brain tissue? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. Maybe number of neurons doesn’t correlate to intelligence either.
You say that “scientific racists have an easier message to tell,” but that’s underselling the point. Scientific non-racists seem to not have a message at all. It’s like arguing against “Intelligent Design” without a developed theory of Evolution, or arguing against Creationism without knowing about The Big Bang. Your argument is deeply flawed, but I don’t appear to have anything better to replace it with.
And it is a historical truth that false theories and bad science never goes away when it is merely disproven, but only when it is replaced by better theories and good science.
One headline claiming “New Scientific Study Shows Under All Races Are The Same” would do 1,000 times more good than 1,000 learned treatises pointing out the statistical errors in “The Bell Curve.”
This comment was written by Rich B..Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Oh, heck no. There’s a whole section in there about Edward Teller and Andrei Sakharov, who very clearly committed tremendous evil by doing science, which could in no sane way be thought of in that situation as being a “timeless epistemological method”. Sorry if I’m misrepresenting it; the book is The Demon-Haunted World, and it’s worth a read.
Well, yeah. It’s a method; it’s not inherently good. No movement, method or philosophy is inherently good.
Having not read Feyerabend, I can’t speak to his views, but it seems to me that there’s a remarkably fine line between insisting that science claim responsibility for its products just like any other human endeavor, and demanding that the facts must fit your personal politics, because when they do, scientists are doing good work, and when they don’t, scientists are playing ivory-tower shenanigans.
I used the following analogy in a Slashdot thread, but now I can’t find it; here it is from memory.
People can be big in different ways. People can be heavy, or people can be tall, or people can be both. These factors aren’t very well-correlated. We can handwave into existence a quantity called the “size product”, or SP, which we get by multiplying a person’s weight by their height. We can use the results to order everyone in the world by SP, and say definitively that one person is “bigger” than another–but in doing so, we’re papering over a lot of complexity, and the measure isn’t really that useful, unless we have a throbbing hard-on for the idea of ranking everybody. IQ is a lot like that, except that there are more than two factors. People aren’t always directly comparable in terms of “smartness”; you can make up an arbitrary measure, but it’s just that–arbitrary. The common conception of intelligence is the result of reifying that measure.
I don’t think this was exactly it; rather, it was a combination of fudging the numbers (measuring skull sized with compressible material showed a difference; doing so with lead shot much less so) and failing to notice that brain size correlates very well with body size, which correlates very well with how well-nourished you are, which correlates with poverty, which correlates with race. In short, the brains were smaller, but not nearly as much as they thought, and it didn’t mean what they thought it did. (Also something about between-group differences not always meaning the same thing as within-group differences.)
This comment was written by grendelkhan.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I’ve argued in some of the comments above that there may not be anything meaningful to measure. When you call somebody “intelligent”, you’re approving of some undefined, context-dependent aspect of them, and when you “measure intelligence,” you’re ranking people according to how well they fit into your value system. Children that do good at IQ tests are children that have the skills that are believed to be good for success in school, college and white-collar jobs (or should I say “civilized” jobs, to drive the point further?).
There are a lot of impressive skills out there in the world that, because of the cultural biases, fail to officially make the people who have them “intelligent”; skills like improvising verse appropriate to a social gathering, or navigating a desert with few obvious landmarks using a highly developed sense of location.
No, of course it doesn’t. In fact, one of the central, repeated points of the book is that we can’t meaningfully measure intelligence!
No, here’s a better analogy: it’s like arguing against Astrology without having a replacement theory of how the movements of the stars can be used to predict the future. Why do the fortune tellers get to win by default?
The analogy goes further, because we can answer why the scientific racists win by default: they cater to the preconceptions of their audience. Racist theories of intelligence are just one extreme version of deficit theories of inequality: social inequality is explained as the result of deficits inherent to the disadvantaged people. So historically, the theory that black children do badly in school because their race is less intelligent lives in the same space as theories like: (a) the children have less nurturing mothers and home environments; (b) their mothers smoked crack while pregnant; (c) they are culturally deprived; etc.
The problem here is trying to make the public stop seeing the inequality as the result of some inherent deficit or another of the disadvantaged, and getting them to rather see it as the flip side of social relations that empower some people at the expense of others.
That’s not a historical truth. That’s the official ideological fantasy history of the sciences, as presented in textbooks that sanitize what actually happened to make the outcome seem “logical.” Actual research on the history of science doesn’t actually support that claim. (The classic works on this are Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Feyerabend’s Against Method.)
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
sacundim, <3 - I was going to tell grendelkhan et al to read Against Method.
This comment was written by Thene.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
I actually had the edifying and educational experience of my kid, back in 3rd grade, being given IQ tests within a few weeks of each other.
The first group of tests were in a non-air-conditioned cafeteria (notable in South Carolina autumns, hot as most yankee summers), the kids were given limited bathroom time, stomachs growling by lunchtime, sitting in uncomfortable chairs in an old, leaky building (since transformed into something else entirely) with the sun at bad angles (”in your eyes all the time”–she said).
Second series of tests, nice spanking-new suburban school, great chairs, tinted windows, air conditioning, lots of visiting moms to give out orange juice and snacks between tests, bathroom breaks galore, as well as physical stretching exercises and positive-thinking/rah-rah self-esteem pep talks at regular intervals. (These last perks were also made possible by the large number of stay-at-home-moms who helped out on test day. There were not many SAHMs at the first school.)
Now, let’s test YOUR IQ: Which test scores were 15 points higher?
Do you really think she got THAT MUCH SMARTER in such a short period of time?
It ain’t rocket science, people. ;)
This comment was written by DaisyDeadhead.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I have an et al.? I don’t even know anyone around here!
I’ll put it on the to-read stack, though.
This comment was written by grendelkhan.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
No you’re not. You’re measuring their ability to respond to a certain set of stimuli, to perform a certain set of tasks, and so on. Intelligence tests do measure something.
The selection of “something” is obviously value-driven. but the test itself remains.
True, there’s not much debate about whether GI is “accurate and equivalent to ‘real’ intelligence” (a position taken primarily by those who don’t know any better.) But there’s plenty of debate between people who, like me, believe that GI has some value (as opposed to no value) and those who–possibly like you, though I can’t be sure–seem to argue that intelligence cannot be tested at all, or that GI has no value.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
IQ does measure something. It is at least moderately predictive of academic success. However, it does not measure intelligence overall, given that we don’t even have a definition of what that is. When you correct for confounders, blacks and whites do equally well on IQ tests. Whatever that means.
This comment was written by Dianne.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
I don’t understand what difference you see between “ranking people according to how well they fit into your value system” and “measur[ing] something [that is] obviously value-driven.”
Yes, it is certainly the case that IQ tests measure how well people can do certain tasks characteristic of Western, upper middle class education and jobs. But that’s the whole point—the whole enterprise suffers from unexamined, little understood cultural bias. It’s a measure of how well people fit some hegemonical cultural expectations, that has the effect of marking cultural difference as deficit. The idea that “scientists” can just give anybody a test and measure how “intelligent” they are is an instance of White Privilege and Upper Middle Class Privilege; the whole procedure is, in the actual practice of it, premised on the test being “value-neutral,” and the people who design and administer the tests assume and exploit the privilege of being exempted from understanding the differences between themselves and the people they administer the tests to.
For a couple of good examples of why the whole thing has hopeless cultural biases, here’s a couple of good things to read: Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence (PDF file), or The New Yorker’s article on Dan Everett’s research on the Pirahã (and pay special attention to the narration of Tecumseh Fitch’s attempts to perform psychological experiments on the Pirahã).
The argument isn’t simply that “intelligence” cannot be tested. The argument is that the whole question, from the very beginning, is framed in a way that disguises value judgements as fact judgements, and as such, represents the people doing the judging as proceeding in a value-neutral, apolitical fashion, which exempts them from acknowledging certain facts about social relations.
This comment was written by sacundim.Report this comment to the moderators
December 10th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
@ Sacundim
This is off topic but I was wondering, since you mentioned Everett’s article, if you knew of any good blog sites that have a linguistics bent that also talk about race, gender, intercultural communications, etc.? I did quite a bit of undergraduate work on the Piraha and would be interested in reading a blog that integrated linguistics and the other topics I mentioned above. Thanks.
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December 10th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
In reply to Doug S way back in the thread, I’d like to point out another fallacy:
Academic achievement =/= intelligence.
Academic achievement is certainly influenced by intelligence, but from what I recall of student development theory, it can be influenced either way — i.e., a bright child who is bored or feels out of place in the classroom can completely bomb in achievement. Also, a bright child might chafe at the traditional structure of American classrooms, which mostly encourage rote learning and mainstream acculturation, not reasoning (a key measure of intelligence). Whereas a less intelligent child who’s got personal motivation, a supportive family or culture which encourages achievement, leisure time to study properly, adequate resources (like food), etc., can easily outperform a child with a much higher IQ.
Apologies if this has been pointed out already — I’m skimming the thread to catch up.
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December 10th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Yes, but I am pretty sure that the effects of malnutrition were at one point linked to intelligence scores as well as academic acheivement. (This still leaves all the problems with what IQ is, and what race is, and what intelligence is and why, and so on and so forth.)
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December 10th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
sacundim, thanks for the links! It’s fascinating reading–the sort of stuff I’d heard about third-hand, but had never seen any primary literature on.
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December 10th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
I already know from experience that school sucks when you’re too smart for it. They had to keep me in special education for years while the regular classes caught up with me. ;)
Formal education is overrated anyway; it’s all about the credentials and costly signaling. Which would be more helpful to someone’s career: magically getting a diploma from Princeton University while receiving none of the education, or successfully completing four years of a Princeton University education with no way to prove that you ever attended? I really don’t know, but I suspect that in a non-technical field, one might very well be better off with the diploma.
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December 11th, 2007 at 8:43 am
While this may be true, I do not think it is relevant to a discussion of intelligence and race. If my opinion were “White people are better at the parts of intelligence that include reading and math, and black people are better at the parts of intelligence that include navigating in the desert, and therefore the different races have different, but equal, intelligence” that would, I think be a pretty racist conclusion.
Instead, my belief is, “Given a society in which every person is given equal opportunity, and there is no societal racism, and every child is given equal encouragement, etc., people of different races will score in approximately identically on tests that cover broad ranges of what is considered an essential education in Western school systems.” There may be different cultural definitions of “intelligence,” but it seems to me that the definition you choose is largely irrelevant. In a non-racist society, white people and black people should score the same on any sort of test, whether it be “algebra” or “improvised verse.”
I feel as though some of the responses are implying (and I assume that this is not what you actually mean), “Who cares if Black people aren’t as good in math, because math is only one aspect of intelligence.” The non-racist position should be “Black people have an equal innate ability to perform well on math test as Whites or Asians.” So, while there might very well not be any natural definition of “intelligence,” we can give it 100 different definitions, “Intelligence equals ability to recall the obscure historical dates.” “Intelligence equals speed in solving multiplication problems,” “Intelligence equals ability to connect names to faces after a single introduction,” and people of difference races should be able to score comparably (after adjusting for whatever needs to be adjusted for.)
There should be way to test these smaller hypotheses without moving into the world of astrology.
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December 11th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I would agree with you, Rich — especially the part about people who seem to be making excuses for black kids’ achievement woes and patronizing them in the process. I’ve heard the same reasoning applied to the gap between women and men on math achievement, and I’m convinced it’s BS for one reason: women in many other cultures do just fine in math. If gender differences influence mathematical reasoning, then why are so many Chinese, Eastern European, African (US immigrant), and Southeast-Asian-Indian women so good at it? Some math- and hard-science-oriented professions in these societies are *dominated* by women (with a corresponding decrease in the perceived social status of math- and science-oriented careers). So that tells me there’s a cultural factor involved in either the education of American women, or the women’s (mis)perceptions of their own ability, that’s impacting their achievement.
Along the same lines, I disagree with you that the different cultural definitions of intelligence don’t matter. Even in a non-racist society, any intelligence test that sees widespread use will naturally be biased toward the definition of intelligence used by the majority or dominant group in that society. So while both Group A and Group B might consider the same factors to be part of intelligence, each group is likely to place different emphasis or prioritization on those factors, based on their history and values. Group A might think the foremost measure of intelligence is the ability to adapt to one’s environment; Group B might think it’s abstract reasoning. No test can give equal weight to all of these things, so it’s likely the test will end up favoring one group over another. And that’s not even counting the tendency of testers from one group or the other to interpret the results in different ways.
The truth is, we don’t really understand intelligence yet. Scientific fields like psychology and artificial intelligence are still trying to pin down what matters and what doesn’t, and how much weight to lend to the things that matter. This hasn’t stopped countless people from claiming that they can objectively measure these things, or ascribing their own personal weight to whichever measures they use. Classic example: psychologists (as cited in Clotfelter’s After Brown: the Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation, I think 2006, and also Bevery Tatum’s Can We Talk About Race from 2006), in the precursor to modern IQ testing, deliberately misused such tests to exclude thousands of European immigrants from entrance to the US at Ellis Island, because they didn’t fit Anglo-Americans’ notions of acceptable European strains (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans). Things have changed since then, but many of the modern tests are still based on “data” like that gathered in the Ellis studies.
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December 11th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Hello, this is my first comment here.
I think both 1) and 2) are wrong ( heh).
But I dislike the approach. It reminds me of Holocaust discussions.There are tons of proofs that the Holocaust happened. But I still don’t think the laws against Holocaust denial are right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
Shutting down discussion, even with the most retarded, won’t bring anything good.
I wanna ask you, since most of you posting on this blog are Americans : do you think it’s a good or bad thing that the USA doesn’t have a law against Holocaust denial?
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December 11th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Saying that I don’t have to be polite to or respect people who hold certain positions on a blog has nothing to do with creating laws to censor certain positions.
I am not a government.
Also, don’t use the word retarded as an insult here again.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
December 11th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
That’s the official ideological fantasy history of the sciences, as presented in textbooks that sanitize what actually happened to make the outcome seem “logical.” Actual research on the history of science doesn’t actually support that claim. (The classic works on this are Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Feyerabend’s Against Method.)
From what little I’ve seen, Kuhn’s work may actually support the claim in question:
As for Feyerabend, anyone who justifies the teaching of creationism is a fool or a liar unless proven otherwise.
Does one of you have a clear example of bad science replacing good?
This comment was written by hf.Report this comment to the moderators
December 11th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Shutting down discussion, even with the most retarded, won’t bring anything good.
This seems easy to disprove if you include internet discussions.
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December 11th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Oh, and if anyone cares, I’d define “good” or “bad” science by Newton’s Rules or a modern paraphrase.
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December 11th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Feyerabend ‘justified’ no such thing. He didn’t write about teaching science, he wrote about creating science. He thinks we shouldn’t, using your example, forever destroy all creationist literature ever, because we’re bloody lucky no one destroyed all atomist literature back when that went out of fashion for a millennia and a half. If he had anything to say about the teaching of anything, I’ve missed on reading it.
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December 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Funny, I only had to type “feyerabend teach” into Google to find this insanity:
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December 11th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I’d call it an over-the-top parody except creationists seem to believe exactly this. Does anyone know if he meant this crap?
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December 11th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
By the way, in case someone thinks Thene answered my earlier question, the one surviving piece of atomist literature I know of seems like stunningly bad science. And this makes sense in retrospect, since it long predates Newton’s rules for experimental philosophy — which seem like the earliest formalization of the method that Feyerabend, being a slavering loonie or a brilliant parodist, claims does not exist. The fact that other forms of thought can influence science seems mildly interesting but doesn’t actually address the issue at hand.
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December 12th, 2007 at 12:00 am
I’m sick (again, again), and also there’s an ice storm here which makes me feel reclusive.
So, effectively, I’m not going to mod/participate much, but I wanted to go ahead and say that I think the discussion has gone in some interesting places.
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December 12th, 2007 at 3:43 am
hf says:
“Bad” and “good” according to whose standards? It’s almost trivial that we, who subscribe to newer theories, regard them as better than the older ones they replaced. It gets worse, because we understand our own scientific theories much better than the ones that they replaced; and even worse than that, because for most of us, our knowledge of dead theories is exclusively through the lens of the replacement theories; we normally only know the older theories as described by the people who rejected them. We don’t get to hear what the adherents of the older theories may have found objectionable about the new ones. (And if we were to hear it, we would quite likely find them hard to understand, or even outright silly. How would you react to an argument against Galilean mechanics based on the fact that it fails to explain generation and corruption?)
In the Kuhnian model, a new paradigm succeeds an older one by taking a vexing puzzle from the old paradigm, and setting it up as an exemplar of how, when you abandon the assumptions of the old paradigm in favor of the new one, the puzzle becomes solvable. While the supporters of the new paradigm describe this as an “advance,” what they leave out is the puzzles the older paradigm solved and that their new paradigm doesn’t. (Generation and corruption, anybody?)
This means that for the new paradigm to get adopted, people must judge that gaining a solution to the new paradigm’s exemplar is more valuable than losing the solutions to many of the old paradigm’s puzzles—often never to recover them. New paradigms don’t in general explain more facts than the old ones—they explain facts that, for historically contingent reasons, were judged to be more important than other facts that the old paradigm explained. This means that arguing that science “progresses” in any sense other than the trivial one (”We like our theories much better than our ancestors’”) is very, very hard; not impossible, I think, but the form of the argument isn’t going to be something like “our theory explains facts that the old one didn’t,” but rather, “we successfully use our theory to reliably do things that we couldn’t do before, back when we had the old theory.” (And even then, we’re going to be vulnerable to retorts like “yeah, but those new things we now do aren’t that good, in comparison with this other thing that your theory can’t do.”)
Anyway, to give an example of how it’s never as straightforward as “good” science replacing “bad” science: Feyerabend discusses Galileo at length. Galileo’s project involved discarding Aristotelian mechanics with a theory of mechanics that didn’t even attempt to explain many of the things that Aristotle’s did (e.g., corruption). The application of Galileo’s telescope observations to astronomy required a theory of optics to interpret of them, and he couldn’t provide an explicit one. The heliocentric models of the time did not really make any testably different predictions than the contemporary geocentric ones. Heliocentrism, which we today judge as a scientific advance over geocentrism, was only developed by pursuing it despite plenty of perfectly reasonable contemporary criticism that, according to many of the standards we claim to believe in, should have shot it down. Heliocentrism only became “good” science after a long time of being pursued despite being “bad” science.
What exactly do you find “insane” there? I think there’s plenty both to agree and to disagree on. The real problem here is that science wields an enormous authority in our society, yet when people are called to that authority, the grounds they offer are unsatisfactory (which is precisely the sort of thing that Feyerabend argues far better than what you’re quoting here). Feyerabend, in the passages you quote, is taking one way out of this dilemma: if science isn’t entitled to its authority on the grounds that it claims it, then it must be stripped of it. This isn’t the only way out of the dilemma, and he doesn’t even try to list what the alternatives are. Clearly not a very great job. But really, it comes down to the same thing I was saying above: the argument that science has achieved “progress” is a very, very hard one to make.
(But also remember that the guy loved to shock his audience. This lecture makes for very fun reading. Feyerabend often comes across as a very dedicated contrarian, sometimes more than he ought to be.)
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December 12th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Well, given the initial topic of the thread, I’d have to say that “bad science replacing good”–or, more precisely, “bad moral reasoning supposedly based on science replacing better moral reasoning supposedly based on science” would be exemplified by the replacement of natural-law-based by Darwinian-based views of human rights. (The Social Darwinist perspective that dominated elite thought in the 1880-1940 timeframe.)
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December 12th, 2007 at 8:46 am
One of my favorite essays, somewhat relevant:
This comment was written by Doug S..http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
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December 12th, 2007 at 10:28 am
This is most likely true, but I was discussing a hypothetical non-racist society, and in such a society, the “dominant group” would not be a particular race. (Maybe it would be bakers, and we would be debating whether bakers are inherently smarter than pastry chefs.)
So I am back to racists providing me flawed measurements, and non-racists waving their hands and saying “there is nothing to measure.” But that is certainly not true — or if it is it is only contingently true because we haven’t come up with a good measurement yet.
If we wanted to prove that a human was smarter than a five-year-old monkey, there are scientific tests that could prove this. We know from scientists that dolphins are “intelligent” animals and the chimps are “smarter” than apes. (There are also some tests, such as this one that shows that on some memory tests, chimps perform better than people.)
If I am a racist, and see that scientists can rank animals by intelligence, and believe that different races are so far apart that they are comparable to different species, it makes perfect (though racist) sense to try to apply the same tests to blacks, whites, and asians. But now I hear that these same types of tests are meaningless because “there is no such thing as ‘intelligence’.”
Maybe it would be a sort of exam like an IQ test, or a biomechanical brain scan or I don’t know what. I just am not buying that there is nothing there to measure, or that intelligence is comparable to astrology.
I believe that, generally speaking, given similar circumstances, a person of any race can do just as well in any sort of skill-set as a person of any other race. In the vernacular, that on average people are equally smart. But without any scientific evidence to support this, is my viewpoint just as baseless as a racist’s?
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December 12th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Rich B,
I think you’ve got a false dichotomy here. The answer does not lie somewhere between flawed measurements and no measurements. The problem is that your concept of measuring intelligence is itself flawed. You’re subscribing to the common belief that intelligence is a single, simple, easily quantifiable concept. This just isn’t true. You can reduce intelligence to its component parts, and measure each of those, yes. But how do you know you’ve picked the right parts? How do you know which parts are more/less important? How do you measure the interaction between those parts, or with external environmental factors? And if you can find a way to measure all of these things, how do you interpret all that data?
Your example here illustrates the problem:
Memory =/= intelligence. I know Down’s Syndrome kids who have better memories than most people on this board including myself, but that doesn’t mean they’re the next Einstein. Memory is a component of intelligence, but it’s erroneous for you (or anyone else) to equate this with “smartness”. That’s like calling a brick a house.
The thing is, American society loves to do this — reduce intelligence to some simplistic, all-encompassing thing that we can stick a number on (IQ score) and use it to dictate an individual’s entire life. Or draw conclusions about a whole group of people based on how “smart” they are. That’s where the racists get into trouble, IMO. It’s not astrology; this stuff can be measured, and conclusions can be drawn from the data. But not simply. And the results will never be something we can reduce to a quick soundbyte. If you insist upon doing so, you’ll be able to come up with something, some simplistic blurb or whatever, about who’s smart and who’s not. But it will be inherently, inescapably, flawed.
Because, according to all I’ve read in the last few years, we’re increasingly discovering that intelligence is not a single factor, but a system. It consists of multiple and very different components which react and interact in mostly-predictable ways to all sorts of stimuli. It’s affected by factors as disparate as whether an individual has been well-nourished, and what color the test is printed in. And like any system, intelligence is dynamic. There have been studies showing that administering the same IQ test to the same person at different points in his/her life usually changes the result. i.e., we get smarter (or dumber) over time. Some of us react to environmental stress by developing new cognitive abilities that we never needed or used before. This ability to learn is also part of intelligence, perhaps the most important aspect of intelligence — yet we’ve only recently begun to study learning theory, as in the last 30 years. It took us 100 years to learn that learning is important.
But I digress. So in response to your question:
Your viewpoint isn’t baseless. It’s probably even true; that’s what the preponderance of evidence suggests, racist reductivist attempts aside. But if you’re looking for scientific evidence to support your belief, you need to keep one thing in mind: you cannot describe a complex system in a simple way. Weather forecasters and theoretical physicists figured this out ages ago. Maybe somebody needs to develop a chaos theory for intelligence or something.
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December 12th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
SamChevre, as you implied yourself, that doesn’t fit the bill unless the older moral reasoning somehow counts as good science by the standard I linked in #63. And sacundim, why talk if you don’t pay any attention to what I say?
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December 12th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
“It’s affected by factors as disparate as whether an individual has been well-nourished, and what color the test is printed in”
And whether or not you’ve let people know that they should score well or badly on a subject because of what group they belong to…
Love your post, Nora.
This comment was written by Mandolin.