Who is saying that Bostrom is racist because his vibe was off?
The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery just because he wanted to be cool and rebel. I personally don't think Bostrom is "racist", more that he is an idiot with edgelord tendencies (and I think this alone justifies to not consider him for intellectual jobs: in a similar way, it is sometimes funny how some people are arguing that they are not racist or sexist, they just are a dick to other people regardless of their skin color or gender, as if it does not mean that society would be better without them too)
>The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery
The measured IQ difference between races is not science quackery. It's a fact accepted by most who seriously study the issue. For example, the American Psychological Association issued a review of the evidence and concluded there is a Black-White IQ testing gap[1]:
> The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socioeconomic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.
So the question remains, do facts have any place at all in this debate, or is it just vibes? Presumably stating a fact in and of itself cannot reasonably be construed as evidence of racism. And so what is left is to condemn Bostrom for his vibe.
I read the area that talks about race. 1. This only mentions African americans, who are mixed West Africans and are a tiny portion of the black race. 2. It specifically says that black people's scores on tests have improved since the 1970s. Around the time they got civil rights. So this is to do with poverty and systemic oppression (the combination of these, and cultural impacts of these, not JUST socioeconomic factors), not race. The statement "blacks are stupider than whites" is very different to "African Americans do worse in tests due the legacy of systemic racism". This is why Bostrom updated his comments to say exactly that.
I mean, you're extrapolating much more than the evidence warrants. Everyone on all sides of this debate believe environment has some significant role in measured IQ. So the fact that the IQ gap has reduced since African American's material condition has improved does not imply the entire gap is due to environmental influences.
You're also changing the subject. The issue is whether the widely accepted Black-White IQ gap exculpates Bostrom of the charge of racism. The question of the source of the IQ gap is a separate issue. Whether that source turns out to be fully environmental or only partially is a separate concern.
As I've said, I don't consider Bostrom as a racist, I consider him as an idiot because he felt for the first scientific quackery that sounds edgy.
Even in 1996, it was obvious that "Blacks are less smart than Whites" is incredibly scientifically stupid, the same way that saying not long ago "LK-99 superconductor is a game changer, and people who are skeptics are wrong". In 1996, it was clear for anyone who look more than 10 minutes that the situation was way muddier than Bostrom realised, and that Bostrom is as stupid as the idiots who jumped on the LK-99 superconductor craze without waiting for more info.
Dunno why i can't reply to your reply, but I pointed out earlier than West African immigrants (sharing West African ancestry with AAs) are some of the most successful immigrant families in the US. Others have tried to debunk this for me saying only the best emigrate to the US. Okay, well why is this the same case in the UK where all black people are immigrants? Caribbean immigrant families have worse outcomes than Nigerian immigrant families. So it's not genetic. It's about transatlantic slavery, the legacy of oppression that that has had, and the cultural distrust of the system that thrives amongst these people in the wake of such systemic oppression.
There's a timeout between when the comment is first posted and when the reply button is visible.
>Others have tried to debunk this for me saying only the best emigrate to the US.
It's not about the US specifically, but about some avenues for immigration costing significant money, time, educational attainment, etc. I don't know much about the UK immigration system, but probably Black immigrants to the UK are similarly selected to be higher IQ than average. It's not like they can just walk across the border.
>Caribbean immigrant families have worse outcomes than Nigerian immigrant families.
You can't just naively compare two very different political situations and social contexts and expect them to be equal on all relevant traits. What political systems in place may make it easier for a Caribbean family to immigrate to the UK compared to Nigerians? Who knows, but these are relevant facts that you can't just assume are identical or irrelevant. These things need to be studied carefully if they are to be taken as conclusive evidence.
I agree there's more to be examined if we want a good picture. There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here. And that is all I'm arguing. Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
> There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here.
If you take race as just a grouping trait for a collection of individuals, then this is just plainly false. Black/White as a grouping trait does in fact correlate with measured average IQ differences. This result is not in doubt. If you're taking race as some abstract ideal then there is no evidence that the abstract concept of race correlates with IQ scores. But this just changes the subject.
>Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
If the argument is that he didn't take sufficient care and sensitivity to an issue he knew or should have known is highly inflammatory, then you should just say that. But this just sounds like a vibe check to me. Which is fair, but at least be honest about it.
This is what is called a spurious correlation, and it is wildly considered as a scientific mistake to call it simply "a correlation", because either the person that talks about correlation has made a mistake by not checking if it's spurious or not, or the person that talks about correlation is intellectually dishonest.
It's like saying that black skin and lion attacks are correlated: while it is true that the correlation coefficient shows a number that correspond to a correlation, proper scientists don't do that, because it is not the skin color that is intrinsically correlated with the lion attacks, but the fact that lions and victims are both present in some specific regions. It is just bad science, or even pseudo-science, to call it "correlated", because you have done half the work and stop before the end. It's a bit like providing a result without the uncertainty bands when those uncertainty bands indicate we haven't reached statistical significance: it's bad science and it is not accepted for publication.
I guess you know it, but just in case: the stupid graph where you see a growing line between skin color and IQ is because the samples are not corrected for socio-economical status, which is itself clearly correlated with IQ. It's like taking blue-eyed people who are poor and stop their education early and brown-eyed people who have been to uni and then looking at the IQ.
Additionally, the stupid naive line is not the only method to check if it is genetic. You can also compare IQ score of twins separated at birth or look at the genome of the cluster that you pretend is "genetically less intelligent" and see if in this cluster there is less variance than in any other groups. In both case, the conclusion is that the IQ score appears to not be correlated to a specific genome. So via this approach, the conclusion is that "we cannot conclude it is correlated" because there is no mechanism to explain it and it can be spurious or a fluctuation.
Thank you for talking sense very well. It very suspicious and disingenous that people seem to want to double down on the loose idea that there may be causation here when it would be ridiculous to do so in any other scientific context. It's blatantly racism and/or, as you said, simply falling for some very inaccurate and dangerous rhetoric by people with a racist agenda.
Did you even read the article you point to? It looks like you just cherry picked a sentence that says what you want to hear.
The passage that you highlight does not say that there is a gap not explained by socio-economical status, it says "it is not ONLY socio-economical". It does not say there is no biases in the the test construction, it says "there is no OBVIOUS biases". And it ends up with "At present, no one knows". It was in 1996. Since then, more studies have been done, based on a black people sample that sees its socio-economical status evolving, and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status.
So, yes, in 1996, believing in "Whites are smarter than Blacks" was quackery, the same way that few months ago, falling for the LK-99 superconductor craze was falling for quackery: you had to be an idiot to not notice you cannot jump to conclusion. The article you quote here is saying exactly that: you cannot reliably say "Whites are smarter than Blacks", because we don't know why we see a gap, it can be a simple statistical fluctuation or a spurious correlation that we haven't discovered yet. It is explicitly said in the article conclusion: "In a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is
clearly out of place". They say that Bostrom confident tone that Whites are smarter than Blacks is clearly out of place.
> It looks like you just cherry picked a sentence that says what you want to hear.
I cherry-picked a sentence from the summary section for the sake of providing a representative statement of the content of the article relevant to the discussion. There's nothing bad form about that. Nothing you say undermines the relevance of the point or somehow minimizes it.
>and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status.
Feel free to provide the studies that demonstrate this.
> I cherry-picked a sentence from the summary section for the sake of providing a representative statement of the content of the article relevant to the discussion.
"cherry picking" is a term used to talk about picking the "nice" context and not picking the "not nice" context, and therefore depicting the situation in a misleading way. The article that you quote was a reaction from the APA to the Black IQ controversies and is widely viewed as the APA taking the position that saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" as not supported by APA. It is what someone understand when they read the full conclusions (other interpretations do not make sense).
> Feel free to provide the studies that demonstrate this.
It's very easy to find them. The fact that you are not aware of these shows that you are not very aware of the state of the art in the subject.
But for example:
Kaplan, Jonathan Michael (January 2015). "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called "X"-factors: environments, racism, and the "hereditarian hypothesis"".
Birney, Ewan; Raff, Jennifer; Rutherford, Adam; Scally, Aylwyn (24 October 2019). "Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer"
Dickens, William T.; Flynn, James R. (2006). "Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples"
Nisbett, Richard E.; Aronson, Joshua; Blair, Clancy; Dickens, William; Flynn, James; Halpern, Diane F.; Turkheimer, Eric (2012). "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin"
>is widely viewed as the APA taking the position that saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" as not supported by APA.
The thing is, I never claimed otherwise. My claim was very specific, and I used the APA review as a citation of that specific point. Namely, that the measured Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science but is accepted by most people who study the issue.
>It's very easy to find them. The fact that you are not aware of these shows that you are not very aware of the state of the art in the subject.
Usually people's claims overstep the actual evidence in their claimed citations. The gambit is that their interlocutor won't look or won't understand what they're reading if they did. Your citations are a case-in-point.
The first one is not about IQ at all, but about the changes in household wealth due to the Great Recession.
The fourth one is a commentary piece that doesn't explicitly defend the point of contention.
The second piece's title looks like commentary, so I didn't bother with it.
The third one defends the claim that the Black-White gap has reduced by 5 points, which is at least somewhat relevant, but doesn't at all defend your claim that the Black-White IQ gap has been demonstrated to be fully explained by bias and socioeconomic status.
> Namely, that the measured Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science but is accepted by most people who study the issue.
I have said that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery.
You answered saying that it is not, explaining that the Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science and therefore, all that remains is vibe.
Except that the science quackery is not "just observing that in data we see a difference while not correcting" (this is just facts and indeed people agree with that), the science quackery is to conclude garbage from this observation.
> Your citations are a case-in-point.
What a surprise. Of course you will say "no! no! it's not true! I don't believe articles that say what I don't want to believe".
> The first one is not about IQ at all, but about the changes in household wealth due to the Great Recession.
Are you stupid? The APA paper says "right now, socio-economic data is not enough to explain it", I've said "things have changed since then, for example look at this paper that shows that socio-economic data is now enough to explain it", and you answer "it does not mention IQ"?
> The fourth one is a commentary piece that doesn't explicitly defend the point of contention.
Are you stupid? The APA paper says "right now, socio-economic data is not enough to explain it", I've said "things have changed since then, for example look at this piece of commentary where very established experts explicitly explain that socio-economic data is now enough to explain it", and you answer "it does not mention IQ"?
> The second piece's title looks like commentary, so I didn't bother with it.
Of course you did not, every excuse is good for you to deny the facts. Commentaries are a valid way to communicate scientific results, it is ridiculous to say "the scientists have said their conclusions are X or Y, but I still maintain it is not because they said it on a pink piece of paper instead of green".
> The third one defends the claim that the Black-White gap has reduced by 5 points, which is at least somewhat relevant, but doesn't at all defend your claim that the Black-White IQ gap has been demonstrated to be fully explained by bias and socioeconomic status.
Are you stupid? You asked me to demonstrate that the picture became clearer, this article explicitly says that between 1996 and now, people have observed an evolution that makes thing clearer. And now you also take ONE of the few article, the one focusing on this aspect, and pretend that it invalidates everything because it does not focus on the other aspect. That's typical of discussion with pseudoscience partisan: you say "X and Y", you gave them 2 articles, one demonstrating X, one demonstrating Y, and they will say "invalid: the first one does not demonstrate Y, the second one does not demonstrate X". (and I know, "no, it's not true, none of these articles exist, I deny it". Whatever)
Tell me, in a theoretical parallel world where indeed my sentence is correct (it is correct in this world, but let's make the thought experiment where we agree it is correct), what should I provide to you that you will not reject for one reason or another? I'm sure you like to think of yourself very generously, but the reality is that in this parallel world, you will behave exactly like here: nothing will never be perfect enough to you, you will still believe you're right no matter what your interlocutor is bringing.
Anyway, I think I've made my point, no? You were saying that Bostrom is just "racist because his vibe is off", and by your own admission (you agree the APA article is saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" is stupid), we know agree it's ridiculous to pretend it is "just because of his vibe". Since then, you several time been intellectually dishonest. At the end, it just reenforces my impression that Bostrom is just an idiot that indeed have fallen for science quackery and have said racist stuffs because his played edgelord. Because if it was not the case, it is very strange that people who defend him are all exactly at the same level.
Honestly the fact that this guy ever suggested that our argument here was that "Bostrom's vibe was off" was already such a bad faith argument that I'm not surprised he is unwilling to engage with studies you have suggested. Sounds like he wants to think he is being persecuted by the "woke mob" rather than encountering people soberly debunking racial bias that has no scientific basis.
>You answered saying that it is not, explaining that the Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science and therefore, all that remains is vibe.
That's not the argument I made. Are you allergic to nuance? Are you incapable of giving a charitable take of your interlocutors position? This is the problem with these discussions, the blatant dishonesty being deployed in service to one's position.
>Except that the science quackery is not "just observing that in data we see a difference while not correcting" (this is just facts and indeed people agree with that)
This is the only observation my argument needs, and is the only thing I ever claimed in this entire discussion. The issue is whether the widely accepted Black-White IQ testing gap exculpates Bostrom of the charge of racism. The additional context and the deeper question of the cause of the gap doesn't change the fact of the measurement gap and potentially doesn't change the exculpatory nature of it. If you disagree, your responses should address this disagreement.
You already said you didn't think Bostrom was racist for the statement, so apparently your purpose in this discussion was different. But note that you did interject into a discussion that was explicitly about the claim itself being "almost tautologically racist".
>You asked me to demonstrate that the picture became clearer
Blatantly dishonest. The full quote of yours I responded to is "and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status". If you honestly took from that quote that I asked how the picture became clearer, then you are the stupid one in this exchange. I don't actually think you are stupid, which just leaves dishonesty.
Your specific claim "it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status" is plainly not at all demonstrated by the articles you linked. They potentially could support a relevant premise in such an argument, but they do not in themselves make the argument. If you make a specific and contentious claim in a dispute, you should give direct support for the claim. Trying to pass off tangentially related pieces of information as supporting the claim is pure dishonesty.
>Are you stupid?
No, but you are clearly a dishonest interlocutor.
>what should I provide to you that you will not reject for one reason or another?
The claim you made is that the Black-White gap is known to be mainly (i.e. mostly) a result of bias and socioeconomic status differences. A legitimate demonstration of this will start with an analysis of test results where the gap "mostly" disappears once the claimed bias and socioeconomic differences are controlled for. I say start with because we also know that IQ and socioeconomic status correlate, and so controlling for a correlating variable is just controlling for differences in the target property. In other words, controlling for IQ differences eliminates IQ differences. So much care needs to be taken when controlling for socioeconomic status and drawing conclusions about IQ differences. But I am very interested in engaging with attempts at such controls.
The problem with these debates is that the position that is moral-coded gets to shovel any and all bullshit in favor of it and are rarely called out for it. Those that call it out are branded as moral degenerates. There is no honest evaluation of the evidence. There is no chance of changing an opposing person's mind. Each side is just further entrenched and leaves the debate feeling like they won. And the world is worse off for the interaction. It's insidious.
Are you really unable to understand that "whites are smarter than blacks" and "we observe a statistical discrepancies in the observed IQ" is not the same?
Let me take plenty of examples, applicable or not to the specific observation we talk about, where we see exactly this observation and yet the conclusion X is smarter is just stupid.
Take 2 groups of people, put one group of people in a torture chamber without food and sleep for 48h, then give the IQ tests to both. Do you really think the tortured group is less smart than the other?
Take 2 groups of people, put one group in a class room and teach them for 2 years Japanese, then give a Japanese tests to both. Do you really think the other group is less able to learn language?
Take 2 groups of people, pass the IQ tests to both, then if the first group does not score significantly better than the second, redo the test over and over until you have a statistical fluctuation such that the first group does score significantly better (at 3-sigma confidence level, it should happen on average 1 time over 100). Do you really think the second group is less smart than the first group (despite that it does significantly better than the first group in some discarded cases)?
Take 2 groups of people, pass for the two of them 100 questions. Then take the 10 questions where the first group done the best and the second done the worst and call these 10 questions "IQ test". Do you really think the second group is less smart than the first group?
In all of these examples, the observation is there, and yet, it is incorrect to say that one group is smarter than the other. Some of these situations are even really similar to what people today consider as the reason why we see a discrepancy in the Black IQ question. For example, the socio-economical status says that 2 persons who are equally intelligent will not score the same IQ score if one of the two had access to some education that the other did not. In fact, you may even say that someone who manage to score 15/20 in a uni science test without having been to secondary school is definitively smarter than someone who score 17/20 but needed years of training and several attempts of the exam to reach this score: the second is definitively slower at understanding physics.
> But note that you did interject into a discussion that was explicitly about the claim itself being "almost tautologically racist".
But I agree with that: the claim itself is almost tautologically racist. I think Bostrom said a racist thing not because he is racist, but because he is an idiot and did not even realize his simplistic conclusion was wrong.
To take again an example I've given previously: the fake videos surrounding LK-99 were fake, make by scammers who cheated. Some people who were overexcited about LK-99 gave credit and supported these videos. These videos and their authors ARE FAKE AND SCAMMER, "almost tautologically". But some supporters of the LK-99 craze did not manipulate videos themselves, they did not create fakes. It is not because these people shared videos they did not realise were fake that the videos themselves are suddenly not fake. Same here: Bostrom said racist things, and it is not because Bostrom had no true racist intent (or at least I give him the benefice of the doubt) that the thing is suddenly not racist.
> Your specific claim "it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status" is plainly not at all demonstrated by the articles you linked
Sure ... whatever. There is literally one article titled "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin", but, yeah, I'm sure it does not say that at all. If you read the article, they are referencing numerous other studies that show (in short, not literally) the fitted curve between socio-economical status and IQ test score by comparing IQ test score for the same population before and after socio-econimical status progress. They argue that this curve fits perfectly to explain the gap. What they call "environmental factors" are access to education, economic gain, ... so it is indeed what is referred to as socio-economic status in the previous discussion.
> where the gap "mostly" disappears once the claimed bias and socioeconomic differences are controlled for
There is an article literally titled "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin". This is literally what this article does: it shows that if you control for environmental factor and don't use biased samples, the gap mostly disappears.
> The problem with these debates is that the position that is moral-coded gets to shovel any and all bullshit in favor of it and are rarely called out for it. Those that call it out are branded as moral degenerates.
This is clearly not my case, I never in this discussion mentioned "moral" or whatever. This shows your true color: you are really thinking that someone who does not agree with you can only be an idealist acting to defend some moral. My position is simple: science articles show that if you correct for environmental factors, the gap disappear. I don't care about moral or whatever. If the studies were saying the opposite, I would defend the opposite. The reason I don't defend the opposite is just because the opposite is not the reality, the opposite is not confirmed by science. But it is very telling that your only way to manage your cognitive dissonance when confronted with someone that does agree with you is to invent a crazy explanation in your mind: surely this person is a hippy (or whatever you want to call it, I don't care) that don't want to accept the facts for some moral reason.
> Each side is just further entrenched and leaves the debate feeling like they won. And the world is worse off for the interaction. It's insidious.
Not really though: the facts don't change. It does not matter if I'm right or if I'm wrong, or if you're right or if you're wrong, the facts prevail and scientists will be guided by facts. Nowadays, scientists are guided by facts, this is why people who says "whites are smarter than blacks" are slowly discarded of scientific position. And you and I under our "people on HN" avatars, we don't matter: it does not matter that you don't believe me, because scientists don't care about you. And I'm sure you are saying "but scientists are now all woke lefties or too afraid to talk because academia has been taken over by the PC police". Whatever make you feel better to deny that facts are just prevailing and that, bad luck, the facts are not saying what you would have preferred to hear.
There is no "2 sides". There is in one side, facts and science, that will continue whatever you choose to believe, and then there is irrelevant person on the internet as you and me, and amongst this group, there are the idiots that are screaming that academia is controlled by lefties or PC police because they don't follow their believes when facts say otherwise.
