Studying race differences (even in relation to IQ) doesn't make one a racist or supportive of racism any more than studying sex differences makes one a sexist or supportive of sexism. Only through understanding the true causes of differences can we get away from the blame game being pushed by critical race theorists.
Bo, thanks for an excellent rebuttal to Pinker's stand on IQ and race. I have been an admirer of Steven Pinker, and I find his recent stand puzzling.
"Race is both a biological and social reality, a product of evolutionary history and a salient marker of human identity. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is strongly predictive of life outcomes, including educational attainment, income, rates of violence, and even marital stability."
These points are demonstrably true, and I would expect any rational, logical-thinking person to concur. Therefore, I suspect a political ideology narrative is involved.
"Since color-blindness will not happen in contemporary America, we must face reality as it is."
This is the case not only in America, but throughout Western Civilization, Asia, and even sub-Saharan Africa.
It's been my lifelong observation that all discrete racial groups note and are aware of racial differences both physical and behavioral. But their response to these observable traits tends to differ, and I further speculate that these *responses* are also rooted in evolutionary necessities. I think it boils down to how existentially important is the intact propagation of one's racial type and associated behaviors, which are dictated by evolved response to an environment? If of deep importance, rejection of other types is stronger; if less important, what is labeled "racial tolerance" is more commonly found.
Really speculative, but it's my current default position in that part of my worldview.
There is an old recording floating around from when Pinker did actually go there and openly discussed why Ashkenazi Jews have higher intelligence at a conference. These "let's get back in the closet" folks are making fools of themselves and are ruining their legacies. When the truth becomes mainstream* in a few years, they will look like cowards.
* I've seen many different intellectual movements start on the internet over the years and can tell when they start gaining more traction with the public. I believe I'm seeing this with HBD - so many random comments on social media touch on HBD themes now, something that just didn't happen ten years ago.
These woke centrists always speak as if the harms of accepting the truth are certain and severe, while the harms of perpetuating the lie are mild and hypothetical at best.
On the one hand, their fears are exaggerated... The Holocaust didn't happen because the Nazis believed the Jews were less intelligent (in fact I watched The Eternal Jew, and there was an entire section about how Jews were overrepresented in various professions, exactly the same as the anti-white rhetoric today). The total number of lynchings over almost a century were not very large, did not exclusively target blacks, and certainly not "just for being black"; they were lynched for alleged crimes, some of which may have been exaggerated or fabricated, as the justice system is fallible in the best of circumstances, certainly more so in cases of mob justice. But given the disparities in rates of violent crimes, it would be astonishing if they were all innocent.
Etc etc. We could cover dozens of other examples...the narrative is superficially plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. History is full of cruelty, but an accurate understanding of the causes of group differences isn't the primary causal factor.
Otoh, their ideology blinds them to the mountain of skulls they are standing on. South Africa and Rhodesia, the most advanced flourishing countries on the continent, even for the blacks. But they didn't have equality, so the race communists and literal Communists worked together to bring them to ruin, poverty, famine, ethnic cleansing, dispossession (of people who's ancestors had in some cases been there for half a millenium, originally settling land that was at the time uninhabited)... In America, children forced at gun point to go to school with blacks...and it did not even improve the education of blacks as intended. All the white victims of black crime. In the UK...white girls, children, raped in numbers comparable to the rape of Nanking, systematically targeted for their race, and the country is being deliberately given over to foreigners, as is every country in Europe...it is as if they are absolutely determined to burn civilization to the ground to prove their faith in race communism.
We should no longer accept this smug pretense that they hold the moral high ground. It is the race communists who have blood on their hands. Their ideology is incompatible with the future of civilization. It is not "nice" or "empathic"; it dangerously delusional. We can't afford to live with the lie anymore.
My own approach to this fraught issue is to try to think past the realities involved by proposing a society in which anyone, regardless of intelligence who works had and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, a society that fits the human material that actually exists.
My underlying assumption is that a lot of the racial resentment that exists today is a result of the fact that we do not live in such a society today, but rather one in which differences in intelligence very much influences who will achieve (or at least appear to achieve) richer and more fulfilling lives.
Given racial disparities in intelligence this understandably leads to resentment and charges of unfair discrimination precisely among the most gifted -- who are also often also the most aggressively outspoken--members of the less favored groups.
This raises the question of whether it is even possible to imagine, let alone achieve, a society in which anyone--including those of only average or even below average intelligence--can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
That the higher intellect prospers more in this country is a function of how a first world technological society rewards individual efforts. Manual labor not so much, products of the mind much more so. If you want to balance out the unfairness of Nature, then we revert to a communist society quickly. We saw how that worked out for Russia. Somewhere there is a balance, but we won’t get there until all accept the truth of the above, rather than search for boogiemen such as “racists” behind every disparity.
My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy. It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long.
One facet of this issue I've tried discussing for years, which has recently been unintentionally brought by the UK's NHS, is the reality and consequences of consanguinity on populations. Especially insidious is its prevalence and pervasiveness in many countries, often at or above 50%.
There's no better justification for your argument than googling Steve Sailer's name: the 'summary' thrown up labels him 'far right' & the 1990s originator of 'scientific racism' (by him coining the concept of *human biodiversity*).
If we should not let generalisations about groups inform our priors about hiring people for jobs, then why should we have a prior that hiring a person from a different group will lead to a better outcome for our firm?
What could we expect a person from a 'disadvantaged' group to bring that a person from another group would not also have?
Nobody comments on the fact that blacks are over-represented in the NBA. Race hustlers make an issue of their being underrepresented in cognitively demanding fields. There’s nothing to talk about. The results of ending DEI and making selection the main barrier to entry into such fields will speak for themselves.
“But what if we change the example to two black men or two white men. Suddenly we pause. It just seems wrong to judge individuals based on group characteristics!”
It is wrong from a moralistic/logical viewpoint. There is always error possible/probable in such judgements. However who has been wronged here? Is there a “right” for these two men—Black or White—to demand that a woman get into an elevator with them? Of course not. Therefore the woman in question has injured no one and made the best choice (for her) possible with the evidence available. Pinker would take away that choice.
If only Iryna Zarutska had the foresight to take a seat a few rows further forward in the rail car, and away from an unknown Black man seated immediately behind her, she’d be alive today. She is not just a victim of crime, but a victim of “ignorance of Blacks” and their propensity for violence. She can be excused for such given that she grew up in a country without such a “problem”. Pinker would have us all grow up as poor Iryna did…sigh.
Pinker, Shermer, Chomsky. What’s the common link? Now Let’s talk about that, too. “No! No!”, says Bo and Aporia. It’s no wonder that Pinker doesn’t want to go in that direction. He’s afraid of where it would inevitably lead. Instead, it’s imperative that we keep the fantastical delusions of the liberal project afloat. Sigh
Ruling out a priori relevant factors (such as IQ) is a defining irrationality - ideological blindness. Voluntary blindness is not harm free - it creates a perpetually resentful victimhood. Pretence of uniformity damages its supposed beneficiaries. Today's example: our government proposes to damage children by preventing teaching that is adaptable to the local intake.
I am a black person who agrees with the hereditarian argument and I could not stop laughing when I was reading this review. A lot of people really don't care that iq gaps are genetic. Black people are quite ok with themselves and are over confident. White egalitarians are the problem
To be fair, I could see an argument that since we're not exactly doing high-budget, highly rigorous, carefully controlled, multiple-testing-methods, normed against verified individual priors testing regimes, which have been carefully calibrated to remain highly consistent over time....
That, in terms of budgeting for measuring IQ differences by race, it's probably not worth the money to chase what's probably a relatively minor difference even if it does exist. Also, it would likely be self-defeating.. Most people willing to spend money on that specific question would also provide enormous pressure to produce the 'correct' results.
If we only have X million dollars to spend on broad-based IQ testing, there are lots of things I'd want to fix first before I tried to fix the gathering of background-normed racial statistics.
And even if we DID spend the money on gathering racial IQ statistics, most of the current 'standard' racial types just wouldn't cut it. We'd have to have hundreds of categories in order to do meaningful statistics on it, and we'd have to have genealogies to verify the answers people gave, and it would just be so much work.
I'd much rather have data on things like parental education attainment vs IQ, or the different results of different types of IQ tests when you give them to kids raised in excellent school districts vs terrible school districts... do relatively non-academic IQ tests show a closer gap between those populations that highly academic IQ tests?
I'd also much rather have information about what being raised in a highly clannish or superstitious environment does to IQ, or whether having a native language more commonly associated with international scientific literature and broad international debate helps, or things like that.
And I REALLY want to see a project to give exactly the same IQ tests, without alteration or re-norming, to a wide population base consistently over a hundred plus years, just so we can look for patterns later.
"Race is contentious because multi-racial societies are fragile, perpetually threatened by resentment and conflict."
This is the whole point. Whites are only significantly net harmed by diversity. This is the elephant in the room. Not only is diversity itself always bad, but forcing Whites to live with Blacks is a one way significant harm. This fact is unfortunately almost entirely absent from Bo's otherwise excellent (as always) article. We should care because we are the ones paying the significant, even existential cost. It is evil to demand we sacrifice ourselves for their benefit in this way, and to remain silent not only while we are victimized, but while we ourselves are falsely blamed to justify the harms being done to us. Let's not beat around that bush.
We have a natural right, and even a moral obligation to our posterity, to fight back against what is being done to us and the lies being told about us to facilitate it. Exploiting our better nature to get us to remain silent as we're victimized and replaced, and to add insult to injury, while being wrongly blamed for what is being done to us.
That Chomsky would make such an evolutionarily ignorant argument is perhaps forgivable (but not really), given his fields of research and ideological priors, but for Pinker to repeat it, without admitting that skin color doesn't cause IQ, but that both traits coevolve due to specific underlying selective pressures, and thus by all evidence we do have appear to be strongly evolutionarily correlated in an extremely meaningful way… Pinker should be openly scolded for such a failure of reasoning and intellectual honesty. He does know better and should be held to account for parroting such a disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt excuse. He knows better.
We might even note how the aforementioned diversity itself is a driver of increased authoritarianism to try to keep the inevitable loss of social trust and cohesion suppressed. As society balkanizes as it always does in the face of these visually different groups with different IQs, behavioral traits, and in-group preferences, we see more and more restriction on free speech, academic inquiry, more unequal enforcement of the law, rising anarchi-tyranny, etc. Basically what you're watching happen in real-time in the British Isles today.
Lying about this reality does not help us. It only very seriously harms us for the benefit of a distant out-group. That is an intolerable and inexcusable crime against us. That is the main point here that was completely absent from Bo's discussion.
Objective facts, disparate harm, our right of self defense, etc. These matter, and I would be far less diplomatic about it than my more polite and collegial friends at Aporia are, with all due respect to them.
This is an interesting argument, and I appreciate the selected quotes, but I'd need to read Pinker's book in order to properly evaluate the assertion that Pinker is advocating for an etiquette of judicious silence — at least in certain contexts — about the correlation between race and I.Q.
I've long promoted Pinker's anti-"blank slate" position, so I suspect his position on race and I.Q. might very well be more nuanced than as presented here.
Studying race differences (even in relation to IQ) doesn't make one a racist or supportive of racism any more than studying sex differences makes one a sexist or supportive of sexism. Only through understanding the true causes of differences can we get away from the blame game being pushed by critical race theorists.
So you don't believe in democracy, and think every major individual decision should be dictated in advance by >top 10 percent IQs..?
Meritocracy over democracy.
That's a big jump
It's pretty much always been that way. The people vote, but what they believe comes from that top 10%.
Bo, thanks for an excellent rebuttal to Pinker's stand on IQ and race. I have been an admirer of Steven Pinker, and I find his recent stand puzzling.
"Race is both a biological and social reality, a product of evolutionary history and a salient marker of human identity. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is strongly predictive of life outcomes, including educational attainment, income, rates of violence, and even marital stability."
These points are demonstrably true, and I would expect any rational, logical-thinking person to concur. Therefore, I suspect a political ideology narrative is involved.
"Since color-blindness will not happen in contemporary America, we must face reality as it is."
This is the case not only in America, but throughout Western Civilization, Asia, and even sub-Saharan Africa.
Speaking of Baysean...
It's been my lifelong observation that all discrete racial groups note and are aware of racial differences both physical and behavioral. But their response to these observable traits tends to differ, and I further speculate that these *responses* are also rooted in evolutionary necessities. I think it boils down to how existentially important is the intact propagation of one's racial type and associated behaviors, which are dictated by evolved response to an environment? If of deep importance, rejection of other types is stronger; if less important, what is labeled "racial tolerance" is more commonly found.
Really speculative, but it's my current default position in that part of my worldview.
Yes, it depends on your threat perspective.
There is an old recording floating around from when Pinker did actually go there and openly discussed why Ashkenazi Jews have higher intelligence at a conference. These "let's get back in the closet" folks are making fools of themselves and are ruining their legacies. When the truth becomes mainstream* in a few years, they will look like cowards.
* I've seen many different intellectual movements start on the internet over the years and can tell when they start gaining more traction with the public. I believe I'm seeing this with HBD - so many random comments on social media touch on HBD themes now, something that just didn't happen ten years ago.
Ten years ago was 7 years' worth of Obama.
Cooincidence? ;^)
These woke centrists always speak as if the harms of accepting the truth are certain and severe, while the harms of perpetuating the lie are mild and hypothetical at best.
On the one hand, their fears are exaggerated... The Holocaust didn't happen because the Nazis believed the Jews were less intelligent (in fact I watched The Eternal Jew, and there was an entire section about how Jews were overrepresented in various professions, exactly the same as the anti-white rhetoric today). The total number of lynchings over almost a century were not very large, did not exclusively target blacks, and certainly not "just for being black"; they were lynched for alleged crimes, some of which may have been exaggerated or fabricated, as the justice system is fallible in the best of circumstances, certainly more so in cases of mob justice. But given the disparities in rates of violent crimes, it would be astonishing if they were all innocent.
Etc etc. We could cover dozens of other examples...the narrative is superficially plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. History is full of cruelty, but an accurate understanding of the causes of group differences isn't the primary causal factor.
Otoh, their ideology blinds them to the mountain of skulls they are standing on. South Africa and Rhodesia, the most advanced flourishing countries on the continent, even for the blacks. But they didn't have equality, so the race communists and literal Communists worked together to bring them to ruin, poverty, famine, ethnic cleansing, dispossession (of people who's ancestors had in some cases been there for half a millenium, originally settling land that was at the time uninhabited)... In America, children forced at gun point to go to school with blacks...and it did not even improve the education of blacks as intended. All the white victims of black crime. In the UK...white girls, children, raped in numbers comparable to the rape of Nanking, systematically targeted for their race, and the country is being deliberately given over to foreigners, as is every country in Europe...it is as if they are absolutely determined to burn civilization to the ground to prove their faith in race communism.
We should no longer accept this smug pretense that they hold the moral high ground. It is the race communists who have blood on their hands. Their ideology is incompatible with the future of civilization. It is not "nice" or "empathic"; it dangerously delusional. We can't afford to live with the lie anymore.
My own approach to this fraught issue is to try to think past the realities involved by proposing a society in which anyone, regardless of intelligence who works had and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, a society that fits the human material that actually exists.
My underlying assumption is that a lot of the racial resentment that exists today is a result of the fact that we do not live in such a society today, but rather one in which differences in intelligence very much influences who will achieve (or at least appear to achieve) richer and more fulfilling lives.
Given racial disparities in intelligence this understandably leads to resentment and charges of unfair discrimination precisely among the most gifted -- who are also often also the most aggressively outspoken--members of the less favored groups.
This raises the question of whether it is even possible to imagine, let alone achieve, a society in which anyone--including those of only average or even below average intelligence--can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
I've spent my entire adult life thinking about this issue. Here is what I came up with: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
That the higher intellect prospers more in this country is a function of how a first world technological society rewards individual efforts. Manual labor not so much, products of the mind much more so. If you want to balance out the unfairness of Nature, then we revert to a communist society quickly. We saw how that worked out for Russia. Somewhere there is a balance, but we won’t get there until all accept the truth of the above, rather than search for boogiemen such as “racists” behind every disparity.
My reflexive response is that a rich and fulfilling life for all makes the initial error of failing to recognize that some individuals, no matter their levels of achievement and acquisition of assets, will never be happy. It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long.
"It's not in them to ever feel positive satisfaction for long."
But that is one reason some are driven to greatness.
Can be.
But also can be like my first wife...
I did say 'SOME'.
One facet of this issue I've tried discussing for years, which has recently been unintentionally brought by the UK's NHS, is the reality and consequences of consanguinity on populations. Especially insidious is its prevalence and pervasiveness in many countries, often at or above 50%.
> Like a war on noticing.
There's no better justification for your argument than googling Steve Sailer's name: the 'summary' thrown up labels him 'far right' & the 1990s originator of 'scientific racism' (by him coining the concept of *human biodiversity*).
If we should not let generalisations about groups inform our priors about hiring people for jobs, then why should we have a prior that hiring a person from a different group will lead to a better outcome for our firm?
What could we expect a person from a 'disadvantaged' group to bring that a person from another group would not also have?
Nobody comments on the fact that blacks are over-represented in the NBA. Race hustlers make an issue of their being underrepresented in cognitively demanding fields. There’s nothing to talk about. The results of ending DEI and making selection the main barrier to entry into such fields will speak for themselves.
“But what if we change the example to two black men or two white men. Suddenly we pause. It just seems wrong to judge individuals based on group characteristics!”
It is wrong from a moralistic/logical viewpoint. There is always error possible/probable in such judgements. However who has been wronged here? Is there a “right” for these two men—Black or White—to demand that a woman get into an elevator with them? Of course not. Therefore the woman in question has injured no one and made the best choice (for her) possible with the evidence available. Pinker would take away that choice.
If only Iryna Zarutska had the foresight to take a seat a few rows further forward in the rail car, and away from an unknown Black man seated immediately behind her, she’d be alive today. She is not just a victim of crime, but a victim of “ignorance of Blacks” and their propensity for violence. She can be excused for such given that she grew up in a country without such a “problem”. Pinker would have us all grow up as poor Iryna did…sigh.
Pinker, Shermer, Chomsky. What’s the common link? Now Let’s talk about that, too. “No! No!”, says Bo and Aporia. It’s no wonder that Pinker doesn’t want to go in that direction. He’s afraid of where it would inevitably lead. Instead, it’s imperative that we keep the fantastical delusions of the liberal project afloat. Sigh
Shermer is Jewish? Didn't even know.
OTOH: Nathan Cofnas and Michael Levin (author of Why Race Matters, can't recommend it enough).
He's not, obviously.
The only commonality they have is secularism.
What is the common link? Do tell.
"Pinker, Shermer, Chomsky. What’s the common link?"
Pertinent point.
Ruling out a priori relevant factors (such as IQ) is a defining irrationality - ideological blindness. Voluntary blindness is not harm free - it creates a perpetually resentful victimhood. Pretence of uniformity damages its supposed beneficiaries. Today's example: our government proposes to damage children by preventing teaching that is adaptable to the local intake.
I am a black person who agrees with the hereditarian argument and I could not stop laughing when I was reading this review. A lot of people really don't care that iq gaps are genetic. Black people are quite ok with themselves and are over confident. White egalitarians are the problem
To be fair, I could see an argument that since we're not exactly doing high-budget, highly rigorous, carefully controlled, multiple-testing-methods, normed against verified individual priors testing regimes, which have been carefully calibrated to remain highly consistent over time....
That, in terms of budgeting for measuring IQ differences by race, it's probably not worth the money to chase what's probably a relatively minor difference even if it does exist. Also, it would likely be self-defeating.. Most people willing to spend money on that specific question would also provide enormous pressure to produce the 'correct' results.
If we only have X million dollars to spend on broad-based IQ testing, there are lots of things I'd want to fix first before I tried to fix the gathering of background-normed racial statistics.
And even if we DID spend the money on gathering racial IQ statistics, most of the current 'standard' racial types just wouldn't cut it. We'd have to have hundreds of categories in order to do meaningful statistics on it, and we'd have to have genealogies to verify the answers people gave, and it would just be so much work.
I'd much rather have data on things like parental education attainment vs IQ, or the different results of different types of IQ tests when you give them to kids raised in excellent school districts vs terrible school districts... do relatively non-academic IQ tests show a closer gap between those populations that highly academic IQ tests?
I'd also much rather have information about what being raised in a highly clannish or superstitious environment does to IQ, or whether having a native language more commonly associated with international scientific literature and broad international debate helps, or things like that.
And I REALLY want to see a project to give exactly the same IQ tests, without alteration or re-norming, to a wide population base consistently over a hundred plus years, just so we can look for patterns later.
"Race is contentious because multi-racial societies are fragile, perpetually threatened by resentment and conflict."
This is the whole point. Whites are only significantly net harmed by diversity. This is the elephant in the room. Not only is diversity itself always bad, but forcing Whites to live with Blacks is a one way significant harm. This fact is unfortunately almost entirely absent from Bo's otherwise excellent (as always) article. We should care because we are the ones paying the significant, even existential cost. It is evil to demand we sacrifice ourselves for their benefit in this way, and to remain silent not only while we are victimized, but while we ourselves are falsely blamed to justify the harms being done to us. Let's not beat around that bush.
We have a natural right, and even a moral obligation to our posterity, to fight back against what is being done to us and the lies being told about us to facilitate it. Exploiting our better nature to get us to remain silent as we're victimized and replaced, and to add insult to injury, while being wrongly blamed for what is being done to us.
That Chomsky would make such an evolutionarily ignorant argument is perhaps forgivable (but not really), given his fields of research and ideological priors, but for Pinker to repeat it, without admitting that skin color doesn't cause IQ, but that both traits coevolve due to specific underlying selective pressures, and thus by all evidence we do have appear to be strongly evolutionarily correlated in an extremely meaningful way… Pinker should be openly scolded for such a failure of reasoning and intellectual honesty. He does know better and should be held to account for parroting such a disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt excuse. He knows better.
We might even note how the aforementioned diversity itself is a driver of increased authoritarianism to try to keep the inevitable loss of social trust and cohesion suppressed. As society balkanizes as it always does in the face of these visually different groups with different IQs, behavioral traits, and in-group preferences, we see more and more restriction on free speech, academic inquiry, more unequal enforcement of the law, rising anarchi-tyranny, etc. Basically what you're watching happen in real-time in the British Isles today.
Lying about this reality does not help us. It only very seriously harms us for the benefit of a distant out-group. That is an intolerable and inexcusable crime against us. That is the main point here that was completely absent from Bo's discussion.
Objective facts, disparate harm, our right of self defense, etc. These matter, and I would be far less diplomatic about it than my more polite and collegial friends at Aporia are, with all due respect to them.
This is an interesting argument, and I appreciate the selected quotes, but I'd need to read Pinker's book in order to properly evaluate the assertion that Pinker is advocating for an etiquette of judicious silence — at least in certain contexts — about the correlation between race and I.Q.
I've long promoted Pinker's anti-"blank slate" position, so I suspect his position on race and I.Q. might very well be more nuanced than as presented here.