[ohsnap]

Not sure what world you live in but I have never heard students argue in favor of African Americans having heritable lower intelligence. Such a discussion would instantly be shamed and publicized. Pretty sure your making this up.

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10445181 and marked it off-topic.

[plonh]

Been seeing this announcement frequently recently. Thank you!

Of course, you could also collapse subthreads automatically (like reddit) when a comment gets downvoted very low) instead of policing manually.

[tptacek]

"Pretty sure you're making this up" is no way to argue, let alone be taken seriously, on HN.

[ohsnap]

when someone uses a personal experience to bolster an argument, it is appropriate for someone to question the validity of how likely it is. It's not an ad hominem or a personal attack.

[notjoedimaggio]

Perhaps. But "pretty sure you're making this up" is not an appropriate tone or argument to question validity. Especially when the basis for your argument is your singular person experience. Your never having heard the argument in no way counters the original assertion that their instructor had students make that statement, unless you attended every single course and class the original commenter refers to.

Next time, perhaps phrase your argument around your experience. "While I don't know where you're from, I never experienced this. Where I grew up in XYZ, people were quickly corrected regarding their misconceptions."

[hueving]

Your reply was just essentially the same thing in reverse, "I've never seen this therefore it hasn't happened."

[ohsnap]

Actually his/her comment was anecdotal, in that no one can verify. My comment is a noting a shared cultural understanding that everyone confirm or reject. (specifically: the likelihood of people saying your classmates are genetically inferior is taboo) It's not anecdotal.

[GSimon]

"I think those claims are unsubstantiated due to lack of sufficient evidence" or even "I think those claims are unsubstantiated" alone comes across better than "pretty sure you're making that up".

Best not to be 'pretty sure' with accusations, even mild ones, especially when you're apparently wrong. And why are you pretty sure? Seems like you have some reasoning, mention why with your accusation or your viewpoint will be 0 on the contribution scale. It comes across like a child discussing whether or not he thinks Santa is real "Yea I'm pretty sure he exists and you're making it up"

[InclinedPlane]

It is an extremely common argument. A few years back a book called "The Bell Curve" came out which put forward that argument.

[ohsnap]

was in 1994. I wouldn't call it common. Though occasionally Andrew Sullivan would comment in this area.

Regardless, I think the parent post was just exaggerating some hypothetical conversation in class to improve his/her argument. The probably of students arguing in class that some of their classmates are genetically inferior is highly unlikely. And if they did the probability of it not causing a massive twitter shit storm is close to 0.

[nommm-nommm]

Is 2014 more to your standards then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Troublesome_Inheritance

How about 2009?

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135158265...

It's not so blatant as much anymore and more implied nowadays but "scientific racism" is still alive and well today.

Worse, any criticism of it is counted with "you're just denying the truth because it's not politically correct."

[rewqfdsa]

It's like trying to debug a SIGSEGV when you hold an unshakable religious belief that a certain pointer cannot be NULL. If your debugger tells you it's NULL, the debugger is biased, or at least is unconsciously exhibiting its page table privilege. If a colleague tells you that the pointer is NULL, he's a bigoted memoryist. You try to fix the SIGSEGV by renaming variables, refactoring functions, or changing data structures, but all you do is make the program slower and more complicated, and the damn thing still crashes.

In the end, customers are unhappy, you can't ship, and you lose your job because you don't allow yourself to see what's blindingly obvious and in front of your nose.

That's what the western world's identity politics fad feels like. The science tells us that there are important group differences. As long as we don't allow ourselves to see them and instead attack people who show them, we're not going to get anywhere.

[nommm-nommm]

Nobody has a problem with finding and researching group differences.

The problem is when you find them claiming they are genetic and innate while being completely blind to all the other things that can cause those differences. The bigger problem is when you go looking for differences specifically so you can "prove" the group is inferior. Usually inferior to the group you belong to.

It's like finding that null pointer and coming to the conclusion that the pointer is null due to nature and that's just the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.

[rewqfdsa]

So it's okay to conduct research so long as you like the findings? Read the books mentioned in this thread and others. IQ is 60-80% heritable. Of course there are environmental effects (consider, say, fetal alcohol syndrome), but for the most part intelligence is strongly heritable, and intelligence (or whatever you want to call g) is strongly correlated with life outcomes. These are facts. If you think that facts go on to "prove" the "inferior[ity]" of certain groups, that's a problem with your interpretation. It's easier to just deny the facts, isn't it?

I do have high hopes for what we can "do about it". These hopes rest on genetic modification. There's no reason in principle that the next generation, or the one after that, couldn't be made all geniuses. It'd solve a huge number of problems. But first we have to recognize the fact that intelligence is largely hereditary!

[InclinedPlane]

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to go to HN anymore.

[ohsnap]

Almost any biological race discussion is taboo. No doubt there are people who are going to cross these lines but it's not a common argument and not one biologists are comfortable venturing into. A good discussion here on what is taboo in biology http://www.nature.com/news/ethics-taboo-genetics-1.13858

.. And any type of race/iq inquiry is something that has to be taboo and outside of the scientific community. For a society that values egalitarianism there are some questions that we need not try to confirm or deny

[rewqfdsa]

Willful ignorance of the natural world has never led to anything good for humanity. That we have to ban certain lines of inquiry because we might not like the answers is positively medieval. As a technologist, I find the idea abhorrent.

[ohsnap]

I can understand that position, but dealing with inquiries outside the hard sciences gets complicated Keeping some things taboo is the better path especially with something like evolutionary biology which is no where near a hard science.