[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!

[nommm-nommm]

I noticed you removed the part of your comment where you claimed that everyone is treated equally.

And no, I never said (or implied) "it's okay to conduct research so long as you like the findings." It's perfectly ok to conduct research even if you are disgusted by your data. (and I've heard some researchers say they have been disgusted with their data) However, this type of research has a long history of being conducted solely to "prove" racial inferiority.

[ohsnap]

I really don't think there is any hard science to say 60-80% is heritable. It's all soft science as people can disagree and agree on that all they want. Until someone can build a computational model of brain function related to the genome (inc. RNA) it is an open question.

[shalmanese]

By studying a) identical twins who are raised together, b) fraternal twins who are raised together, c) identical twins who were adopted and raised apart at birth and d) fraternal twins who were raised apart, it's possible to tease out the effects of nature and nurture.

For example, you're far more likely to be schizophrenic if your identical twin is schizophrenic compared to your fraternal twin. This strongly suggests that schizophrenia has a major heritable component as no other explanation would account for this. This is as much "hard science" as anything else we study.

[ZeroGravitas]

Interestingly "fetal alcohol syndrome" has a history of being misdiagnosed as genetic and this false conclusion being used to support eugenics before the true cause was established.

[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.

[rewqfdsa]

Evolutionary biology is absolutely a hard science. It's rooted in both empirical evidence and models derived from statistics and game theory.

You haven't presented an argument: you've presented a fear-based assertion. I absolutely disagree that it is ever better not to know. Every single time someone has made that argument and tried to enforce it, it's retarded our progression as a species.

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe did tremendous harm, and all it was trying to do was save our immortal souls. It was doing good work. It was better not to know, right? How much progress might we have made in mathematics had Hippasus not been murdered for providing the existence of irrational numbers?

People who share your views do us all tremendous harm. We could make life better for billions of people if we gave up our taboos on researching ourselves.

That said, I do appreciate the honest. It's not often that I see people out right admit to wanting to ban certain lines of research. Your doing it is refreshing.

[ohsnap]

Note that sociology is deeply rooted in empirical evidence statistics as well. I think we can agree that that it is a soft science. Hard science requires no subjectivity, no hidden variables, and re-creatable experiments. Soft sciences have a place, but not in telling us what is true.

Until you can take a genome and build computational models of intelligence it is foolish to be so confident to draw any conclusions in IQ research.