[lukev]

To be clear: most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly.

But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-population effects, and personal history (nutrition, education, etc) strongly dominates that.

And that's setting aside the moral implications of judging someone or changing your behavior towards them even if you have somehow measured them to be "less intelligent," as if that was a single axis of worth.

Because, apparently, this needs to be said.

[timmg]

> most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly.

That may certainly be true.

(Not OP, but) I always shutter when we want to deny scientific results because it might be "helpful" for someone making a racist argument.

My personal belief is that truth is the goal of science. Even in cases where the truth is uncomfortable.

[kstenerud]

It's very nice to believe in a pure system that exists outside of politics, but that's simply not how the world works, and it never will be.

There is no scientific breakthrough that has occurred sans politics. Politics choose the winners and the losers, and the realm is science is no exception.

All science is political, because the scientific institutions are made up of people, who are political. Your research project lives and dies by politics, as does your dissertation, who gets published, who receives awards, etc.

So when it comes to research of limited utility that has a nasty cadre waiting in the wings to pounce upon it, the wise person would think twice.

[timmg]

As I said to another person on this thread: if scientists let their political views override their pursuit of truth, the public will (rightly) lose faith in science.

So when you tell them to "trust the science" -- be it vaccinations, climate change or something else -- they have no reason to trust that science.

[kstenerud]

People don't have faith in inanimate things like science. They have faith in their leaders, who then lead the way in what to believe.

If those leaders believe in the integrity of the scientific institutions, their flock will follow. If they're anti-vax, their flock will follow. If they believe in some medical quackery, their flock will follow. If they believe in eugenics, their flock will follow. It's happened before.

What was fringe yesterday can become mainstream today, with the right leaders.

[Nicook]

I enjoy that you are framing this as somethings that "may" happen in the future.

[suzzer99]

There are a few scientific topics that are too easily manipulated by bad actors who ignore all the nuance. You have to tread very, very carefully on those and ask yourself what good vs. what harm can come from it. We know from history that giving opportunist leaders a chance to classify humans into distinct sub-groups based on intelligence and other key traits ends in catastrophe.

[timmg]

I understand what you are saying and I don't disagree with the idea that bad actors will use science in bad ways.

But I think going down this path of denying (or hiding) science that can be used for bad ideas ends up causing (rightly, imho) a distrust of science -- which is far worse.

A distrust of science (not saying it was caused by this particular issue) is how we ended up with so much anti-vax sentiment in the US. And that is the reason we are seeing outbreaks of diseases that used to be minimal.

I think if you want people to "trust the science", you have to trust the people.

[convolvatron]

it seems like you are simultaneously arguing for a science that holds itself outside public opinion, and one that is beholden to it.

no, wait, I get it.

all scientists should expect mistrust because of perceptions of bias of any of them, regardless of how well founded. that seems at the very least unproductive.

[timmg]

> it seems like you are simultaneously arguing for a science that holds itself outside public opinion, and one that is beholden to it.

Apologies if I did a bad job explaining my opinion. But I was attempting to argue the exact opposite of that.

My view is that science should be the search for truth. And that if the truth is inconvenient for some political (or other) reason, so bet it. The truth is the goal. Full stop.

My feeling is that if scientists stop pursuing truth in cases where it doesn't fit their politics, they will (rightly, IMHO) lose the trust of the public. (Of course, in particular, those in the public who have different politics.)

[convolvatron]

so, because science as whole is not pursuing the idea that people with different genetics as a population are inferior in some ways to others with sufficient vigor, that we should expect a justifiable general distrust of science including completely unrelated results like global warming. I don't see how this is prescriptive in any way, except maybe to ... I guess find scientists that are will to accepting funding for ideas that are popular with some people? do you think that would help if they found those ideas to be meritless? or even if they didn't?

[JuniperMesos]

The actual reason this matters is because of the implications it has for race-based affirmative action programs in cognitively-demanding fields; i.e. "why are there visibly no black people and lots of Asians in this advanced math class, and what should we do to fix the problem?"

There is no political agreement on whether having or not having affirmative action programs is racist (or against which racial groups).

[tptacek]

There are a huge number of assumptions, many of them quite dubious, encoded into the idea that this research is impactful to affirmative action.

Affirmative action might be problematic for totally unrelated reasons. Maybe there's no way to do it without being racist towards Asians, or without selecting a tiny privileged cohort of Black families to accrue benefits on (simply "applying for college" in the first place situates most people in a position of privilege).

We absolutely do not know enough about the psychometric science here --- forget race entirely and just try to pick through theories of intelligence and its mutability --- to make public policy decisions. It is, at present, a pure scientific concern.

[card_zero]

This interest in IQ has a negative effect on the concept of intelligence, never mind human unity. It attaches exaggerated importance to test scores, jobs, and school. It tends toward snobbery.

[gnerd00]

reading about Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences stuck with me.. seven is a common list

[lopsotronic]

I think the discussion in recent years has refocused, embracing ethnonatalist implications and challenging the core assertion that "racism is wrong".

My main resistance to that is much the same as yours: the differences are so small, that re-architecting society around them is not going to be enough juice for the squeeze.

But one could also argue that the juice is not even the point: by re-architecting society in this way, you "pre-brutalize" your population so that their threshold for violence against "others" is lowered. Thus your population is closer to being wholly militarized, and theoretically is more effective in war, and is less captured by "weak" or "unmanly" moral ideals, such as empathy.

While this might seem a virtue to someone of an expansionist mindset, in application this principle never, ever works well - again, thanks to those tiny differences. If a citizen is pre-brutalized to have a lowered resistance to killing those with curly hair, how long is it before they kill their next door neighbor with wavy hair, over something like lawn furniture?

Pre-brutalizing your populace to killing any sapiens is enough to brutalize them towards harming anyone else. This is the core of the "imperial boomerang", or the colonial boomerang theory, as to why the great wars of the 20th century took on such a nasty character. The ease with which we dehumanized subject populations was - all too easily - redirected against the neighbors, most memorably with Germany trying to re-create the American West to their East.

[tptacek]

Whether there are meaningful genetic variations in intelligence (the subtext of these discussions is always intelligence) that break down in any scientifically valid way along "racial" lines is very much in doubt. What we have is evidence of (socioculturally-sense) racial disparities in psychometric tests in a limited number of (largely western) countries. We don't have causality, we don't have wide surveys globally, we don't even have that much certainty about the test validity. It's equally plausible that the variations we see are SES and cultural transmission effects.

Contra claims elsewhere on this thread, science on this topic isn't suppressed at all. There are multiple branches (in quantitative psychology and genetics) that study this issue actively, and if you follow it, new papers aren't rare. But directionally those papers aren't confirming the priors of the people claiming the science is suppressed, so they don't get acknowledged.

[georgeburdell]

And yet you are also likely to argue “weather is not climate”. Differences in population characteristics of all kinds have massive societal implications and we should lean into addressing them.

[lukev]

Well if you are talking about environmental stuff (like leaded gasoline), sure.

If you’re talking about trying to improve the genetics of populations at scale… yikes.

[convolvatron]

people trying to force everyone else to accept their poorly defended notions of race superiority have a much larger social impact than any quantifiable differences in the genetics of populations.