[BenDaglish]

> Facts remain facts even if we don't like them.

It depends not only on your definition of "facts", but on the interpretation of the same, and how that affects policy and decision making. For instance, these too are all "facts".

"Poor people have lower IQ's than rich people"

"Americans have lower IQ's than the Japanese, Italians, Mongolians, British, Austrians and many many others"

"More men have high IQ's than women" (more men in the top 10%)

"More men have low IQ's than women" (more men in the bottom 10%)

"As pirates decrease, global warming increases"

The real point, and something that Paul completely missed in his essay, is that we now analyse these things with a greater degree of historically-informed sophistication. Your statement could just as well read "On average, when given a written test invented by white men over 100 years ago, a sample group consisting of historically enslaved, disenfranchised and under-educated people of African heritage in the United States performed less well than a sample of their European-descended counterparts". Indeed, I'm sure that's true. The leap though to racism, which is making blanket assumptions about people based on skin colour, is completely fallacious.

[alextgordon]

I'm as sceptical as anybody of the merits of IQ as a means for assessing "intelligence", however the fact remains that it is simply a test of memory and logical reasoning. You might as well ban giving maths tests.

I think you'd agree that IQ does not discriminate based on race at all, it discriminates based on class.

It seems common in American discourse to dress class divides up in some kind of "-ism", to subvert the individualistic views that many on the right hold. Everybody wants to fix racism, but many Americans seem to treat systemic poverty with an "every man for himself" attitude.

Unfortunately this has the result of burying the issue, because even if all racism in America were eliminated, the class divide would still remain.

[dragonwriter]

> You might as well ban giving maths tests.

No one banned giving any kind of test. What the case at issue found illegal was using a test that had a discriminatory effect when the employer could not demonstrate that the test at issue was "a reasonable measure of job performance", based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wherein Congress banned job discrimination on race and placed the burden of proof on employers to demonstrate that practices with disparate impact were reasonably job related.

> I think you'd agree that IQ does not discriminate based on race at all, it discriminates based on class.

Tests don't discriminate, people do. An employer who has an overt policy of racial discrimination, who replaces that policy on the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 goes into effect with an IQ test requirement covering the same jobs that were previously covered by the overt discrimination policy, where results on the test in question both has disparate racial results and have no demonstrable tie to performance in the jobs covered, well, its not hard at all to see that as the employer (not the test) discriminating on race, using the best tool for that purpose that they think they can get away with.

[btilly]

I am quite sure that Paul did not miss this in his essay. Every period has congratulated itself on being enlightened in contrast to what came just before, and every period has been right on some things and wrong on others. He is intensely aware of that, and his whole point was to be careful about current intellectual fashion.

Therefore an intellectually honest person should be suspicious of any statement that can be read as, "We were always wrong about X but now we're right." Outside of hard science, it is more likely than not that the new statement is more determined by fashion than actual evidence. Which means that after another generation or two the pendulum will swing back again and we'll arrive at a more nuanced place which keeps some actual improvements we found, and throws out most of it.

[AndrewKemendo]

"On average, when given a written test invented by white men over 100 years ago, a sample group consisting of historically enslaved, disenfranchised and under-educated people of African heritage in the United States performed less well than a sample of their European-descended counterparts"

That is a really good way to describe the test results. I'm gonna use this from now on.

[ultimape]

"On average, when given a written test invented by white men over 100 years ago, a sample group consisting of historically enslaved, disenfranchised and under-educated people of African heritage in the United States performed less well than a sample of their European-descended counterparts"

- or colloquially know as 'blacks'?

Its a shame we are forced to talk about situations like this with kid gloves and extreme specifics so as not to appear racist. Our society isn't going to change if we have to speak like academics to get our point across.