I read the whole thing and it was painful. He's a godawful writer and the strange random derogatory mentions of the New Deal are a pretty big red flag of crankishness.

The idea of presenting what the Nazis thought isn't some point of nuance or some deep insight that no one does, it's literally in every entry level history book about WW2.

In fairness, most conservatives do exactly this too. And even people that perceive themselves as "open-minded rationale thinkers," which I guess would fall under classical liberals (although in American politics today they would incorrectly be labelled conservative) have their own cognitive biases and blindspots.

Guys, I have a request.

Harris has done about 150 podcasts and written several books, and probably has devoted 3 podcasts to the subject (race and IQ/whether him and Murray are racists) most of this thread has centered around, and everyone else in the IDW has devoted less material than this on this subject.

I understand this is a honeypot issues for a lot of people, for varying reasons, but I think it is time to move on. As an aside, the last few pages have been an interesting sociological experiment on how cognitive biases and personality traits interact, so that different people can read/listen to the same thing and come to wildly different conclusions about the information they consumed. But I think we could move on to other subjects and the same thing will invariably happen.

When I started this thread, my expectation was I would listen to podcasts and respond to interesting things I heard. However, I haven't actually been listening to podcasts the last few weeks because I am listening to a 7 book fiction series. I am almost through, so I will try to do my part to contribute interesting material on other subjects moving forward.

Probably a good idea. For further reading, however, I was going to suggest this Nautilus interview with Dalton Conley, a Yale sociologist who went back to get a second PhD in genomics. His book The Genome Factor has some useful commentary on the Bell Curve, and the interview above does as well.

I'm not sure he explained the idea as clearly as possible, but the discussion of the "chopsticks problem" is pretty important, as is the Flynn effect, and (not discussed) limitations of IQ as a measure of intelligence. But maybe the most important point to make is just that pretty much every prediction made in the Bell Curve has turned out to be contradicted by the evidence, as our ability to combine sociology and genetics has increased.

If you and the reds are ok with the way the thread is going, then that is fine with me. I just didn't want to wake up one day and find this thread (or the entire forum) nuked because of the content in this thread.

Pretty sure there's zero chance of that happening.

The IQ discrepancy is fact, the science behind it is garbage, and yes, that you believe black people are inferior to whites does make you a racist. I get that **** hurts your feelings, but in this thread above all others I'd think we'd understand that facts do not care about your feelings.

White supremacy and the perpetuation thereof is the core reason the IDW exists. It's why the Koch brothers fund Rubin's ****. It's the crux of the issue.


OK, and I hate to tap the tank here, but I think we all know the issue is you're uncomfortable having a conversation where so many of your ideological allies are more open about their belief in black inferiority.

A fun new way to learn about the world you might give a shot is "reading books"

BTW a big red flag issue that wasn't addressed here is that a leftist worldview can explain the IDW.

Their fans are low status white males alienated from society by late capitalism, eager for the community and imaginary superiority offered by the IDW.

Their members are either grifters preying on the above or actual bad actors trying to keep in place the status quo.

The problem with the IDW, and why it's such a gateway to the alt-right, is that it has no explanation for why the opposition exists. Why would white men be SJWs? Why is PBS putting a gay wedding in Arthur? Why are colleges teaching that the Confederacy was the bad guys?

The best they can do is vague referencing of Cultural Marxism and the gay agenda, but to draw the conclusions from those vague references requires embracing some straight up Protocols of Zion ****. Thus we see DoOrDoNot, who was a MAGA chud in Chezfront, evolving into a NRx guy by now. Because actual white supremacists at least have a theory of the world that explains the struggle.

That's an interesting link. The part about the significant genome differences between black African and white US is evidence in favor of there being an actual nontrivial genetic component in the observed differences (between white US- black US and white US- black african)

It is not, in fact, evidence of that. The entire point of the "chopsticks problem" is that you cannot take correlations between various genetic markers and social outcomes as evidence for a causal role of genetics.

The general problem with trying to talk about genetics and inheritance in a political context is that the temptation is to oversimplify the actual science to support pre-determined political views. That is, for example, what Murray wanted to do. But the evidence doesn't generally support any of this.

So, the reason why Conley begins by stating unequivocally that race (in popular imagination) isn't scientific is immediately to push back on this tendency to essentialize racial differences as biological. Because racial groups are not actually genetic population groups in a very meaningful way. The links I provided before to the anthropological evidence are useful here. The point about the complicated interaction between genes and environment, and the fact that outcomes are not simply determined by genes, is also relevant, but I think the fact that so many people can't get further than "oh, there are genetic differences between people based in ancestry, therefore the racist explanation is right" is pretty much why he begins by pointing out that race isn't scientific.

The reason why all this is difficult is because we have trouble conceptualizing what the evidence from actual genetics research means without resorting to preconceptions of race which are quite literally the fruit of our racist history.

Claiming "Race is a social construct" in the face of a nuanced subject as racism is an infallible stance, and one of sincere intellectual dishonesty

I disagree. This might have been true many decades ago when communism was our sworn enemy and anyone with a left wing idea was negatively branded a communist sympathizer. As much as I despise Peterson, he's right in his assessment that extreme right wing ideas are much more readily isolated and discouraged in society than extreme left wing ideas.

I don't really follow you here. That race is socially constructed is not an infallible stance in my view (if I understand what you mean by that); it's a conclusion that follows from ample evidence. And it's a a pretty important conclusion at that, whatever you think of fly's posting. I'll grant that it is often also misunderstood, but that's why I find the anthropologists' blog that I linked useful.

Melting down as in using some insane logic like "I think C is racist, A gave him a platform so A is racists, B thinks A has some interesting ideas so B is racist too"?

I guess I was giving you the benefit of the doubt of just being uninformed, but you admit yourself that you are just making **** up to push your rhetoric. Thanks, I guess?

I'm not arguing against the genetics, I'm arguing against the virtue signaling that it provides. Flys posting in this thread is about browbeating people into submission with shame and accusations. Then he gets to claim "race is a social construct, come at me racists" and there is nothing to argue against.

Its purely show

It's literally evidence towards a genetic factor. Assume you have two cars, a black one and a white one, and the white one is reliably observed and expert-accepted to have a higher top speed, but nobody knows why. One might hypothesize that the engines are a contributing factor. It's prima facie reasonable and clearly should be assigned a probability of >0%. Now you learn that the engine architecture in the cars is in fact quite different (say one is an ICE and one is a hybrid EV-ICE). It's obvious that that increases the probability that the engines are in fact a contributing factor compared to whatever you thought that number was before (and if you thought engines were 0% or 100% before so this doesn't change anything, you're a total moron)

You're making a category error, and to be fair, the author does it too. Acknowledging that simple comparisons (say gas burn/minute or electricity used/minute) are basically useless across engine architectures means that doing simple comparisons will give stupid/unreliable/meaningless results, but it says literally nothing about there being an actual underlying difference- just that it can't be reliably found with certain simple comparison methods.

If you phrased this in car terms- we can't compare gas burn or electricity usage between ICEs and hybrids and predict much of anything well, therefore this is evidence that they're actually the same output- it's obvious that the statement is completely ridiculous and that what I said two paragraphs up is the correct take.

The evidence is abundant that a gap exists, environmental factors that matter are known to exist, and there's nothing resembling proof that it's all environmental or that there's a genetic component. The only reasonable position is that there's a nontrivial chance that it's ~all environmental, there's a nontrivial chance of a meaningful genetic difference, and somebody who disbelieves one of those statements (knowing the information posted in various 2p2 discussions) is a complete imbecile.*****

He had a better take on that than most, but again, he acknowledges that clear genetic differences exist, and if you can still see an effect even counting people who are 15/16 white and 1/16 black as black.. well...... when the social race is "misidentifying" black people relative to genetics, and doing it in a way that would work to neuter the effect (calling mostly-white people black), and the effect still exists in the social race, one should consider that either mixed-race people are exceptionally stupid compared to purer-blooded blacks (which I've never seen any evidence for) or that the effect has to exist close to the genetic race as well. Using that "misidentification" as evidence against that conclusion is a non sequitur at best and a complete self-own at worst.

"IQ" is an interesting topic and something I think could be measured in a more tangible way and exploited at an individual level. I even messaged WN about starting a thread on the subject well before this topic came up. I think studies like the bell curve are interesting because of the individual aspect, the racial aspect is whatever to me. The Murray interview with Harris was interesting for that reason. Like me, I think Harris was looking for a big smoking gun that was just outright racism, but instead found data that lead to an uncomfortable conclusion. That is why he endorsed the interview and made the statement about Murray being an unjust pariah.

When confronted with the (poorly) framed question of "morbid obsession" on the subject that could be perceived as racist, Murray definitely faltered. I think Harris got uncomfortable, but its possible he purposely worded the question as such. Its a hard question to respond to, but he faltered none the less.

Does anyone have an issue with acknowledging cognitive abilities on an individual level?

What am I missing about the chopsticks problem? Hes conflating an inherited social trait, like using chopsticks, with genetics association to intelligence. Its apples and oranges. The article you linked says genetics affect a personals overall being around 50%, and I've heard higher. That isn't even an argument. Genetics don't predict the use of chopsticks.

I'm not interested int the line drawing thing when the desired destination was decided long in advance and it's part of the silly name calling thingy.

But, and I'm taking it at face value too, the article, identifies and explains the genuine problems with Murray's work very well.

"Perhaps the most celebrated confusion of geographic difference for race followed the publication of Genestic Structure of Human Populations (Rosenberg et al., 2002). The authors studied genetic variation in 1052 people from 52 populations and then asked a computer program called Structure to group the samples. When they asked it to produce two groups, Structure gave them EurAfrica and East Asia-Oceiania-America. When asked for three groups, Structure gave Europe, Africa, and East Asia-Oceania-America. When asked for four, it gave Europe, Africa, East Asia-Oceania, and America. When asked for five, it gave roughly the continents. And when asked for six, it gave the continents and the Kalash people of Pakistan. When asked for more (up to twenty groups), it gave more (Bolnick, 2008)"

This is an excerpt from Well Named linked. I think it shows illustrates pretty clearly that the idea of race as we use it is a social construct.

For one, the act of deciding how many "races" there are is arbitrary. If you took 10 scientists who do gene clustering research and didn't allow them to collaborate at all, and asked them how many human races there were and what they are, you would probably get a lot of different answers. This is especially true if the scientists were all chosen from different parts of the world, as they would be bringing different socially constructed baggage to the table that would probably influence how they decided to make genetic distinctions. If you took 10 mathematicians from around the world and didn't allow them to collaborate, and asked them what 2+2 was, they would presumably all come to the same answer.

Second, if you went into the real world and walked up to people on the street in the US and told them there was actually only 2 races, and they had to guess what they were, (a) they would not all come up with "EurAfrica and East Asia-Oceiania-America" and (b) no one would agree to reorganize society to reflect this (ie racial quotas getting into college), because the concept of race in the real world is arbitrary (socially constructed) and does not map onto the science of genetic difference with particularly high fidelity.

Also, I concede that the fact that if scientists did come to a consensus tomorrow that it was correct to demarcate humans into 2 races based on genetic similarity, and all the white people were told they were actually the same race as black people, a lot of white people who don't consider themselves racist would probably have a lot more problems with this then if the designations had fallen in a different way, which I guess illustrates how the problem of racism is deeper than just overt white supremacy.

Ironically, I don't think Sam Harris would have any problem at all with this designation (if he agreed the scientific rationale behind deciding to arbitrarily choose 2 races was sound), because he isn't racist and is intellectually honest (at least insofar as the limits of his cognitive biases)

Actually, I don't think this is accurate, but it is late and I am going to bed, so I will address it tomorrow. But the short answer is that IMO in the real world white liberal SJWs (college educated, coastal, liberals etc.) do not act in the world as if they belong to the same tribe as "other whites," and they only act in the world as if 'white identity' is an actual thing (and not a social construct, and a very new one at that) when it is convenient and self-serving.

So because in the real world SJWs act as if they are from a different tribe from the rest of white America, they have no psychological problem being on the other side of the culture wars.

I wasn't using strawmen, either, I was just saying things that made you upset. When I call the IDW right wing racists that is an observation, not a strawman.

"uninformed strawmen" is a phrase that makes literally no sense, so I was clowning you on being unable to come up with a better response for when some anon know-it-all SJW clowns on your intellectual heros.

Because, and this point is getting pretty old at this point: the intellectual bubble of the right wing Youtube and podcast circuit makes their listeners completely unprepared for actual disagreement from the left.

Social constructs are real? They exist. They are social constructs. But like, why do they do this? You just described the issue of non-racist white people, but you didn't explain what's in it for them. Why are they being raised non-racist, why are they staying non-racist after exposure to the real world, why do they think Harris is a racist moron instead of a leading light against the regressive left?

I'm willing to tolerate a discussion about population genetics in the context of Harris' interview of Charles Murray, particularly because I think it would be useful if more people understood what "race is a social construct" means (and doesn't mean, re: whether race is "real")

But I've deleted some recent posts that I think are getting into problematic territory. This is not the place for speculation about race wars or whatever. Thanks.