My take is that those that self-identify as white might have a genetic predisposition to wondering about race-related genetic differences.

If you presented some basic tenets of scientific racism to people, I really think you'd get a lot more people believing in them than you'd expect. If you presented a premise like, "Science can adequately determine differences between different groups of human beings." you would definitely get people who don't have a racist bone in their body agreeing with that statement.

That doesn't tell me that those people are racist. What it does tell me is if science offers legitimacy to racism, I think a lot of people who classify themselves as leftists would go along with that. After all, it went through the scientific process and has been seen fit to be published by academic journals. They might not go around committing hate crimes but their behavior around those groups would definitely change and probably not for the better in many cases.

It would also be unsurprising how many antisci suddenly find great value in such studies.

When I used to have classes like OChem with a high proportion of Asians, usually pre-med, I figured they were overrepresented for cultural reasons and would, on average, lack the mental horsepower of a more random selection of similarly accomplished students, which would make my job of getting an A easier. My attitude was along the lines of, "Looks like I'm going to have to disappoint a bunch of tiger moms by pwning their kids." Then I'd pwn thier kids and, like an idiot, focus on philosophy instead of doing something easy like med school.

https://mobile.twitter.com/RacismDog...03118006870017

Saying it‘s not „black people“ that are good long distance runners, but only members of the Kalenjin tribes of Kenya seriously undervalues Ethiopians. But of course it‘s true that this shows that racism isn‘t only evil, but also immensely stupid.

I graduated in math which generally had people who had a combination of loving math and some aptitude, but I started in engineering which had a lot of people who were more or less told what to do by their parents. Some were quite unhappy about it. I remember a girl in my dorm crying because her parents wouldn't let her take a class she wanted. My parents had no clue what classes I was taking. The people compelled can do quite well of course, but the curve busters are usually people who are actually interested in the subject.

Tiger parents may have served me better though as math was an impractical choice, more or less intentionally so, as I never intended to go to grad school.

Speaking of Cotton Hill and posters too racist for Politics, let's check out how sweep single/the steam's newest account is doing:

BANNED, too racist for SE lol

The reason I heard for the dominance of Kalenjin is that they tend to have long, lean legs which leads to a favorable ratio of surface area to mass. This facilitates better heat dissipation. At least this was the explanation in a very interesting TED talk about why today‘s athletes are so much better than previous generations.
It‘s probably not monocausal and what you wrote might very well contribute as well.

GermanGuy,

you’re right that I ignored Ethiopians and once again it‘s only a subset of the population of Ethiopia.

Yes, I had to be self directed. My dad like to drink, play tennis, and race sail boats. He dropped out of USC and eventually had a management job with a utility. His dad was a CPA and a VP at a good company but was an alcoholic. His dad had a PhD in divinity, earned in the late 19th century. My dad had few books around but taught himself computer programming in the early 1980s to take a new job with his same utility company. He was definitely smart but, largely due to personality, was always raw. My mom graduated from UCLA but was much more the "social chair" type and had a solid career selling real estate. She sometimes read, but not really intellectual stuff. (Note they divorced when I was like 5.)

They never knew what I was doing in school, didn't guide me, and were surprised to learn that I was participating in things like academic decathlon. Parental or cultural influence combined with personality and not being manifestly dumb can result in "high achievement" among most students. In fact, my baseline "educational policy" prescription would be to make school a good deal more rigorous, and I think most students could handle it if done well. Hell, my step dad taught chemistry at a community college and he was barely above average intellectually.

Edit: I should note that I was a B/B- student in high school but always did well on tests so was still in advanced classes. I did a full load of AP classes my senior year and passed the exams. I got into a good UC (but not Cal) and always told myself I'd focus when I got to college. I got like a 3.2 gpa my freshman year but then stepped up my focus and got a 3.85 the next four years (did a five year double major).

In the case of the Kalenjin it's really beyond reasonable doubt that something genetic is going on. In 2000 Danish researchers spent months in the region and put three randomly chosen groups of schoolboys without running experience through an identical 3 month training program. One group were Kalenjin from a particular area, one non-Kalenjin Kenyan, and one Danish. At the end of the training not only were the Kalenjin group significantly faster than the other groups, but when two of them were matched up against one of Denmark's best professional distance runners in a 2km race, they beat him easily. Schoolboys, after running for 3 months.

Obviously this doesn't preclude the idea that other nearby peoples (Ethiopian etc) might also be good at running.

Huh? So people should reject scientific conclusions outright if they have a “race” component? Like a doctor who recommends specific genetic testing for Tay Sachs for an Orthodox Jewish couple but not any other patients is somehow suspect of being a racist?

Right on cue

I think that's more an inbreeding than a race issue. And Tay Sachs probably has like one genetic factor. I'd be surprised if fewer than 100 genes influenced "intelligence" and would be surprised if more than 25% of those genes, which, eg, may code for things like resting level reuptake of one class or another of neurotransmitters, have any realationship to what people mean by the ill-defined phenotypes people call 'race.' And even if that 25% (of what are actually probably hundreds of genes) somehow linked up in some coherent way with 'intelligence' and 'race', they would cut both ways.

By the way, something that is not as well known as it should be is that people vary considerably in their response to aerobic training. Some people virtually do not respond to training. It's the secret that Big Personal Training doesn't want you to know. There's an article about it here. I'm a low responder myself. When I was 15 I spent months training hard at running and barely improved at all. It was frustrating. It's worth knowing about this because there is also variation in whether people respond better to straight endurance or HIIT, so you can tailor your workout to your body.

A lot of this variation is known to be heritable. There's even a genetic swab test you can have done that will tell you if you're a high or low responder. I'm not sure what exactly they test for, presumably the test only covers part of the underlying genetics. The test predicts 23% of individual variation in training response.

Yup.

It's nothing more than contrarianism for the sake of it.

The only thing that shocked me about his post is the fact that I could see it at all.

I haven't really dig into this much lately, but just the entire project of moving from any phenotype to a genetic explanation is a fraught enterprise, usually only viable for simple phenotypes, like eye/hair/skin color or genetic diseases, where minimal variation is involved. It's a significant topic in philosophy of biology and probably graduate level genetics.

Genes are things that make proteins. And most phenotypic variation is not so much the absence or presence of protein X, it's how more or less of protein X participates with the broader symphony in which protein X plays some part. Also, many genes simply regulate the production of other genes.

Now, move from the relatively well defined area of physical traits like blood type to abstract things like personality and intelligence (bearing in mind that even 'well defined' mental entities like emotions are broad abstractions-see, eg, What Emotions Really Are by Paul Griffiths), then you're no longer doing science and simply justifying preconceptions with science sounding language in a latter day version of phrenology.

It doesn’t really matter why, the point is it’s accepted fact and should be. I think a lot of dumber liberals actually aren’t really race egalitarians at all because they are afraid that science will prove “Zomg! Black people aren’t as smart as whites!! When that was trivially false even before genetic testing existed and will continue to be false as we get better at it. Dumb people gonna dumb I guess.

Here's a link to the homepage of that philosopher of biology I mentioned. http://griffithslab.org The readable article linked on the home page notes:

There's an old saying that things appear simple until you start looking at them closely.

And, more to the point:

p. 5 of pdf, Lynch, K. E., Morandini, J. S., Dar-Nimrod, I., & Griffiths, P. E. (2018). Causal Reasoning About Human Behavior Genetics: Synthesis and Future Directions. Behavior Genetics, 1–14. http://griffithslab.org/wordpress/wp...pplication/pdf

simplicitus,

Not that you're saying your parents were disinterested, but mine definitely weren't. They just didn't interfere or pressure us.

He’s morphing into Skalansky right before our eyes.

It's not just about race, but some supposed liberals are very attached to genetic components of intelligence and love things like "merit based" immigration. See Gattica/Ecriture. It's all part of feeling that they are better and more entitled than the unwashed masses.

I mean my parents were happy when I did well at school, they just weren't involved in the process. I doubt I showed them my college applications. Pressuring me has never really been a successful approach to eliciting desired behavior (for good or ill), which my mom probably understood.

Math, to my mind, is probably the hardest area to focus on in college, though undergrad math majors can get plenty of good jobs these days. The problem with math is that there are very few wounded animals in the herd to outrun, and you really have to adopt the study of math as a way of life to do tolerably well.

Funny enough, this girl who I always crushed on, head cheerleader at my HS, who was smart (but not really smart), ended up being a math major. Then she married the "smart" quarterback, who went to med school, and became a really good stay at home mom. (His older brother, another jock, ended up going to a top 3 law school and becoming a partner at a major law firm, where he helps support the Federalist society.) Their kids don't appear to be academically inclined from what I can tell from FB.

Well, I believe Canada and New Zealand and other "liberal" places do "merit-based" immigration. One significant problem seems to be that evaluating "merit" from the places from which people are likely emigrate is a pretty poor proxy for evaluating merit. A better measure of "merit" is probably that they have the drive and desire to emigrate in the first place.

I guess "merit-based" immigration policy isn't necessarily bad as such, it's just that historical conceptions of merit have been terrible predictors of who is meritorious. Maybe if the US would do a study of 50k immigrants over 50 years (including 2nd and 3rd generation) and seek to identify those traits that actually correlated with contribution to the national interest (and those that had a negative correlation) I would be ok with at least discussing the issue. Absent that, I suspect current US lottery and family-based immigration policies actually have a better net effect than a clumsy "merit-based" system, including positive externalities related to the perception of the US abroad.