At IOZ I left a comment that many of the folks who come there for laughs (or venting) won’t give a shit about. I suppose it might fit better here, although it might strike readers as banal.
Professor Coldheart, a great deal of academia consists of publishing things of no relevance to anything at all and whose only possible justification (other than it’s a job and we’ve got to publish something) is functionalism-free love of truth. And “truth” is stretching it with theory papers that merely find implications of premises that have nothing to do with the actual world. What distinguishes them from “HBD” is that they don’t have a similar body of criticism. Both “HBD” and Pinker’s theories on violence, along with many other ideas that for our purposes we can categorize under “social science” have real implications beyond “so what”. Human minds specialize in thinking about other humans, you don’t have to be that big a nerd (relative to math theorists) to find the topics interesting. If you don’t need that extra bit to make topics interesting, you can read Terence Tao’s blog.
Example implications are whether the recent decline in violence should be regarded as a fluke (as Pinker suggests for the 60s upsurge) and predicted to revert to the mean or whether we should expect it to continue. And since he has ideas on what causes changes in the violence level that has implications for how we might act to lower it. Or increase it, if that’s your bag.
There was initially hope that genetic research would find genes for certain desired traits (finding deleterious mutations is easier, though if you’re a deaf parent who wants a deaf kid it’s another story). We’ve made a lot of progress in certain superficial traits, but those aren’t the contentious bits of hereditarianism. First height had a GWAS showing it to be significantly heritable (as twin-adoption studies predicted) and massively polygenic, Deary has recently found the same for IQ, I expect researchers will start doing the same for personality and we’ll see how that turns out. That polygenism makes it difficult to actually identify the genes, but not impossible. Thanks to Moore’s Law computational genetics has advanced dramatically in recent years. I expect “designer babies” to take off not too far into my lifetime, starting with the traits closest to the simple Mendelian model and advancing toward the extremely polygenic in the more distant future. In the shorter term, more accurate measurements of relevant factors like genetics will help us to find where “environmental” interventions are most effective, perhaps even beginning to tailor them for more specific genotypes (as is a current goal in medicine). And since a huge factor escaping conventional “nature” vs “nurture” breakdowns is unpredictable “noise“, I’ll add that it’s not going to remain dark matter.
I haven’t said anything here about whether “race” is a scientifically valid concept. I hope that’s not the end-all-be-all of “HBD”, it’s less interesting than the broader scientific revolution happening under our noses. But there are already officially designated racial groups and race is a politicized topic. If that hadn’t been the case, a lot of this would be a lot simpler. But eventually science will reach the point where we’ll feel awfully stupid about the energy wasted in arguments under a condition of ignorance.
January 3, 2012 at 10:47 pm
I didn’t add a lot of links to avoid tripping spam filters. But some posts to check out:
Heritabilities Are Meaningful and Important
Dude, Where’s My Theory of Everything?
Why Speak Truth?
“Only Losers Overcome Bias”
This last one is linking to the actual extended argument in video form, but has a decent summary.
January 4, 2012 at 10:27 am
Heya!
As I explained to Leonard downstream: when I talk about “truth qua truth,” I’m having fun with him. To act less coy for a second: it is my contention that many (if not most) of the non-academic online defenders of the theories of HBD are just looking for a way to justify their private bigotries. Defenders of HBD get around this by claiming to be “racial realists,” or to be interested in the truth as such, not by having an agenda to promote. Rather, it’s the liberal establishment in the ivory tower that has an agenda! They’re suppressing “crimethink” because the immensely powerful lobby of non-Asian minorities would cut off their funding, etc, etc.
I know you don’t want to bring up race, and neither do I! It’s a cluttered topic, the argument has been hashed and rehashed to neither side’s satisfaction and it’ll get us nowhere. But when I say “who cares about truth as such?”, I’m tweaking other people’s noses, not advancing a good-faith argument for nihilism.
January 4, 2012 at 3:59 pm
“many (if not most) of the non-academic online defenders of the theories of HBD are just looking for a way to justify their private bigotries.”
So unlike the academic defenders, the non-academic defenders can’t really intellectually support their positions, thus they’re believing what they want to believe? Perhaps, but in the case of race issues often even the mere descriptive parts of the argument (blacks disproportionately commit more homicides) is taboo in everyday conversation, at least if you’re in a large metro and a knowledge worker.
I wonder what’s worse, believing in something to not ruffle any feathers (relying on social proof), or believing in something because you desire it be true…
“They’re suppressing ‘crimethink’ because the immensely powerful lobby of non-Asian minorities would cut off their funding, etc, etc.”
I think even they’d tell you it’s the powerful “lobby” of the SWPL crowd, not the NAMs: http://glpiggy.net/2011/12/22/anti-racism-is-social-proof/
January 5, 2012 at 12:46 am
Professor Coldheart, I agree that most people discussing the issue are not chiefly concerned with truth for the sake of truth. If it were merely a matter of “justifying private bigotry” then the argument might arise about whether they’d let their daughter marry one of THEM. But I tend to see it come up in more policy relevant contexts. If you insist that we’re all equal, then there’s a big X factor behind outcomes that others explain with HBD. The X factor could be bigotry itself, subtler institutional racism, inadequate funding for [insert favored program here], the dysfunctional cultural norms of Banfield’s “Backward Society”, and many other possibilities. So, from the perspective of those justifiers of private bigotry, a lot of policy is going to be wrongheaded. And since the discourse is restricted, poor policy is going to resist correction. gc aka “godless capitalist” makes some heated arguments expressing that point among others here. A more scholarly exposition on the effects of preference falsification is Timur Kuran‘s “Private Truths, Public Lies”. Glenn Loury made his own little contribution as well.
gc has dropped out of the blogosphere and requested that all his contributions at GNXP be removed for the sake of his career. The linked post is about the president of Harvard and the world’s most eminent living scientist losing their jobs for the taboo things they said. Chris Brand is less significant figure, but he lost his job after writing “The g factor”. In countries without our First Amendment you can be prosecuted for saying certain things. So yes, I’d say there is a powerful “lobby”, even if it doesn’t consist of Non-Asian Minorities. The Israel lobby isn’t just a bunch of Israelis, or even Jews.
January 5, 2012 at 9:03 am
I think Brand was fired because he defended pederasty, although that might just have been the last straw for the university administration after his earlier run-ins with feminists and antiracists. Pro-pedophilia and HBD may be the most dangerous views to air publicly these days.
January 7, 2012 at 12:26 pm
“Pro-pedophilia and HBD may be the most dangerous views to air publicly these days.”
With a defense of HBD like that, who needs enemies?
I think interest or support of HBD study is more a (middlebrow) aesthetic than a bigotry or a a fellow-traveler with public policy optmization. HBD interest tends to cohabitate the same middlebrow white guy space as general interest in IQ and libertarianism.
As for the best model of reality, I think the HBD’ers are closer to it than the anti-racists, but given their love of libertarianism and their tendency to ride HBD from its sweet spot into antiscience, I think they’re closer to truth more by luck than by love.
January 12, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Whether the non-academic HBDers are concerned with truth for the sake of truth or for the justification of their “private bigotries” makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the claims they make. If the claims are false, demonstrate it factually. If they are true, accept and deal with them.
The politically correct approach to HBD claims has more in common with religion than with science. Let’s consider the reception given to remarks of Larry Summers about the difference between male and female IQ distribution and its effect on the representation of women in science and engineering, or to the comments of James Watson to the effect that he was ” inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”
Were Harvard University or the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory acting as the institutions of scientific enquiry they profess to be, Summers’s and Watson’s remarks would have been treated as assertions as to fact that deserved investigation. That is not, of course, how they were received. Instead, Summers and Watson were turned out of their positions. This is not the response of scientists to an empirically testable proposition; it is the response of prelates to a heresy.
According to Wikipedia,
“When asked if Summers’s talk was ‘within the pale of legitimate academic discourse,’ [Professor Steven] Pinker responded ‘Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa. There is certainly enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously.’ ”
My point exactly!
A distinguishing characteristic of religious faith is the persistence of its adherents in believing things that are contrary to the evidence of their senses – e.g., a believer in transsubstantiation holds that bread and wine have been materially transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ even though they continue to look, feel, small, and taste like bread and wine. In like fashion, the p.c. brigade embrace a completely environmental explanation of human social and political inequality in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. As Watson noted, “they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.” Eppur si muove!
January 8, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Riding HA’s comment, I’m reminded of this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/
January 9, 2012 at 12:20 am
I wasn’t aware of Brand’s writing on pedophilia. I discussed that subject in my first month of blogging. I wouldn’t unequivocally refer to myself as a “young person” any more. Like Jonathan Miller, I suppose I’m just youngish.
H.A, funny since I had recently been reading “HBD” bloggers complain about the idiocy of libertarians. I suppose immigration is the issue where libertarians are most often in the opposition to them, but Half Sigma has more general disputes. I don’t disagree with your overall point though. Razib got into a big argument with Inductivist readers who who don’t bother to check the science on skin color-intelligent pleiotropy. A choice quote from him “and i’m pissed because there are plenty of you morons who thinl your world views are awesomely rooted in Science. but the reality is that you don’t give a shit about Science. this is a great time to keep up on human genomics, but a lot of you idiots treat it like a sugary supplement”. And to verify my claim in that thread that Razib tearing commenters is a general trait, here’s an example from BrownPundits.