Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve.
Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot).
Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds.
This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.
Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society.
We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.
Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.
So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.
Agreed, the trick is to keep policy at the individual level. Because assumptions or observations of group behavior cause problems on both the right and the left.
For instance, there is a strong progressive assumption that the male/female divide if it were truly fair would be 50/50 in all industries (or at least the ones they focus on, e.g. comp sci).
But you can't on the one hand make bold statements about expected outcomes and then remain blind to the science of group differences. These issues would be far simpler if solved by focusing purely on individual achievement.
Given we have a fixed amount of effort to apply to scrutinizing superficially reasonable but deeply poor arguments, we should focus on those that -- if false -- have the most deleterious effect on utility, broadly defined. If social equity is a component of the utility function, and I think for many it is, then power-preserving arguments would be such a target.
This could really be articulated in any way you choose, but no it doesn't follow that "we should be more skeptical of arguments that facially seem to support the powerful at the expense of the weak" is an irrational or wrong position.
Except that the argument Chomsky makes about the fact that this research would have no purpose in a society that treats people as individuals, ie not a racist society, is certainly valid, but the current progressivism is to do the opposite, ie to define people by their race/sex, and to count the number of people of each race or sex in organisations, and to call racism/sexism if it is not exactly the population distribution.
That’s the argument Murray makes in his latest book, i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it.
This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance).
This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case).
Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about.
As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
> Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about.
Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
> As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one.
> (of which only a small bit relates to race)
It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
“That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. But just because there's a lot of variation in many traits among humans mean there's variation in all of them, in fact we all have the same organs with the same functions, the same number of chromosomes, the same metabolic pathway to produce energy from food, etc. There are as many things that don't have variations in humans as thing that do. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a genetic impact on cognitive ability, but this argument is really poor one.
> Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
When almost all your citations in your discussion about the link between “races” and intelligence, are taken from at best biased studies (from South Africa, Rhodesia or Southern US under segregation) when it's not openly racist (Richard Lynn, which has 20+ citations in the book!).
If you want quick look at the quality of the sources used in this book, I highly recommend you to watch just the five minutes starting at 1'52'28[1], about the “single best study of Negroid intelligence”.
Also genetically aren't all the different distinct populations found around sub-Saharan Africa anyway, with everyone else in the world all sharing a single genetic group that has very little genetic variance within it?
> “That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious.
Is this obvious? I can't imagine what kinds of attributes you're talking about. I think if they were significant ones (courageousness, curiosity, etc) they would probably have really profound political effects you don't see in reality.
It is obvious that there are many attributes that varies (skin color, eye color, eye shape, hair thickness, hair color, nose shape, lactose tolerance, height distribution, breast size, etc.).
But, it doesn't mean that every attribute varies this way. That's exactly what I'm arguing against actually.
About psychological traits you mention, there's so much cultural influence I don't think genetics would have any visible impact even if it was a factor (I'd be surprised if genetics played zero role here, but I expect the genetic-induced variance to be much lower than the culturally-induced one).
Consider something like the role of courage in military tactics. If you had some populations who were simply less courageous than others, you'd have a different baseline for stuff like, does a phalanx work? Is a phalanx even necessary?
Even a minute difference in something like this would change the mechanics of the formation. So stuff like Alexander's globe-spanning conquests would suddenly become impossible as he hit a different population regime where his tactics don't work anymore, or the Mongols would hit some barrier where they would start losing all their battles because people weren't reacting the way they should, etc.
In reality, of course, empires like the Roman one absolutely depended on the fact that the same social systems and techniques worked just as well in modern day scotland as they worked in modern day Iraq - a legionnaire was a legionnaire, whether they came from egypt or wales, and they could and were moved around and interchanged.
That doesn't mean there cannot be genetic variations on those attributes though. No two legionnaires had exactly the same size[1] but that didn't prevent building legions acting as a unit…
In fact, the whole purpose of the phalanx as a combat organization is to remove the weight of individual actions: you don't need “courage” (whatever that means[2]) to stand in a phalanx, because you're clumped up with every soldiers, and you have nowhere to flee (and btw those soldiers are your neighbors and relatives, so fleeing would destroy all your social life back home, putting an enormous social pressure on soldiers).
There has been an extremely long and celebrated history of different nations and peoples employing different military tactics and being known for different sets of skills in battle.
But aside from that, it seems like everything you wrote is pure conjecture and even if some of it was true, that absolutely does not prove a point about there being no genetic component to intellectual diversity.
Sure - the basic concept of a multi-ethnic social organization presupposes that ethnicity doesn't affect how you react on social conditions. In the 19th century and early 20th century, it became fashionable to say that only nations of one ethnicity could ever function. There are, however, many centuries of empires functioning with a myriad of ethnic and cultural groups living under the same law and administrative structure, and it works fine, because people are basically the same everywhere. If they weren't, it wouldn't.
P 1. A policy is a set of procedures a state employs to get a desired reaction from a population.
P 2. An empire is a state that employs some policies across its entire territory.
P 3. Multi-ethnic empires with strong cohesion have existed.
So if you take 1, and 3, you see that for both to be true, people have to have very standardized reactions to policies across ethnic 'lines'. I state it with certainty because it's obvious.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial
It is.
None of the controversy over the book is about that orbital-level view.
If the sources are bad, how can you make any such statement about conclusions in the work? To state as fact what is and is not controversial regarding the Bell Curve, smells a bit like your Gas Light is possible not combusting properly.
> If the sources are bad, how can you make any such statement about conclusions in the work?
I’m not making any statement about the conclusions in the work.
I’m making a statement about the controversy around the work, from observing that controversy, including reading extensive material from people objecting at the time it first became controversial.
The controversy was never over the broad idea that different populations have different distributions of different attributes.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes
It is by no means "the general argument" of the Bell Curve, and saying that pretty transparently shows that you have not read it. You are, of course, excused by the fact that the book has been the target of relentless smear campaign by media and many academics, which resulted in painting completely wrong image of what the book actually is about.
Bell Curve is almost entirely concerning the American society, and only in passing mentions issues and results from different parts of the world. The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ. Moreover, which will probably be shocking to people who only know Bell Curve through second hand accounts of people very loudly denouncing it, for the most part it explicitly restricts itself to results and data from the population of white Americans only, to show that these correlations are not a result of some sort of insidious ethnic or racial discrimination, as they also exist within white population. Only in last part of the book ethnic and racial disparities are mentioned, mostly to show that these are pretty much what you would expect if you assumed that correlations of intelligence and outcomes within population of white Americans are the same if you extend your analysis to population at large.
> The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ.
Except the data they use is not IQ (they are using AFQT Score because that's the available data) and they are artificially constructing an equivalent IQ. The original data doesn't even fit a bell curve (because there's no reason a given test should). For some reason, unjustified in the book, they assume that the AFQT score depends only from genetic factors and not from any kind of social determinism.
The fact that the book liberally jumps from AFQT score to IQ to “genetic factor” is an enormous issue which completely destroys the credibility of their work.
Also, in their book it is “to a large degree, explained by their IQ”, because they controlled for almost no social or environmental factors: only the “parental socioeconomic status” (also a made-up metric) is taken into account.
Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either).
And btw, the study you quote explicitly rules out the conversion done in the book:
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
> Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Alas, there have been other studies done, and it turns out that indeed, AFQT/ASVAB score and IQ correlation does in fact extend to areas on the left side of the distribution too, exactly as expected. To reiterate: this correlation exists across entire spectrum, not only among high IQ people. If anything, the correlation at high IQ is lower than expected, because of range restriction effect.
> Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone
Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
It can, though. The problem is that the population of military test takers is not representative of population at large. For one thing, its average intelligence will probably be higher, due to relative scarcity of mentally disabled people. However, if you know the parameters of IQ distribution among military test takers, you can easily convert AFQT/ASVAB to IQ.
> You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Oh yes it is. Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud. Doing so in any hard-science topic would earn you an angry comment from your reviewers.
> Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
Oh, and I guess Herrnstein and Murray didn't publish that book? Because they definitely do so in The Bell Curve: They are literally plotting AFQT and SES (their bogus “socioeconomic factors”) against social outcome and since AFQT has a higher correlation than SES, they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
And if you read my previous comment, you'd notice that the AFQT -> IQ is only a part of the issue in the Bell Curve, the bigger part being how they assume AFQT -> genetics because they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics. (The last steps being an ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve so it's not really a surprise…)
> Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud.
No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study, but you can’t extrapolate that outside the sample, that would be a rookie mistake”. This is, of course, absurd. We do science precisely so that we can make useful predictions in day to day life, outside of studies.
> they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
> they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics
I don’t think they do, and it is contradicted by what you wrote in this very comment, where you say they claim genetics is “decisive factor”. This clearly makes no sense under assumption of equality/identity of concepts — you wouldn’t say that A is a “decisive factor” in B, if A and B are the same thing.
> ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve
Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
> No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study
It's not about not extrapolating to individual subjects outside of the test group, it's about not extrapolating to categories which aren't represented. That's why we don't conclude a vaccine is effective on all mammals after a trial on mouses! We experiment on humans, and we even try to get as much diversity as we can (age, gender, preexisting conditions etc.) so the result can be generalized to the entire population.
> I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
The argument made in The Bell Curve is that genetics is the single most important factor. I wrote “alone” not because there is not other factors, but because according to the authors there is no other factors as important.
> Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not. At least not according to the usual definition of “scientific knowledge” which imply some degree of consensus: this research field is strongly divided on that question, with a clear ideological split. BTW, even the mere existence of g is questioned.
I wonder if a society that treats people as individuals is even possible?
To me that sounds like reasoning along the lines of the physics professors answer: "First, let's assume that all cows are spherical..."
Not always a useful assumption.
Generalizations are necessary for a human to function. Something like 90% of all daily activities are repetition and you would become psychotic if you tried to make a conscious effort to evaluate and re-evaluate everything all the time.
This goes for how we view people too, obviously. Especially those that we do not know.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't try, just trying to argue that it would be inhuman to expect us to succeed every time.
Except the stars are millions of light-years away from the moon. I don't think we are that far from a race neutral society, despite the last year of political slogans.
Treating everyone as an individual is exactly the opposite of “assume all cows are roughly spherical”. It means judge someone with the highest resolution information available. The fact that perfect information is not always available, doesn’t mean you can’t still have the maxim of making the best of the information you have / can acquire.
> But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
I agree. This is a major counterargument to this notion that this type of knowledge is not useful. Not even mentioning that it is freaking interesting and it will always spark curiosity in a lot of people.
So I know a lot of people mentioned in this New Yorker piece. Not well but I consider them colleagues. I have a lot to say about it on several levels.
On the one hand, I've had to deal firsthand with the phenomenon Paige-Harden is talking about, in hiring discussions and faculty meetings. It's infuriating and bizarre to see the level of denial that arises among people who ostensibly are extremely intelligent and well-educated. It reaches a point where my only conclusion has been that these individuals are completely out of touch in an ivory-tower sense, that they have no idea what happens in clinical settings, and the problems that arise in terms of phenomena that are obviously congenital disorders or near-disorders, even if they don't have a label per se.
On the other hand, I think the behavior genetics community is in a bit of denial itself, about the strengths of its models and reliability of its conclusions. The field has found itself in a no-mans land the last decade or so, in that the revolution promised by the genome area instead stripped the field of results: the findings of the twin era, when faced with molecular genetics, largely evaporated. This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication.
This all leads to a general sense within the BG community and without that the models and findings of behavior genetics are based on very big assumptions, assumptions that seem to fall apart when looked at through a microscope. They might have some validity in a broad brush sense — in the sense that yes, there are some sets of genes that collectively lead one to have higher functioning cognitive ability, and some that lead to impairments — but the tricky details most people wrestle with are mismodeled. Comparing one end of the bell curve to the other is doable; less doable is comparing adjoining areas of the curve. There's also the strange complexity of life, which is largely absent from these models. A common pattern is for some BG conclusion to be drawn in the literature, and then everyone has very clear, prima facie evidence — on the news, in everyday experience, and so forth — that clearly contradicts it. The BG community wrestles with it, comes up with some contorted explanation for why there's no contradiction, and then silence.
The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement. What it concerns itself with are characterizing with abstract descriptions — "additive genetic variance", or "polygenic risk" — people as if they are static objects. It's not oriented toward identifying something specific or manipulable, like a neurophysiological pathway that can be changed, or the products of specific genes. Even when research is oriented toward potential change, as in environmental interventions, genes are still treated as something fixed and unchanging, background that is to be covaried out because it's not something we should do anything about.
So, even though I think the left-leaning segments of academia definitely go overboard in how they approach behavior and genetics, there's some sympathetic groups who largely reject it for other reasons. They see the field as fuzzy and unreplicable in a levels-of-analysis sense, if not sample-to-sample sense, and are skeptical of the overall worldview implicitly being promoted.
I need to reread the Chomsky piece; it's dense and full of excellent points. But part of what it points to is the fundamental problem with seeing individuals in society in terms of reward or punishment for what they are, rather than in terms of the obligation of society at large toward improving other individuals.
The real crisis looming on the horizon isn't the failure of the left to appreciate behavior genetics. It's the failure of everyone to appreciate the implications of a civilization where we will soon be able to alter our genes at any stage of life, as well as the neurobehavioral structures that are downstream from them. Where does the moral obligation lie then? With the individual or society? What value is there then in abstract quantifications of variance due to the individual at birth, and variance that occurs later?
>This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication.
Why would you say that? I think you implied you work in this field, so maybe you do know better than me. But from my perspective, you are incorrect. Not only a lot of SNP's are replicating, but we also have the definitive method to test causality, which is applying PGS intrafamily.
> The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement.
Ok, now I am definetely sure you don't work in the field. Wtf? Of course it is immensely valuable to know that cluster X of genes influences condition Y. Nowadays, drug discovery is a pretty messy process without any direction except trial and error. If we can previously know which genes are first implied in this condition, then we can reason what they are probably doing (using previous knowledge of them) and from there work in a possible solution.
Chomsky's basic argument is that we can build a society where social success doesn't depend on IQ. Or as he puts it:
"If... society can be organized more or less in accordance with the "socialist dictum," then nothing is left of Herrnstein's argument"
So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's fine but trivial, it doesn't need pointing out. My point is that within the range of progressive arguments, Chomsky's is definitive because it doesn't involve the intellectual contortions that other progressive positions are increasingly depending on.
You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would
appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
The statement you are putting forwards assumes many things - that value is decided by solely by monetary values as decided by "the market", that a market that can calculate values perfectly is possible, that social rewards have no value, that socialism is incompatible with rewarding people materially for material product, etc..., which most people would say are false.
Socialism is a system where a clique of powerful people jail and abuse anyone who opposes their ways. Ostensibly it's for the good of society, but in reality it's just for the ruling class. Source: lived under socialism for 14 years. Also observe N.K.
Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
Meh, none of that is socialism. Those things also happen in capitalist societies so I guess we could also say that those things are capitalism... it seems that to you there is no distinction between capitalism and socialism.
Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
Sorry about your experience, but here in America it's not much better. We imprison more people than anywhere else in the world, including the USSR at its height, in raw numbers and per capita terms as well. Our system is one built on a concept of punishment and retribution, rather than rehabilitation and forgiveness.
Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman
The other half of that of course is that prison is highly profitable in the United States, making the incentives to imprison people incredibly perverse. Housing people involuntarily is an industry in America, and people are working very diligently on optimizing and perfecting it to be as profitable as possible. This leads to insane situations where prisoners are being used to fight fires with little to no pay, which may sound like slavery to you, but... well. It is. The 13th Amendment which "abolished" slavery even carves out an if someone is convicted of a crime.
I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere.
TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
He opposes it when it turns up. But for example, he was frightfully keen on Venezuela's "21st century socialism" until it predictably, and predictedly, became yet another authoritarian failure:
> Do you think they invented his quotes? There's usually room for a fruitful discussion if you want one.
No. But do I think that their "interpretation" is even close to charitable and that there's a even faintest chance that we'll get somewhere from that starting point? No, not a chance.
The author is of course the author of some "abolish the NHS book/report" as well. Do you honestly believe that this sort of such stuff is represented by anything other than monied interests?
"[W]hat’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created […] The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact."
That seems to prove my point, irrespective of whether the IEA is a right-wing thinktank (yes, it is).
> So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
(not to bring up a no true scotsman-type argument) but maybe chomsky has a different understanding of what "socialist principles" mean compared to most contemporary people (and those who implemented those disastrous policies)?
The research definitely is significant - definitely politically, if not scientifically (which I'd argue it is, any research that helps find the truth / predict the future / create a better model of the world is scientifically significant).
We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlation of IQ and interests with race & sex. Sure, genetics don't determine an individual's life, but they do influence population averages, so if genetics explain/predict sex & race differences in careers and education, we could hopefully resolve those debates.
Another example of this is the association between violence and (1) computer games, and (2) sex/testosterone. The first one, albeit "intuitive", was debunked using science/statistics, and the second one most people just assume as "obviously" true (and noone claims sexism!) (although AFAIK it's scientifically debatable).
Again, genetics don't determine an individual, but they do influence the population & sub-groups.
Clear evidence that one group differs from another doesn't provide any useful information for dealing with individuals.
Like make up a characteristic where women differ statistically from men, but have the difference be about 1/2 the standard deviation for either group. Lots of women will be closer to the average for men than the average for women, and vice versa, there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
And lo and behold, most human characteristics are similar to this pattern, with clear distinctions available between groups and of no value in making decisions about individuals, because of intragroup variation.
“ Clear evidence that one group differs from another doesn't provide any useful information for dealing with individuals “
This isn’t necessarily true.
For example, I know that two-year-olds are far more sensitive to missing naps then eight-year-olds are.
This changes how I structure time and environment around a two year old so that he is the statistically more likely to behave. If I don’t do that, I set them up for individual behavioral failures.
> Like make up a characteristic where women differ statistically from men, but have the difference be about 1/2 the standard deviation for either group.
> there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
It's quite painful then that people are obsessed with measuring group differences with the only possible explanation being bigotry. If people ignored identity groups and studied individuals, we might not be in such a political mess.
If outcomes between groups are different, investigation into underlying causes of differences in group outcomes is often useful- bigotry need not be a motivation.
What I see is that if a difference is indeed found, there can only be two reasons for it: Racism or sexism.
Computer science or video games are an example. The demographics allegedly show very prevalent sexism here that is allegedly responsible for said difference.
The self-reflection about how other fields have similar one-sided demographics with the opposite sex isn't interesting on the other hand. On the contrary, that realization is ignored, because it would endanger the sexism story. A look at the pipeline is also just ignored, even if demographics are one-side before discrimination even could occur.
I don't believe that some people believe their own conclusions though. The bad thing is that states and governments now try to correct something that is based on false assumptions. This is nothing else than totalitarian and absurd behavior.
>What I see is that if a difference is indeed found, there can only be two reasons for it: Racism or sexism.
This seems absurd to me. As an example, I figure that the reason that there are more male construction workers than female construction workers is not sexism- it's that men largely have more physical strength and a greater inclination or preference for highly physical and dangerous work than women.
Would you call this sexism? Why should it be the default assumption that men and women have equal preferences to self-select jobs exact equal proportion for each and every profession?
> Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true
The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kind of absurd when you think of some of the more superficial and obvious yet real differences. You clarify this very succinctly, but it is still abstract, and I find many people tend not to understand until given a more concrete example... this I find challenging to do without being prejudged as some kind of racist or sexist, so unfortunately I just don't bother any more, the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
> the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...)
Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline.
The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.
Incidents of people being offended in the past doesn't mean that people aren't more sensitive today than they are now. I think there is a strong argument made in "The Coddling of the American Mind" that overprotective helicopter parenting after the turn of the century, combined with the rise of online echo chambers that provide instant support for any personally held opinion have resulted in a society of individuals who are extremely sensitive and take offense much more easily.
His arguments regarding the social consequences arent as good as they could be, but the ideas he is refuting are so stupid that I cant tell if they are strawmen or just commonly held ideas. Chomskys writing is often convincing, but his perspective always seems so limited. The (in)significance of the research, intentionally vague regarding specific or general as a trick, and justified by fear of missuse in politics, perhaps. But it shows an emphasis on argument over substance, and a lack of perspective on technology.
Thank you, /blast/, for sharing this article. The US public discourse has become a thoroughly annoying, exhausting puppetry of shouting, wrestling straw-men.
Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed.
I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.
I don't think that a text judging biology, written by an (arguably smart) linguist dating 50 years back can be in any sense "definitive". Even in a moral and political one. Science evolves and real-world consequences follow.
Someone playing with electricity in 1800 was doing scientifically insignificant research. 100 years later, electricity was a major industrial force.
We are just entering the era when genetic manipulations of not just embryos, but adult organisms will be possible. One day, this technology will be used on humans as well. Even if the U.S. forbade such research, other countries likely won't. 20 or 30 years from now, progressives will have to find answers to technology that can tune various parameters of human beings, maybe including some cognitive abilities.
Having read and enjoyed the linked article, I noted that roughly the second half of Chomsky's argument is that the inquiry into race and IQ is fundamentally just boring -- "of quite limited scientific interest". He's saying "sure, you could be right, but who cares?"
This contrasts with the reactions in the article of scorn such as comparing researchers to "Holocaust deniers".
It struck me that of the two; Chomsky's reaction is the more devastating.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. This sort of battle comment leads to predictable, nasty discussion, and what we want here is curious conversation.
I'll lead with this - people should be treated with respect regardless of their race and regardless of their IQ. People should be given equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of any differences.
> Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc.
>Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
We have widely studied and reported on reasoning for why some races do worse on tests in america, and the answer is not inherent differences in race, and it has very reasonable scientific backing. The reason is racist policies that made it harder for some groups to succeed. This is a real thing in American history. It's the same underlying reasoning why many rich coastal enclaves in liberal areas also do better on standardized tests - better access to opportunity and support.
> 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
Its pretty hard to ignore the american history of racism, from slavery to redlining to KKK to modern day voting laws. And its pretty easy to connect the dots to how those MASSIVE issues affect people in 2021.
The important point of all this really was the vast american history of racism, not comparing dogma or "propoganda" to what i think about treatment of others. Also, FWIW you're wrong. Progressives are not about giving more opportunity, they're just ensuring that opportunity is received by the people who historically did not have opportunity.
--- --- ---
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
That is the thing to remember.
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
Giving disproportionate advantage to minorities because minorities of the past several hundred years had disadvantage is not justice or even logical. It's just racism.
I don't ask for anything special despite my ancestors being treated like crap. My ancestors were discriminated against, yet now my children are seen as benefactors of a "history of racism" despite our ancestors being literally subject to that racism.
It's a farce, and a thinly veiled excuse for modern racism.
...and it's very telling that progressives have abandoned the notion of equality.
> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot.
Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism.
Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries.
New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.
Where there are differences among humans, I think they should be eligible and encouraged for scientific study. Science doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) care about feelings. I worry that we’ve created a society where “it’s taboo to study that” will blind us all on the path to true understanding.
If we discover facts that we internalize as uncomfortable along the way, it wasn’t the discovery that made those facts exist. Politics can take over after science reveals the facts, but (ideally) not before.
I find it extremely likely that, across all research, that we will find actionable information about what interventions are helpful (and which are not) and blinding ourselves to that in the interest of comfort is undesirable IMO. These could be nutritional, societal, economic, or other and these interventions could serve to lift billions of humans to a better condition.
> The idea that racism is wrong because we all have equal capabilities is preposterous to begin with, why, you might as well justify sexism in that way.
Nobody challenges that women are physically weaker then men. Trying to point to this, and scream out of loud as part of some fetish is preposterous, and trying to justify sexism.
Nobody denies that genetics exist. Waging a sneaky campaign to seep into scientific publications to legitimise racism, and attempting to "scientifically pronouncing somebody dumber than others" is preposterous, and is racism.
This vexation of finding scientific basis for somebody's inferiority is exactly what German, and American Nazis did in nineteen thirties, while hiding behind the fig leaf of "doing real science."
> Nobody challenges that women are physically weaker then men.
I have encountered multiple people in my personal life who are offended by the idea that women are physically weaker than men.
There is also plenty of evidence of this in the raging debate surrounding transgender (specifically male to female) individuals and their physical advantages competing against non-transgender women.
So yes, I would say there are many who challenge that notion.
> There is also plenty of evidence of this in the raging debate surrounding transgender (specifically male to female) individuals and their physical advantages competing against non-transgender women.
Yes, this is a huge issue in progressive ideology that is trying to take a local maxima of least-resistance arguments.
There are solid arguments why M2F individuals are not problematic in sports, but "there are no differences" is not one of them. Better ones include, the inherent differences are much smaller after hormonal changes most m2f people undergo, or that elite tier athletics are already self-selecting for the most genetically extreme people anyways, further reducing the difference.
I wonder how many people who throw accusations of "closet X" and "stealth Y" so easily are, in fact, themselves closet X and stealth Y and generalize about other people based on their own carefully hidden prejudices.
Reminds me of Conflict vs Mistake theory. Mistake theorists worry about whether an idea is true. Conflict theorists worry about whether an idea is useful their enemies.
Shifting the argument to "bad faith", "closet X", "stealth Y" is exactly that: It says nothing about whether something true, only that "it helps the bad guys."
Well, to be honest, claiming that people who say A do in fact mean B, is more of an attempt at mind reading of others than just another conviction.
This is frowned upon, because there is no bottom to this race downwards. Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
> Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
You say this as if human beings are entirely unfamiliar with the use of facades in everyday life (need I mention most women's familarity with "the nice guy"), more so in those domains where power and position are at stake.
No, I wanted to say that we should apply some threshold of evidence before making accusations like this, and we shouldn't apply them onto large groups of people.
These assumptions of sinister motives are unwarranted.
There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")
https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block...
Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve.
Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot).
Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds.
This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.