Talk:Race and intelligence/Archive 13

message: The bit about contested assumptions was recently added.  I think it's fine, but in its original form it mischaracterized the actual assumptions.  That intelligence can be "reduced" is POV language; one might instead say that the assumption is that intelligence "encompasses" most definitions.  But this is beside the point; the actual assumption (and finding) of the classicists is that intelligence is measurable and mostly (but not entirely) unitary -- that is, there is a g-factor hierarchy with g at the top and important group factors below.  I have edited these "assumptions" accordingly.  --DAD T 17:00, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intelligence 

message: Is everything okay here? No problems that I can see.... Uncle Ed 21:43, July 15, 2005 (UTC)
:The FAC page has sucked up most of the vitriol lately ;) --Rikurzhen 21:47, July 15, 2005 (UTC)
::Yeah, I think everything's OK! I just want to get this NPOVed in the first few paragraphs (the rest needs it, too), but I think this process of negotiation is going well given volatility of the topic. Jokestress 21:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: D--- it, what the f--- are you talking...<ahem>  Ed!  Hi!  Yes, looks like we've got a productive dialogue.  Thanks, Unc.  ;)  --DAD T 23:38, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Civility and neutrality check

message: I wanted to say a couple of things before knocking off for the night, but to do so I'd have to move to a different OS. Maybe I should give up and buy a new computer. Archiving does have its benefits as long as we don't move stuff that is still being activ ely referred to. 
:I've done some archiving here but many recent active threads made me hesitant.  A more courageous soul might also take a pass.  Hopefully your OS can handle the present page.  ;)  --DAD T 16:36, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Length of talk page is indigestible on my old computer 

message: #Change: Easy fix for important problem, and I'm happy to help edit referring pages. --DAD T 17:02, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Change title to "Intelligence and race"

message: # Keep. I'm pretty sure this article is discussing two issues:
#* The presence of a general correlation between race and IQ
#* Theories about the causal factors that produce the correlation
:So I really don't see the problem with using a title that implies a causal connection. That's what this article is about. --malathion talk 21:31, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Keep "Race and intelligence"

message: #Abstain: For the moment, I'll abstain. While at one level it makes sense that people would read the two phrases different, I haven't yet gotten over the fact feeling that the two are logically identicial. --Rikurzhen 17:10, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
#Abstain. Exactly the same reason, even though it's tongue-in-cheek. I teach formal logics, and it would be professionally embarrassing for me to advocate a change to something that is equivalent, because conjunction is (as we all know, class) commutative. (After a beer or two, I might admit that the change is, actually, quite a good idea.) Arbor 19:51, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Abstain

message: # Yes. It's growing on me. --Rikurzhen 19:40, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
# Yes. I don't see why not. --malathion talk 21:21, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yes 

message: # Well, it's a weak no, and I see that I am in the minority anyway (and late, to boot!) but here are my reasons: First, the current title is short and sweet, and compatible with what other sources (textbooks, encyclopedia articles) call this. Second, the Evolution article isn't called Evolution research either. Third, there are quite a number of issues in the current article that aren't actually surveying he "research" but rather the controversy, public reception, history, etc. surrounding the issue. Much of that is certainly not research, but I think the article benefits from that material. So I would like to maintain Race and intelligence (or any grammatically correct permutation of those words—conjunction is commutative, after all) for the title of the summary style article. The subarticles then are about history, research, controversy, and whatnot. To put this differently, I am afraid the label research will skew the article too much towards the scientific viewpoint—a viewpoint I myself endorse, but "writing for the enemy" is what makes this entire endeavour so much fun. (And we are still having fun, aren't we?) For a good article on Race and intelligence research we could just make a REDIRECT to the Rushton and Jensen survey paper, couldn't we? Arbor 13:44, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  No 

message: Regarding the first picture caption, I can't find the "Rushton 1995" reference among the refs.  What's the actual reference?  I just read the Roth 2001 paper.  Holy data. --DAD T 00:56, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  missing reference 

message: I'm going to speculate a bit; I hate doing this, but with this particular group it may do more good than harm.  I hypothesize that Rikurzhen, Jokestress, P0M and I (at least) are all: 1) highly educated, 2) strongly liberal, 3) familiar with general scientific practice, 4) deeply concerned with the social consequences of the research, and 5) [it must at least be speculated] not deluded by any forms of racism save those unremovable subconscious types.  Rikurzhen and I, and perhaps others, are practicing scientists in cognitive science and/or genetics.  It seems implausible to me that a crew with this kind of talent and (admittedly hypothesized) shared values can't cooperate, enjoy each other's company, and build an exemplary article.
 
I'll speculate that Rikurzhen and I know the scientific literature better than Jokestress right now, but we're both energetic and delighted to inform.  I speculate that she knows the scientific racism literature better than we do, and I hope she'll be just as energetic in educating us.  The vast majority of new editors who show up here appear to react viscerally -- and with scads of ill-informed edits -- to the seeming incompatibility of the science with their worldview; I went through a similar crisis when I first encountered the material.  The antidotes are mutual trust, flexibility and, above all, knowledge.  It's not a marathon or a sprint; this isn't a race.  It's a project that's larger than any of us. --DAD T 01:13, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Amen to that. By the way, you can add me to your list, except for (2). I'm European, and liberal still means "the opposite of socialist" around here, so I always choke on that label. Call me an unrepentant leftist or a social democrat. (And I'm a practicing scientist as well, but in the "hard" sciences.) Arbor 13:51, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  DAD speculates a bit 

message: This discussion page is starting to look like the trees and connections among trees in a tropical jungle.  One of the primary causes of trouble among people who argue about [race] and [intelligence] in the world outside Wikipedia (as well as within) is that there are contending ideas about what referents the word "race" has, if any. Reading over a series of diffs I started getting the feeling that we are not clear on the connections between empirical evidence, statistical evidence, constituted entities (or social constructs, by which I mean concepts and the words that label them that create accounts for what things are "out there," how and why those things work, etc.). 
It would be a great contribution if we could describe clearly and persuasively why the study of connections between [race] and [intelligence] so easily becomes controversial. 
I am also beginning to wonder whether I have a minority take on the nature of genetic connections among all human beings -- that it is a rich tapestry with a few billion threads peeking out at this end of the loom, and that it's not a simple weave where all threads go straight up and down the cloth.
Take the issue of the skulls. Unless the great archeologists who study ancient China were failing to describe accurately what they were digging up, there are enough similarities among Chinese skulls going back thousands of years to constitute a "type." The same goes for Native American skulls. But there is not absolute uniformity among them, and occasionally skulls have been discovered that have suggested to people like Herlee Creel that there were both a couple of "negro" skulls and a couple of "caucasian" skulls among the "Chinese" skulls. I don't want to get into what it means for there to have been these atypical skulls there, but simply to point out that people who devoted their lives to trying to puzzle out the ancient origins of a great civilization had enough of an idea of what a typical skull was to have been puzzled by a few odd ones.  So let's take the skulls as the basis for a kind of thought experiment, at least until someone comes up with evidence that indicates that one can't make a good guess on what DNA evidence will show just by looking at a skull. (One book that I have at hand that talks about "skulls of pronounced Chinese type" at the time of the Shang dynasty, is William Watson's Early Civilization in China, p. 64.)
If one were to look at one skull from an American Indian, one from a native of Mali, etc., etc., you might not get an idea of what was typical of the groups that they came from. For instance, if you looked at the skull of a Taiwanese whose parents had made him sleep on his back on a board, you might decide that Chinese skulls had rectangular rear aspect.  If you examine a large number of skulls you will find commonalities that can't be accounted for by the application of external forces to deform skulls in different ways depending on the culture. That's probably what the pictures of the 3 skulls are intended to illustrate.  For some skull features to pop out at you, you don't even have to wait until the skin is removed. Everybody calls us Anglo types "da4 bi2zi" (big nose) (or "hook nose, beak nose" if you speak Taiwanese). A Chinese kid who sprouted a "witch's nose" like mine might have a hard time growing up.  
If one is being "scientific" in one popular sense of the word, one may become concerned to measure dimensions of the skulls with micrometer precision, measure millions of skulls, etc.  The practical person who measures a few skulls from a few different widely separated points on the globe will fairly soon notice that the average distances center around certain values for each group, and will realize that taking a thousand more or even a hundred more is not going to change the average enough to make any great difference.  If Anglo average nose length  is 2.03 inches after you've done a thousand, and Chinese average nose length is 1.1 inches after a thousand, it's not going to matter if after you take 10,000 measurements the "real" averages turn out to be 2.0296 and 1.0973 inches. There is nothing racist in the simple accumulation of empirical evidence.
If one were a computer and just cranked out the numbers, that would be the end of the story, but humans do what I've already started to do: They say something like, "The characteristic nose length of Chinese is 1 inch plus or minus .3 inches."  That judgment is already a construct on two grounds, (1) you've already singled the Chinese out as "a group" and you're treating them as though there were a discontinuity between them and the northern Europeans, and (2) you've conceptualized the group as "Those people whose average nose length is about an inch."  
The next stage may be to ask why the group that adapted to living on the edges of the ice-age glaciers have big, long noses, and the other group is characterized by noses that are much more economical of raw material, less likely to get caught in door jambs, etc.  
I don't see how any of the above is racist. They involve constituted entities, social constructs, and racist conceptualizations are also social constructs. The difference is that the racist conceptualizations include a strong axiological component that is not grounded in empirical observations. It is one thing to say, e.g., Northern European noses are good for warming and moisturizing sub-freezing air, and another thing to say that Northern European noses suit their owners for prying into the business of honest people who are minding their own business, and so the people are bad.
If memory serves, the people who have been most interested in skulls from an ideological standpoint have concentrated on measuring brain case volume and arguing from that dimension to the physical size of the brain, and then from that to the intelligence of the owner of the skull.  It's a simplistic argument to say that volume = intelligence. Humans are not, I think, the organisms with the biggest brains.  I suspect that the people who used information on brain volumes to racist ends voiced the conclusion that some groups have to be less intelligent than other groups simply because their brains were of a lower volume.  
Politically it probably would be wise to avoid the skull illustrations. There are plenty of other heritable characteristics that are known to be different among different populations but not to be accelerants  for controversy and ill feeling. 
I thought these matters were clearly explained in the article on Race, maybe I'd better check.P0M 00:41, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps. What you say reminds me that one of the nicest people I've ever known was one of my students in the disciplinary school. He was said to have suffered some kind of marginal brain damage, and was not a whiz kid, but I'd rather have him as a neighbor and a friend than some of the guys in finance who were crowing about how their financial manipulations were ripping off the pensions of old ladies. I think I'm more fervent in appreciating the cultural/nurture things that can be done to produce the nice guys and influence people against becoming sociopaths.  P0M 02:08, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Right -- intelligence and personality are largely unrelated.  In personnel selection, it's (in order): select on 1) intelligence and 2) conscientiousness and emotional stability.  But my boss used to say, "One rule: no a--holes."  ;) --DAD T 02:36, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questions about group understandings of fundamental matters 

message: I agree, broadly, with your whole tract.  Tidbits: nobody claims brain size = intelligence, and published size-IQ correlations are low, on the order of 0.1-0.4 IIRC; humans have smaller brains than several megafauna, but the proper question is whether elephants with larger brains are smarter than their cerebrally underendowed herdmates; the skull measurement material may have value (I understand that forensics on bones and blood can correctly identify racial identity) but is probably irretrievably associated with quack craniometry and early attempts to justify racism.  
I'm not surprised by the controversy, outside or here on WP.  To a set of people, anything that arms racists (and many research findings in this field clearly arm racists) must be fought by any means available.  The same thing happens w.r.t. evolution, which clearly arms anti-creationists or (yikes!) atheists.  To another set, the findings are so obviously false, or the questions so ill-defined, that it's just a matter of time and effort to expose the rotten core of the so-called "science".  To another set of people, the good that can come of understanding the roots of inequality more than compensates for arming racists, who are pariahs in our society anyway.  Another set just wishes knowledge could be compiled without all this slinging of value judgments and policy implications.  Whether we admit it or not, I'm fairly certain that our little group of authors subscribes quite fervently to one or more of these positions, and we can't just leave them at the home page.  --DAD T 01:45, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps. What you say reminds me that one of the nicest people I've ever known was one of my students in the disciplinary school. He was said to have suffered some kind of marginal brain damage, and was not a whiz kid, but I'd rather have him as a neighbor and a friend than some of the guys in finance who were crowing about how their financial manipulations were ripping off the pensions of old ladies. I think I'm more fervent in appreciating the cultural/nurture things that can be done to produce the nice guys and influence people against becoming sociopaths.  P0M 02:08, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Right -- intelligence and personality are largely unrelated.  In personnel selection, it's (in order): select on 1) intelligence and 2) conscientiousness and emotional stability.  But my boss used to say, "One rule: no a--holes."  ;) --DAD T 02:36, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  DAD comment 

message: The intro says:
self-identified race is a useful categorization for social science research and can produce scientifically meaningful conclusions
I suspect that this statement mischaracterizes the nature of the studies of [race] and [intelligence]. Nobody has made a study that did not use self-identified race as its sole means of categorizing the subjects of the study into [racial] groups? P0M 00:54, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A quibble or a question 

message: I've started a Race and intelligence controversy article. Experimenting with the idea is probably the best way to decide if it is worthwhile. Have at it! --Rikurzhen 03:48, July 21, 2005 (UTC)
:Doesn't that indirectly signify that this article is uncontroversial which would be a mistake?  Isn't it unnecessarily redundant to have 2 such articles? What about the point of non neutral presentation regardless of the word "controversy", focusing on just "race" and "intelligence" misframes the issue in a completely non neutral presumption inducing way. zen master T 06:43, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: But none of the titles you list present the subject with a presumption inducing conclusion in the title, they are all straight forward and simply stated. Wouldn't it be redundant and POV (both conclusive) to have two titles such as Sugar and tooth decay and Sugar and tooth decay controversy?  This article should be renamed to Intelligence research controversy, there is already an Intelligence research article so we would actually be following your plan above, what do you think? zen master T 09:35, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: We've had this discussion already countless times.  Others do not share the view that the title is "presumption inducing".  The straw poll on this subject shows only one vote (ZM's) for this position.  Support for renaming the article, even to reverse the terms, has been flimsy at best.  Time to move on. --DAD T 14:46, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The recent feature article candidate vote is evidence to the contrary to what you are saying. zen master T 14:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hm -- I can find no consensus on the FAC comment page that the article's title is "presumption inducing".  Anything else? --DAD T 17:41, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Race and intelligence controversy