Forbidden knowledge

Any society that accepts that various groups of people may be inherently different will sooner or later see one of those groups oppressing the others. A brief glance at history can confirm this.

The reason we don't talk about differences in IQ between races isn't because those at the low end of the scale might be offended. It's because the ones at the high end of the scale will, eventually, wield a dictatorship over the others.

I think that there is knowledge that should be suppressed. A good example is bomb making instructions that can be found on the internet. I've never searched for information about making bombs, but I've read that it's there.

I don't know that I would have burned the files of the 731's scientist, but I would place it away in a high security government place where limited people had access to the information.

Statistically, some races might average higher IQ's than other races. I can't think of anything that you'd do with that information. Schools and employers aren't teaching or hiring groups of people. They have to work with individuals, and any individual might score higher or lower than what is the norm of the group.

For instance, we don't know the race of Betty or Eleazer, but would you want those two crackers working for you even if they belonged to a race that scored high on IQ tests?

There is such a thing as emotional intelligence, and I don't know how strongly it correlates to regular IQ tests. It's the ability of a person to feel for others(empathy) and the ability to deal with emotions(like anger)in a constructive manner. People with emotional intelligence are often more successful in life than those without, but with a higher IQ.

Geez, isn't it obvious? Racial differences in IQ would mean that "affirmative action" would be justified forever.

Eleazer,

I didn't ask. I said that I didn't know your race, nor do I care. Now that you mention it, I realize that some people may use the term "cracker" to be a white person. I use it to describe a person who's a bit on the goofy side. A person that some people would just toss aside because they come across as a little crazy. But really, it's a person who has issues or mental health problems and haven't found a way to deal with them in a healthy and constructive sort of way.

It seems to me that questioning the validity of the IQ test as a measurement of knowledge in the first place would change the whole framework of this discussion.

Travis makes a good point. I think people put too much validity in IQ, when it may reflect less on a person's intelligence and more about their ability to succeed in the the traditional school environment. And many studies have shown that the biggest factor relating to success in school is economics.

Intelligence is a funny thing. Who is more intelligent, the person who can understand quantum physics but can't tie their own shoes or the person who doesn't understand quantum physics but is able to function in daily life with a range of skills and common sense? And just because someone gets a 4.0 in college doesn't mean that they have true critical thinking skills, sad to say.

I think the danger of these studies about race and IQ is that it does not allow for the unique individual. Sometimes a stereotype can have a broad grain of truth, but it is not always true. And have we learned nothing from the movie Gattaca about defining people by "science and numbers"?

Rod,
A reporter wants to suppress the truth?
Say, who gets to decide what truths to suppress; me, you or say, the Catholic Church or maybe someone like a Mao or Stalin?
Isn't the root of political correctness denying truth, because under a politically correct mentality truth is what we want it to be. Funny, were you not just writing about this a bit earlier with the Will To Power and all. You constantly harp on the moral laxness of our culture, bring up After Virtue on a fairly regular basis and pine for a time when the culture had a moral center, a consistency. Didn't the Middle Ages offer something as such? Of course the truth of Copernicus was suppressed as was Galileo.
Aristotle instructed on virtues, one being courage. I'm no expert so maybe you should revisit what he had to say regarding true courage for I cannot help but think you are rationalizing this away because you just plain fear it. Is that what you are going to teach your children? Truth is Truth except when I decide it's not-some day you can do the same, just believe like me, not someone else. It's, well, complicated.
Oh, heck-we'll just wimp out on this one, heh?

The first sentence should read:

Pleaserod is right liberals will not march people off to death camps because of inferior genetics - they'd be more than happy to do it for political and religious reasons.

Pleaserod is right liberals will not march people off to death camps because of inferior genetics - they'd be more than happy to do it for political and religious reasons.
Posted by: Zeke | May 22, 2008 10:59 AM

*rolls eyes*

Imagine, for a moment, there was evidence that Evangelicals or Orthodox had lower IQs than everyone else in society. What should we do with that information. Is it something that should be reported, so we can monitor Evangelicals and the Orthodox more closely because of their lack of intelligence? Should it be the basis of social policy? Should their views be discounted because they just aren't as smart as everyone else? When they do things that are contrary to the mainstream, will it allow us to have some perspective: Those Orthodox just aren't as smart as everyone else, so that's why their values are so backward.

Substitute religion or being from Louisiana or being redheaded for race and ask yourself: what are the implications for reporting that there are IQ differences between these people and everything else but ... by the way, it just shouldn't matter.

You seem to be jumping my case about this, Daniel, but I'm actually more or less on your side. Are you just programmed to assume that I'm wrong about everything?

"Substitute religion or being from Louisiana or being redheaded for race and ask yourself: what are the implications for reporting that there are IQ differences between these people and everything else but ... by the way, it just shouldn't matter."

Daniel, you can't substitute being redheaded for race.

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php

"Human races, like dog 'breeds', are defined in the biological context by shared ancestry, not by single appearance traits. With ancestry you can predict many genes and many traits, but with single genes or single traits, you can not predict many other genes or traits. Which is why you can still easily identify the ancestry of the depigmented individuals in the above picture. Population ancestry predicts the sum patterns of one's genotype and phenotypical traits (e.g. general racial appearance) while any single variable - in this case, skin color - does not."

"Denial of this fact was dubbed Lewontin's Fallacy (PDF) by British geneticist A.W.F. Edwards. 'Skin color' is a false and intentionally misleading straw-definition of race, that dishonorable public scientists such as Sternberg and Venter use to manufacture consent for their ideological viewpoints about human equality."

Steve Sailer has a new post up about this, including this excerpt from an interview he did with Steven Pinker:

Q: Aren't we all better off if people believe that we are not constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose?

A: People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

---

I take Pinker's point, and agree with it to a certain extent. It's the "surely" part that gives concern. It does no real harm if people sneer at cheap uplift in the arts. As the eugenics movement and its miserable fate showed, there can be very real harm if this kind of science becomes more widely known. It's not the fault of science; it's the fault of what we humans will tend to do with it.

I think, by the way, what happened to James Watson was disgraceful. Which raises the question: if I believe that this knowledge should be suppressed, then why do I object to the most effective means of suppressing it, that is, social censure? I don't have a good answer.

Rod, you bring up the example of James Watson. This is exactly the problem. Look at what happens when a man says what is obvious, that a lot of money going to Africa is wasted because the people there just do not have the intelligence to use the money wisely. (I'm paraphrasing and probably elaborating.) The poor man even had to apologize, and suffered opprobrium anyway. But if you were to take a secret ballot of a random sampling of 1000 people in this country, who were assured that no one would ever know what they wrote down, I bet a large majority would agree with him. The exceptions would be African-Americans and guilty white liberals.

I sometimes think, and hope, that maybe we can have an honest discussion of race in this country, because of the presidential campaign of Obama. He seems like a truly decent and thoughtful man, although I reject his politics. But would we be able to have a discussion where we can be honest about the frustration people feel? Where employers can talk about being forced to hire undeserving employees because of racial quotas, or being sued for discrimination because they fired an incompetent who was also a racial minority? Where white people could echo Barak's grandmother and say, "I am afraid of black people, especially when young black men congregate, and especially when they wear clothes glorifying the 'gangsta' lifestyle"? Where typical middle-class Americans could say how disgusted they are that when young black men sleep around, get young women pregnant, and then neglect both mother and child, it is considered the responsibility of the larger society to alleviate the inevitable poverty and dysfuncionality?

We often hear about how "angry" black people are, because of how they've been treated. Well, white people are very angry too.

Imagine, for a moment, there was evidence that Evangelicals or Orthodox had lower IQs than everyone else in society. What should we do with that information. Is it something that should be reported, so we can monitor Evangelicals and the Orthodox more closely because of their lack of intelligence?

Daniel,

If that were the reality, it's not inevitable that any evil would result from our knowing about it. Besides: in my experience, there's already a widespread belief among secular white liberals -- grounded purely in their prejudices -- that evangelicals and other religiously committed Christians are less intelligent than the general population. Perhaps some hard data could begin to change that attitude.

Recognition that intellectual gifts are not evenly distributed among all ethnic groups need not lead to any "monitoring" (for what purpose?) or other evil consequences. What it would lead to, hopefully, is a gradual end to the complaints that various demographic groups are "underrepresented" in universities or certain professions. Perhaps even an end to the absurd Diversity racket that no one in the corporate world publically challenges for fear of being labelled Racist.

That would be all to the good.

Mhoram, great point how our very laws (NCLB for example) assume equal intelligence between the racial groups.

Rod, But let me say it clearly: any commentators who post openly racist remarks will find their posts removed.

What, praytell, is a "openly racist remark"? This must be my chance to get my post removed! Let's try the following facts:

1) People from Europe generally have pale skin.

2) Orientals are on average shorter than whites.

3) Jews average IQ is nearly a full SD above whites, and two SD above blacks.

4) This IQ difference shows up in the average money earned by racial groups and other real life consequences. Jews take half the chess championships. Earn an oversized share of the Nobel prizes.

5) Blacks dominate many sports due to genetic averages that can be quantified (fast/slow twitch muscle mass, V02 max).

6) Within the next generation we will have isolated many of the genes that lead to average racial differences.

The only problem with these facts is that they disprove liberalism's bizarre religious belief that all men (and women) are biologically equal. I note they don't complain much, however, how Darwinism disproved a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.

Libs find themselves in the ironic position of demanding the teaching of evolution in schools, yet deny the natural consequences of this theory with respect to genetic differences between humans! And thus they won't teach the well-known IQ differences between racial groups in schools, even when this knowledge has a large effects public policy (again, NCLB).

It's really rather funny; any fool who knows a whit about genetics can see what 20,000-50,000 years of separation between the racial groups has done to humans. We should expect to see differences. What isn't so funny is how so many dumb people hate and persecute those who tell the truth. But it's the liberal way...and now many conservatives want to jump on the bandwagon. Sad.

Not that it matters much. Within a century, most humans will be fairly well mixed racially and genetic diversity will go way down as recessive traits fade. It took over 50,000 years to build the racial groups. It will take less than a thousand to nearly eliminate them.

I think Bill's 12:01 comment is the best one on this topic I've seen so far.

How many of us can point, in our family trees, to people who never went to college, could barely even read English (though they may have had rudimentary reading ability in the language of their birth country)--and yet who not only functioned, but succeeded in nearly everything that they attempted, simply because no one ever told them they couldn't do it?

How many of us have encountered a very elderly person who might not have ever scored well on an IQ test, but whose experience of life, and meditative reflections on those experiences, showed a depth of understanding about the human condition that few academics ever display?

I think the reason this discussion of IQ and "what that means for social policy" even happens is because of the notion that the only life worth living is the one that involves a college degree and a white collar job--and if possible, several degrees, all of them from Ivy-league schools, and a position as a high-level executive, government official, or some other equally well-compensated career field.

And those relatives or elderly people who weren't necessarily capable of at least a four-year college education would have been as shut out by their society as similar people are now by ours, because the presumption that there's only one definition of success and only one educational and career track possible to achieve that success has taken hold so firmly in our culture.

Intelligence as a quantifiable factor seems to lead to an objectification of people, whose worth as individuals becomes caught up in this one measurable. But you can't measure either wisdom or common sense, which outside the world of university-corporation-politics counts for a lot more than one's ability to determine the directional turn of the gears of the eighth wheel in a sequence of a dozen or so.

Erin points the way: I submit that the discussion at hand is not about intelligence; it is about competence.

It's not what one has, it's what one does with it. I believe that it is safe to assume that the vast majority of car drivers are intelligent, but I observe that a significant portion of them put themselves and others in imminent danger of injury and death on a regular basis.

We also tend to lose sight of the appropriate placement of the line for diminishing returns. A person of average intelligence can work twice as hard as a genius and achieve similar results, but why would the average person want to live his/her life that way? The canard, following the tone of another poster above, is that results are the only measurement and that the measurement must needs be competitive and comparitive. Good enough brings the bacon home. Who cares that it was in the top 1% of all those bringing home bacon?

IQ tests test the ability to answer certain questions, not intelligence. There has never been a "universal" IQ test that can erase the realities of culture and access to resources and education.

If I gave an North American IQ test to a South American tribesman, he'd probably fail horribly. On the other hand, if I set a North American person loose in the bush with nothing, and that same tribesman, his education would allow him to do everything necessary to survive and thrive, and the North American person would probably fail miserably.

A lesser degree of the same thing can be observed in North America on IQ tests. Asians test the highest, then whites, then blacks. The reasons for this are almost certainly cultural and resource-based. Most Asian immigrants come from countries with extremely competitive educational systems, and they instill that in their kids. Whites tend to have more resources and culturally, tend to put more emphasis on education (on the whole).

I'll tell you this, there is no difference between a black person's brain and a white person's brain once you cut them out of the skull and examine them. Not even the best anatomist would be able to tell you which is which.

Here's the problem: we haven't figured out how to effectively measure intelligence. We haven't even really agreed on what intelligence is. We CERTAINLY have no inkling as to whether or not it is genetic. And even if base intelligence is genetic, there are a myriad of other factors. Early nutrition, for example, drops IQ scores. So does a boring and ugly environment. So does lack of early exposure to analytic thinking, math, and reading.

Hey, know what that all sounds like? Growing up poor in the inner city, or rural areas, or in a war zone.

Point the second: if the issue were genetic, you wouldn't be able to say things like "Black people score 2 SD below Jews." Because there is no such thing as a genetic "black race". There are West Africans, Sub-saharan Africans, African Americans, Carribeans of African descent... etc. Black americans, for example, are, genetically, and as a population, an admixture of 40% European DNA and 60% African.

Also, mdavid: your point about East Asians being shorter on average is a rapidly changing fact. It turns out that once they start eating a higher fat diet containing a lot of red meat, east asians get just as tall as white folks within a few generations.

Nat - yes, in the US "black" generally refers to people of African ancestry, unlike in New Zealand and Australia.

Early in his waterfront-covering career as *Kulturkritiker*, George Steiner*

*Whom I've just teased at my "blog":

tinyurl.com/55hr9p

raised the issues covered in this post with his usual air of coiled melodrama, in the closing pages of his T.S. Eliot lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury, published by Yale in 1971 as In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture:

anti-rev.org/textes/Steiner71a/4.html

"That science and technology have brought with them fierce problems of environmental damage, of economic unbalance, of moral distortion, is a commonplace. In terms of ecology and ideals of sensibility the cost of the scientific-technological revolutions of the past four centuries has been very high. But despite anarchic, pastoral critiques such as those put forward by Thoreau and Tolstoy, there has been little fundamental doubt that it ought to be met. In that largely unexamined assurance there has been a part of blind economic will, of the immense hunger for comfort and material diversity. But there has also been a much deeper mechanism: the conviction, centrally woven into the Western temper, at least since Athens, that mental inquiry must move forward, that such motion is natural and meritorious in itself, that man's proper relation to the truth is one of pursuer (the 'haloo' of Socrates cornering his quarry rings through our history). We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because 'they are there,' because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal -- radical, self-mutilating -- of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risks, the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of our civilization, which holds that man and the truth are companions, that their roads lie forward and are dialectically cognate.

"For the first time (and one's conjectures here will be tentative and blurred), this all-governing axiom of continued advance is being questioned. I am thinking of issues that go far beyond current worries in the scientific community about the environment, about weaponry, about the mindless applications of chemistry to the human organism. The real question is whether certain major lines of inquiry ought to be pursued at all, whether society and the human intellect at their present level of evolution can survive the next truths. It may be -- and the mere possibility presents dilemmas beyond any which have arisen in history -- that the coming door opens onto realities ontologically opposed to our sanity and limited moral reserves. Jacques Monod has asked publicly what many have puzzled over in private: Ought genetic research to continue if it will lead to truths about differentiations in the species whose moral, political, psychological consequences we are unable to cope with? Are we free to pursue neurochemical or psychophysiological. spoors concerning the layered, partially archaic forms of the cortex, if such study brings the knowledge that ethnic hatreds, the need for war, or those impulses toward self-ruin hinted at by Freud are inherited facts? Such examples can be multiplied.

"It may be that the truths which lie ahead wait in ambush for man, that the kinship between speculative thought and survival on which our entire culture has been based, will break off. The stress falls on 'our' entire culture because, as anthropologists remind us, numerous primitive societies have chosen stasis or mythological circularity over forward motion, and have endured around truths immemorially posited.

"The notion that abstract truth, and the morally neutral truths of the sciences in particular, might come to paralyze or destroy Western man is foreshadowed in Husserl's Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (1934-37)..."

&c. "Guaranteed to break the ice at Tupperware parties" - after Eric Idle's novelties salesman

See also, from the humanist side of C.P. Snow's "two cultures", Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography by the distinguished critic of French modernism Roger Shattuck, and The Repeal of Reticence by Rochelle Gurstein.

consider the concept as soon as someone devises any measure of intelligence that is vaguely objective and useful. Right now they're utter nonsense. This is assuming, of course, that there is any such thing as 'intelligence' in some objective sense, as opposed to people just having different level of dozens of skills and areas of knowledge.

Distinctions can be real without necessarily being quantifiable. We can't rank people according to athletic ability -- it's not entirely quantifiable, and it's a collection of very different skills and abilities: strength, speed, agility, endurance, etc., which different persons have to different degrees.

That doesn't mean there are no meaningful distinctions in relative athletic ability, both among individuals and among groups. If such distinctions were not meaningful, we'd have to start worrying about why East Asians are underrepresented among the world's great sprinters. Do we call that the Glass Finish Line or the Bamboo Ceiling?

Psst, they're also the most educated. (Keep it under yer plastic green bowler hat, please.)

"If I think that the information in the book The Bell Curve is accurate, many would say automatically that makes me a racist."

Not if you can distinguish between the information in the book and the really shoddy way the authors analyze it.

Because if different populations show differentials in the results of IQ tests, but the results of these tests show only weak (or, no) correlation with reality, who cares?

The whole point of The Bell Curve was that these tests do predict quite well -- on average of course -- outcomes in a wide variety of areas, from economic (income), to 'cultural' (out of wedlock birth), to medical (lower IQ people are more accident prone, have poorer health etc).

We might reconsider mass immigration from specific countries, we might totally stop the subsidy of poorer people to have children (free school lunches, HUD subsidies).

None of these things would be evil.

Ah, yes, because like Jesus said, we're not supposed to feed or house the poor. We must stop the immorality of poor people in having children, or at least stop such children from living afterwards!

Incidentally, how exactly can Republicans talk about ending HUD subsidizes with a straight face? Anyone but me remember that scandal?

Oh, and, heh, exactly the same scandal is happening again with Alphonso Jackson. Bush 2.0: All previous Republican scandals, returning in one convenient package!

Oh, and is this the same HUD that, under Bush leadership, repeatedly shrugged off warnings about the upcoming mortgage collapse? HUD being one of the few government institutions that could do something about it (Fed Reserve isn't entirely under government control), as they are involved in enough mortgages that they could have demanded changes.

But instead they pushed for rule changes that made it easier for their backed lenders to issue risky loans, and another rule change that made it harder to detect fraudulent ones by lenders.

But damn those poor people attempting to feed and shelter their children, they're probably genetically stupid, and that is, surely, the real problem with HUD.

Dreher's nonsense in this article explain why white Christians will soon be extinct. God created the races for His glory--what is so 'scary' about that?