First, moral frameworks exist for a reason and aren't the realm of "church-lady hyperventilation". For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional.
Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them. As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary.
If anything here is irrational, it is your insistence on studying a correlation that has no value beyond justifying racially motivated policies. If the last 2000 years teach us anything, it's that for any concrete social problem you'd want to solve, a solution motivated by the belief that one race is superior to another is not going to be the optimal solution.
> pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field
Belief in superiority on a collection of phenotypes roughly correlated to what we call "race" today pre-dates Darwin by 100+ years. AS a matter of historical fact, the "scientific" notion of race today came about as a post-facto characterization of latent racial superiority theories that existed prior to the scientific era.
So yes, race is inscrutable from a scientific perspective because it is not -- at base -- an idea of scientific origin.
Here is what we do know.
We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil.
We know that for hundreds of years, crackpots of varying scientific literacy and persuasiveness have evoked the en vogue scientific ideas of the day to claim the inferiority of a group of people with an astoundingly invariant set of latent racial characterizations. And we know that at every point in history, their crackpottery is eventually identified -- even if science doesn't advance enough to demonstrate the crackpottery until years later. (the somewhat pathetic aspect of the crackpottery displayed in this thread that rjkyle is so kindly addressing is that it all has already been disproven, and yet... so don't pretend this is about "scientific truth" or "intellectual inquiry")
We know that even if it were reasonable from to outset to choose a given phenotype over all others to study, it would go against the grain of everything we have learned in the last 2000 years to use any notion of inferiority between races as a basis for decision making.
We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence.
So, there is no reason to study this correlation. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Nothing good can come of it. If history is a guide, not even intellectual understanding.
Anyways, I'm done engaging with you and peterfirefly now. The belief that one "race" is superior to another is detestable, and to claim that there could exist definitive scientific evidence for such a claim fundamentally misunderstands what science is and ignores a rich history of such claims in the history of science
> For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional.
No. Perhaps it's even the other way around: police and courts should not be hindered in fighting crime, just because too many of the criminals seem to be black. Don't black people in black neighbourhoods have a right to protection against criminals? Is it constitutional to deny them said protection?
> Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them.
No.
> As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary.
No.
> We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil.
We know that ideologies that pretend people are equal have gone terrifyingly off the rails -- especially when they succeeded in controlling what was allowed to be said.
> We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence.
Absolutely. We can measure it directly, for example, on individuals.
What? I don't know what rock you've been living under since the 1960s, but overt and blatant racial discrimination in policing or sentencing is a) a blatant violation of the fourth and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution; b) illegal under and number of federal and state statutes; and c) something we've already tried (both constitutionally and unconstitutionally) throughout the years and it's never worked. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
>> Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them.
> No.
Name one concrete policy proposal motivating this research. One way in which the world would change if we had an answer (which, BTW, we already do -- the effect is negligible even setting aside the fact that the question doesn't even make sense).
I've already explained Affirmative Action is more about reconciliation for pre-civil-rights era structural violence, or just a carte blanc commitment to diversity. Neither of which is informed by the proposed research.
(BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
I've explained numerous times that history (i.e. as close as we get to empirical evidence in societal decision making) suggests that making decisions based upon these beliefs is a bad idea. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
And of course the fact that we've already made racial discrimination in law enforcement both unconstitutional (in multiple ways) and illegal (in multiple ways) because of the observed harm these policies caused (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
> We know that ideologies that pretend people are equal have gone terrifyingly off the rails -- especially when they succeeded in controlling what was allowed to be said.
Frist, what harm? The only concrete harm I've heard from anyone so far is Johnny McSuburb (believing he was) turned down for a college scholarship because some black kid from the hood matched his test scores. Calling that a real harm is ridiculous when stacked up against e.g. the "scientifically" justified sterilization programs of the 1950s. And that's limiting ourselves to some of the more benign examples of the policy impacts of racialized "science". Far worse has been done in the name of "scientifically proven" racial superiority theories, even just in the United States. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
Second, restricting IRB approval isn't "controlling what was allowed to be said". It's controlling what federally funded researchers can try to validate using public money. So I fail to see what concrete harm you're referring to. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
The fact is, espousing "scientific proof" of claims that one race is intellectually superior to another is not new. Similar claims have be made and then used in the past to commit outright atrocities. It is difficult to see how the demonstrable harm done by taking these claims seriously outweighs the basically non-existent benefits we would get from having an answer.
jmorphy88 - You pretend like there's no danger here, but we're short on examples of "scientific" evidence being used as a justification for killing off or harming huge portions of populations, even here in the US.
The attempt to paint racialized theories of intelligence as objective scientific inquiries lacking in prejudice is also not new, and those exact theories whose inquiry was justified in this exactly same way ("you moralizing buffoons, we're doing science!") have been used to justify undeniable evil in the past, even in this country.
So yeah, jeer. But eugenics sterilization campaigns in the 50's had this origin and were Fucking Evil. No other word is fitting for forced sterilization, and those campaigns were justified by "science" that "debunked" people who were overly-"moralizing" societal planning.
Also, the original parent isn't even doing the latest rhetorical trick of not talking about races but about "demarcated populations" or "collections of phenotypes". He specifically mentions "Africans". So, no, this isn't about defending Science. This is about using science to defend overtly and obviously unscientific bigotry.
Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them. As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary.
If anything here is irrational, it is your insistence on studying a correlation that has no value beyond justifying racially motivated policies. If the last 2000 years teach us anything, it's that for any concrete social problem you'd want to solve, a solution motivated by the belief that one race is superior to another is not going to be the optimal solution.
> pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field
Belief in superiority on a collection of phenotypes roughly correlated to what we call "race" today pre-dates Darwin by 100+ years. AS a matter of historical fact, the "scientific" notion of race today came about as a post-facto characterization of latent racial superiority theories that existed prior to the scientific era.
So yes, race is inscrutable from a scientific perspective because it is not -- at base -- an idea of scientific origin.
Here is what we do know.
We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil.
We know that for hundreds of years, crackpots of varying scientific literacy and persuasiveness have evoked the en vogue scientific ideas of the day to claim the inferiority of a group of people with an astoundingly invariant set of latent racial characterizations. And we know that at every point in history, their crackpottery is eventually identified -- even if science doesn't advance enough to demonstrate the crackpottery until years later. (the somewhat pathetic aspect of the crackpottery displayed in this thread that rjkyle is so kindly addressing is that it all has already been disproven, and yet... so don't pretend this is about "scientific truth" or "intellectual inquiry")
We know that even if it were reasonable from to outset to choose a given phenotype over all others to study, it would go against the grain of everything we have learned in the last 2000 years to use any notion of inferiority between races as a basis for decision making.
We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence.
So, there is no reason to study this correlation. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Nothing good can come of it. If history is a guide, not even intellectual understanding.
Anyways, I'm done engaging with you and peterfirefly now. The belief that one "race" is superior to another is detestable, and to claim that there could exist definitive scientific evidence for such a claim fundamentally misunderstands what science is and ignores a rich history of such claims in the history of science