Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#461

Post by yadaeno » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:16 PM UTC

IQ is misunderstood by most people and the common misconceptions are extremely harmful.

In reality IQ matters much less than people think. The top 5 rated chess player of all time (Hikaru Nakamura) has a ~105 IQ. People with an average IQ are capable of performing at the 0.1% level with the proper structured training and time.

In my experience IQ mostly impacts the rate at which you learn things. So it took you 2 years instead of 1.5 to master a certain skill -- so what? As a society we should put more emphasis on hard work and results, and less on inherant traits.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#462

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #450

baybal2 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

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.

I'm always public about my convictions, sometime too public according to the moderators of HN.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#463

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

Having grown up in a rust belt mining city and having gone to school with a lot of non-intellectual classmates, I can say that "regular people" are much more ready to accept inborn differences in mental abilities as self-evident (similarly to, say, facial beauty) than intellectuals themselves.

Smart and highly accomplished people, on the other hand, often try to deflect, dispute, water down and distract, once the topic of heritability of intelligence comes up.

To a part this is given by the fact that intelligence is a hard topic, but I wonder to which degree this semi-denial is psychological. Smart people might resent the possibility that part of their success could be traced back to random unearned biological privilege that cannot even be taxed and redistributed. "Just World fallacy" is an attractive one, especially in a society that verbally celebrates equality and equity.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#464

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:26 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #447

Applejinx wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's understandable for people to collectively react negatively to genocidal tropes getting pushed once more with great enthusiasm. This shit never goes away, and Nazis were not in the least theoretical: one could say what made Nazis Nazis was a game plan, one that's very specific. Also, the keystone of progressive dogma is that there is VALUE in the wellbeing of all types of people, contrasting with conservative dog…

>progressive dogma ... contrasting with conservative dogma That's a false dichotomy and really the core of my complaint. Instead of dogma, we should be striving towards facts based on empirical evidence. Science.

It's far from a false dichotomy. Typically, part of the assumption that the world must be broken down into hierarchical power structures and the subhuman valueless people must be suppressed, is an insistence that empirical evidence has established these things as facts.

Further investigation (for instance, Shaun's video on 'The Bell Curve') reveals this evidence is faked.

Some of us have had our patience with this sort of thing eroded, over time. You cannot simply assert you have the evidence, you have the facts, any other interpretation is wrong, and therefore you automatically win. That ain't gonna fly, except among a subset of HN commenters and system-participants.

And their brigading only discourages the participation of those who still think all this is about exchange of ideas. In my experience 'we define the facts, the evidence, and use systemic means to stifle anybody who gets in the way' does not enhance the free exchange of ideas.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#465

Post by zosima » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:27 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #416

cm2187 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distri…

> 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 A…

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.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#466

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:29 PM UTC

blast wrote: post #293

Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: 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…

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.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#467

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

The problem here is not study of genetics, but the tacit assumption that society must be constructed for the elevation of whatever the 'best' is, and the suppression and destruction of the 'worst'.

The rest is just where you place the line, and if you grant that, you are establishing the threshold for genocide.

Things would be a bit simpler if the argument wasn't 'never talk about any differences among people', but 'never place that line, because society is not constructed for the destruction of the least among it'.

It is NOT an inevitable requirement that society is constructed for the destruction of the least among it.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#468

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #462

inglor_cz wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm always public about my convictions, sometime too public according to the moderators of HN.

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.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#469

Post by callmeal » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #219

Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. Certain ethnic groups and families, on average, are more likely to have certain traits and less likely to have others. But genetics doesn't matter , in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but…

>Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve.

That is not true. We've known that since the 80s. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-ii...

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#470

Post by croon » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 12:41 PM UTC

FiberBundle wrote: post #459

croon wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but no it's not. For example; are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? If they are and are functioning it means it can work. If they are not, maybe people have differing opinions of what socialism entails. What usually is a "no true scotsman" argument is when someone only calls something socialist when it's not working, because if an implementation is working that would deflate the argument. See a few pos…

> are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? Absolutely not. They are primarily market based with a relatively large welfare state. How is that even a question?

Because that is what most "socialists" want, meaning your definition of socialism and theirs are probably very different.