Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

> I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are",

See, for example, Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance, cited 1600+ times:

> The psychological construct of general mental ability (GMA), introduced by C. Spearman (1904) nearly 100 years ago, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and attention in recent decades. This article presents the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job experience. The sizes of these relationships with GMA are also larger than most found in psychological research.

One main reason why you might not have seen this is that you didn't go out of your way to find it, and the mainstream publications systematically hide, distort, and often blatantly lie about the existing evidence.

The current events aren't really new though. Universities have been getting steadily more left wing over time, and there's no clear waterline at which point it became 'religion'.

So this can easily be taken as an argument that governments should be divorced from academia. No grants, no student loans, no degree requirements in public sector jobs. Which would be fine, I think. The arguments for why governments should fund academia look very weak these days. It was supposed to be about long range research that the private sector wouldn't fund, but what we see in practice is the private sector funding ultra-long-range research like self driving cars, AI, etc whilst public funding gets guzzled by oceans of non-replicable P-hacked ideology driven pseudo-science. And as for education, well, researchers often don't make the best teachers anyway.

> There is no contradiction in being intolerant of intolerance.

There is, because literally every viewpoint is an implicit repudiation of some set of values, ie. aka intolerance. The whole point of tolerance is the recognition of this fact and that resolving such differences requires dialogue (edit: resolving them without violence that is).

As Popper said, only those views that directly incite violence or cannot be kept in check by public opinion should be silenced, otherwise you put the whole enterprise of tolerance in jeopardy.

Perhaps by not telling the alleged perpetrators they are taking advantage of "power structures" provided by racism. If the US is ~60% white, then simply by the numbers there are more disenfranchised white people than any other race. Are these people also taking advantage of said "power structures"?

If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.

> You immediately assume one of the three is the brightest of them, because your understanding of Affirmative Action Policies says this particular race has the highest likelihood of having higher overall test scores.

I think it's important to distinguish between probabilities and possibilities. It is possible that any of them has the highest score. However, it is most likely that the Asian does.

Let me articulate this phenomenon in a more neutral example. Suppose you start an elite academy for the game Go. All of the best Go players in the world come from places like South Korea, China, etc, who have a long history of playing the game. However, you would like to increase the appeal of the game internationally, so you institute an affirmative action policy that says 50% of your students must come from non-asian countries.

Let's say you have 100 slots to fill each year, and you operationalize your affirmative action policy as follows: You take all the asian applicants, rank them by ability, and take the top 50. You take all the non-asian applicants, rank them by ability and take the top 50.

It should be obvious that, in this example, the average absolute ability level of the two groups will be quite different. The incoming Asian group would crush the non-Asian group in competition. This isn't due to any innate racial capacity gap, but due to the historical and cultural relationship to the game of Go.

Now, you educate each group together for say, 4 years. That education process may homogenize ability a little bit - helping the lower performers improve more than the higher performers (though the opposite may also be true), but it's probably not sufficient to close the rather large incoming skill gap.

Now, if you were watching a match, and the only things you knew about the two competitors were that they both attended your elite academy, and one was from South Korea, and the other was from California, who would you bet on to win?

It's entirely possible that the Californian is better! It's just less likely, given no additional information. Critically, this isn't an argument against the affirmative action policy. The AA policy is doing just what it should do - helping to close the skill gap. But it does means that statistical reasoning about racism has to be sensitive to this confounding variable if it wants to make truly accurate inferences.