Race Unrealist

I was noticing again a post by RaceRealist from last year: Strong Evidence, Strong Argument: Race IQ and Adoption. It’s in response to a previous post of mine: Weak Evidence, Weak Argument: Race, IQ, Adoption. I don’t want to waste too much time on it, but the intellectual dishonesty and simplemindedness of it amuses me. I’ll do a quick breakdown of it, that is quick by my standards.

In reference to my post, he says that it’s “an environmentalist in the B-W IQ debate regurgitates the same old and boring long-refuted studies and the same long-refuted researchers, to attempt to prove that the gap in IQ is purely environmental in nature. I have written on this before, so his reasoning that there is “weak evidence” and “a weak argument on race and IQ” is clearly wrong, as we know the studies and researchers he cites have been disproven. Steele then references another discussion he had on the black-white IQ gap, speaking about people being “uninformed” about a position while arguing it.”

First of all, I’m not a mere ‘environmentalist’ and I’ve never argued for a blank slate view of human nature. Anyone who has seriously studied the topic knows that the nature vs nurture debate is meaningless. There is no way to separate the two because genes never exist outside of nor are expressed separate from environment and epigenetics. Genetics, in an evolutionary sense, are simply a biological aspect of the environment. That is just reality, no matter one’s ideology.

I’ve never denied the role of ‘nature’. I’ve simply pointed out the obvious fact that it isn’t separate from nurture. That RaceRealist has previously expressed his ignorance on this matter is irrelevant. He neither disproves what he disbelieves nor proves what he believes. He just makes a lot of assertions based on weak evidence that he cherrypicks and strong evidence he ignores. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond to that in an intelligent and rational way.

“Since he’s saying that there is a “difficulty of replicability” with IQ tests in transracial adoption studies, he hasn’t read the ones for the hereditarian argument and seeing how they show the biological origin of IQ or he’s just being willfully ignorant.”

I have read about them. And I’ve written many posts about the issue. Just do a search in my blog about twin studies, adoption studies, heritability, etc (or look below at the blog posts I have listed). Any argument RaceRealist could attempt to make I’ve probably dismantled before. I don’t plan on repeating myself. It is pointless that he wishes to deny his own willful ignorance and project it onto others. I’m unimpressed.

“There are no racial biases in education nor policing. Police arrest less black offenders than are reported by the NCVS and affirmative action getting blacks ahead shows that the racial bias is for them, not whites. Saying that it’s “systemic and institutional” is a cop out since you know he doesn’t want to even entertain the idea of the hereditarian hypothesis.”

That is as willfully ignorant as one can get, as the overwhelming evidence is there for all to see, assuming one wants to see. But I can’t force knowledge onto those who don’t want to know. Trust me, I’ve tried. That is what amuses me. I’m laughing here as I write these words. It is so ludicrous. If I can’t have a meaningful debate with ignoramuses like this, I can at least mock them.

“Stereotype threat, my favorite. ST can only be replicated in the lab. “Prejudice” doesn’t matter.”

What the fuck does that even mean? Stereotype threat has been studied no different than anything else. I don’t know what is meant by “in the lab”. Stereotype threat has been studied, for example, in classrooms. I guess anything where research happens is in a sense a ‘lab’. Numerous studies have been done and replicated. It’s standard scientific research and well supported.

Prejudice doesn’t matter, he claims. Yet this is the same kind of person who complains about prejudices against whites and right-wingers, as if those supposed prejudices matter a lot. What he really means to say is that he doesn’t think anyone who isn’t like himself matters. He should be honest enough to state the truth, instead of hiding behind politically correct rhetoric.

“What other confounders could be controlled for that you think had a negative impact on the mean IQ of blacks at adolescence throughout adulthood?”

That is shocking that anyone who wants to pretend to not be a complete ignoramus could ask such a question. Does he really not know about confounding factors? Whose ass has his head been shoved up?

The confounding factors have been detailed in thousands of research papers, articles, books, and posts. Many edifying sources can easily found just by doing a web search for “confounding factors”. If he really wants an answer, he could use the search function on my blog, as I’ve listed confounding factors in numerous blog posts and comments. Even so, most of these confounding factors are obvious to the point of being common sense.

Yet he would, of course, dismiss out of hand any confounding factor for the simple reason that no confounding factor will ever fit into his preconceived belief system. RaceRealist’s entire post is a dancing around the issue of confounding factors, momentarily asking a question of me that he would never ask of himself, much less attempt to answer. He doesn’t want to know. It’s ignorance upon ignorance, all the way down.

““Internalized racial biases” don’t matter since blacks have a higher self-esteeem about their physical attractiveness (Kanazawa, 2011), so “internalized racial biases” (which includes things such as one’s thoughts of one’s self physically) do not matter as they are more confident than are whites. This is due to testosterone, which makes blacks more extroverted than whites who are more extroverted than Asians (Rushton’s Differential-K Theory). If these racial biases were really to manifest themselves to actually sap 15 to 18 (1 to 1.2 SDs) IQ points from blacks, this would show in their self-confidence about themselves. Yet they are more confident, on average, than the other two major races.”

I know what he believes. That has already been made perfectly clear. These just-so stories amuse me endlessly. I really can’t stop laughing. Watching a race realist make an argument is like watching a monkey dressed up like a human doing tricks in the circus. It has the vague appearance of something resembling an argument, but it is simply absurd on the face of it.

I can knock his points down like shooting at a flock of ducks with a machine gun.

The Kanazawa study doesn’t say what he claims it says. Blacks in the study are told to rate themselves, but no comparison is asked of them to rate others. So, we have no idea how they rate themselves compared to how they rate others. It could be simply a fluke in how different populations interpret the rating system and so may say nothing about actual perception of self relative to perception of others. Besides, Kanazawa doesn’t acknowledge and discuss confounding factors, much less try to control for them. Kanazawa doesn’t even mention who were used as test subjects or make an argument for why they are representative of the broader populations, which would require him to deal with confounding factors.

For example, maybe he was using test subjects that came from different backgrounds of socioeconomic class status, residential conditions, regional cultures, etc. Thomas Sowell argues that blacks adopted the white redneck culture before many of them migrated to states in the North. If that is the case, then multiple factors would need to be controlled for. What results would be seen with poor white Southerners or even poor whites in general? And how would they compare to blacks or at least particular black populations? We don’t know because Kanazawa’s research is near worthless, other than as a preliminary study to demonstrate that a better study needs to be done.

Does this really mean what Kanazawa and RaceRealist thinks it means? There is no evidence to support their ideologically-biased conclusion.

Oppressed populations often respond with pride. Think of the proud Irish when they were under the oppression of the English. Think of the proud Scots-Irish in impoverished Appalachia. For such groups, the personal sense of pride gives them an attitude of self-respect in a social situation that makes it difficult to achieve the more tangible forms of self-worth. If you are part of a privileged demographic, you don’t need as much overtly declared sense of self-respect because all of society regularly tells you that you are valued more than others. The privileged, by default, have respect given to them by others. That is not the case for the underprivileged.

If that is true, then an exaggerated concern for self-esteem as a compensatory mechanism might be standard evidence of societal disadvantage and systemic prejudice. Centuries of institutionalized racism could explain why this compensatory mechanism has been so important for the black population. For much of their past, the black population’s sense of self-value was all that they had, as the majority of the black population for most of American history couldn’t even claim the value of self-ownership. This sense of ferociously defended self-value could have been a means of survival under centuries of brutal oppression. If so, it took centuries to develop and so it won’t likely disappear very quickly, especially considering the legacy of racial prejudice has been proven beyond all doubt to continue to this day, not to mention what epigenetic factors may still be involved in influencing neurocognitive and psychological development.

Then again, there could be an even simpler explanation. Blacks on average deal with a lot more difficulties in life than whites on average, such as higher rates of: poverty, unemployment, police targeting, police brutality, etc. Maybe dealing with immense difficulties and managing to survive builds a sense of self-confidence, a proven belief that the individual can manage problems and that they will get by. Instead of a compensatory mechanism, it would be more directly an expression of survival in a dangerous and difficult world.

This could be easily tested by looking at other poor and disadvantaged populations. But it might be hard to find comparable populations that were historically oppressed in the manner of centuries of racialized slavery, chain gang re-enslavement, Jim Crow laws, race wars, lynching, sundown towns, redlining, etc. Simply being a non-white minority isn’t necessarily comparable. Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans didn’t experience oppression to this degree and they don’t show signs of higher self-esteem, the two maybe being causally related.

It’s telling that researchers like Kanazawa never bother to fully test their own hypotheses. And it’s telling that race realists have so little intellectual capacity to analyze research like this to actually understand what it does and does not say, what can and cannot be concluded from it.

The point is we don’t know, as many possible explanations can be articulated and need to be further researched (see: Factors Influencing Racial Comparisons of Self-Esteem, Gray-Little & Hafdahl). Interestingly, according to Twenge and Crocker (Race and self-esteem): “Blacks’ self-esteem increased over time relative to Whites’, with the Black advantage not appearing until the 1980s.” If testosterone explains the racial differences, then what evidence is there that black levels of testosterone increased around 1980 and what caused it? Testosterone levels is a strange argument to make, especially considering that self-perception and self-assessment has been proven to change according to environmental conditions, besides just stereotype threat: television watching, a presidential election, etc. Besides, there is much conflicting research about testosterone differences, some of it even showing no notable racial differences, specifically between blacks and whites.

As for Rushton’s differential k theory, there has been much debate about it with research showing different results. But as far as I know, no researcher has yet tested the hypothesis by controlling for all known confounding factors. So, for the time being, it remains an unproven hypothesis. Many have argued that Rushton’s research was designed badly, an inevitable outcome when confounding factors are ignored.

Yet more just-so stories shot down.

“It’s been discussed ad nasueam. The data attempting to say that blacks are just as intelligent are whites are wrong, as I will show below. The data for the hereditarian hypothesis is not weak, as I have detailed on this blog extensively.”

Race realists declare their beliefs ad nauseum. So what? I find it interesting that race realists are only able to make their arguments by ignoring the data that disconfirms or complicates their ideologically motivated conclusions and by ignoring criticisms of the data that they use as a defense. If you can’t make an intellectually honest argument, why would you expect others to treat you as though you were intellectually honest? A good question that RaceRealist should ask himself.

“Race is not a social construct, but a biological reality. If this debate is “about as meaningful as attempting to compare the average magical intelligence of those sorted into each Hogwarts Houses by the magical sorting hat”, why waste youre time writing this post with tons of misinformation?”

Declaring your beliefs doesn’t add anything to debate. Everyone knows what you believe. The trick is you have to prove what you believe. But that would require you take the evidence seriously, all of the evidence and not just what is convenient.

“Steele cites Block (2005), a “philosopher of science”. Rushton and Jensen (2005, p. 279) say that those (Block) who say that gene-environment interactions are so hard to entangle, why then, do identical twins raised apart show identical signs of intelligence (among many other heritable items)?”

I’ve written about this before. Identical twin research is some of the worst research around for the reason I constantly repeat, a lack of controlling for confounding factors, such as most twins raised apart still sharing the same in utero environment, sometimes the same early childhood environment, or else raised in similar environments because adopted to similar families in the same or similar community.

All of this is common knowledge for anyone not utterly ignorant on the matter. How am I supposed to argue against someone’s ignorance when they want to be ignorant? I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to force the ignorant to not be ignorant. That would be a great trick, if I was capable of doing that.

“Eyferth comes out, of course, which the study has been discredited. To be breif, 20 to 25 percent of the fathers to German women’s children weren’t sub-Saharan African, but French North Africans. 30 percent of blacks got refused in military service in comparison to 3 percent of whites due to rigorous testing for IQ in 70 years ago. One-third of the children were between the ages of 5 and 10 and two-thirds were between the ages of 10 and 13. Heritability estiamtes really begin to increase around puberty as well, so if the Eyferth study would have retested in the following 5 to 8 years to see IQ scores then, the scores would have dropped as that’s when genetic effects start to dominate and environments effects are close to 0.”

That is really amusing. He admits that his race realism means nothing. Because it is inconvenient, he suddenly argues that not all blacks are the same and that we shouldn’t make broad generalizations about all blacks. Were the populations representative? Maybe not. But then that exact criticism has been made against much of the data race realists obsess over. That is the whole point.

Sure, there is a lot of imperfect data out there. That is the core of my argument about why only an ignoramus could state a clear, strong conclusion when we know so little and what we do know is of such uncertain value. Often we can’t even determine how representative various populations are because we don’t know all the confounding factors or how to control for them. That is my whole point. I do find it endlessly humorous that someone like RaceRealist can’t see how this applies to his own arguments.

I can’t help but laugh at the rest of his ‘analysis’ as well. He states that, “20 to 25 percent of the fathers to German women’s children weren’t sub-Saharan African”. So? About one in five American blacks have are mostly European. And more than one in twenty have no detectable African genetics whatsoever. That means there is a significant number of American blacks with little to no sub-Sarharan African ancestry that shows up on genetic tests. Most post-colonial black populations are heavily mixed in various ways.

The issue remains that ignorant race realists like to pretend that all blacks are somehow a single ‘race’ in any meaningful sense. But that is obviously untrue, even according to the data they use. This ignorance is further exacerbated because I have never met a race realist, at least not of this bigoted variety, who even understands what heritability means (hint: it isn’t the same thing as genetic inheritance, as any geneticist knows). Heritability rates would include any confounding factors not controlled for and, of course, most of those confounding factors would be non-genetic. Beyond that, there is no rational reason to assume that genetic factors have any more effect at one age than at another. Such an assumption comes from the lack of basic comprehension about heritability.

We know next to nothing about genetics, since almost all the research is based on measuring correlations. It is rare that direct genetic causation is ever studied and even more rare that it is proven. This is why many researchers have simply given up on finding genetic causes for much of anything. The fact is that genetics never exist or get expressed in isolation from non-genetic factors. The two responses to this are intellectual humility and willful ignorance. I’ve chosen the former and RaceRealist chose the latter.

“Headstart gains are temporary, and there is a fadeout over time.. Arthur Jensen was writing about this 50 years ago. IQ and scholastic achievement gains only last for a few years after Headstart, then genetics starts to take effect as the child grows older.”

Is RaceRealist utterly stupid? I ask that in all seriousness. The only other possibility is that he is being disingenuous. Why would it be surprising that a temporary change in environmental conditions often only has a temporary change in results for individuals temporarily affected? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

I could go on and on, ripping apart everyone of RaceRealist’s beliefs. But what is the point? I’ve already disproven this kind of bullshit again and again, as have many others. Such ignorance is infinite. That is why I end up just throwing my hands up in the air and laughing with amusement. I’ll go on mocking such people, as long as I continue to find them amusing. What other use can they serve?

As RaceRealist ends by quoting Rushton and Jensen in response to Nisbett, I’ll turn the table around. Nisbet writes, basically stating they are full of shit:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) article is characterized by failure to cite, in any but the most cursory way, strong evidence against their position. Their lengthy presentation of indirectly relevant evidence which, in light of the direct evidence against the hereditarian view they prefer, has little probative value, and their “scorecard” tallies of evidence on various points cannot be sustained by the evidence.

* * * *

If you actually care about knowledge more than ignorance, questioning curiosity more than dogmatic ideology, then you can read what I’ve posted before. I offer a ton of data, quotes, and sources:

Basic Issues First: Race and IQ
Heritability & Inheritance, Genetics & Epigenetics, Etc
What Genetics Does And Doesn’t Tell Us
What do we inherit? And from whom?
Identically Different: A Scientist Changes His Mind
Unseen Influences: Race, Gender, and Twins
Using Intelligence to Assess Intelligence
The IQ Conundrum
HBD Proponents, Racists and Racialists
Racial Perceptions and Genetic Admixtures
To Know Racism
Examining Our Racialized Lives
Racial Reality Tunnel
Race Realism, Social Constructs, and Genetics
Race Realism and Racialized Medicine
The Bouncing Basketball of Race Realism
Race Is Not Real, Except In Our Minds
Racist Realist
To Control or Be Controlled
Disturbing Study Highlights Racism
Racism Without Racists: Victimization & Silence
An Unjust ‘Justice’ System: Victimizing the Innocent
Are Blacks More Criminal, More Deserving of Punishment and Social Control?
War On Drugs Is War On Minorities
Substance Control is Social Control
Institutional Racism & Voting Rights
Black Feminism and Epistemology of Ignorance
Racist Ideology within Racial Terminology
Racecraft: Political Correctness & Free Marketplace of Ideas
Race-Racism Evasion
Racism, Proto-Racism, and Social Constructs
The Racial Line and Racial Identity
Scientific Races and Genetic Diversity
Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility
Working Hard, But For What?
Whose Work Counts? Who Gets Counted?
Worthless Non-Workers
Deep Roots in Dark Soil
“Before the 1890s…”
Opportunity Precedes Achievement, Good Timing Also Helps
Are White Appalachians A Special Case?
Americans Left Behind: IQ, Education, Poverty, Race, & Ethnicity
Class and Race as Proxies
Race & Wealth Gap
No, The Poor Aren’t Undeserving Moral Reprobates
The Desperate Acting Desperately
The Privilege of Even Poor Whites
To Be Poor, To Be Black, To Be Poor and Black
Poverty In Black And White
Black Families: “Broken” and “Weak”
The Myth of Weak and Broken Black Families
Crime and Incarceration, Cause and Correlation
On Racialization of Crime and Violence
Fearful Perceptions
Paranoia of a Guilty Conscience
John Bior Deng: Racism, Classism
Why Are Blacks Concentrated in Inner Cities?
From Slavery to Mass Incarceration
Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration, Race, & Data
Invisible Problems of Invisible People
Are Blacks More Criminal, More Deserving of Punishment and Social Control?
White Violence, White Data
More Minorities, Less Crime
Conservative Arguments Recycled and Repackaged
Race & Racism: Reality & Imagination, Fear & Hope
Slavery and Eugenics
Slavery and Eugenics: Part 2
Black Superiority
Eugenics: Past & Future
Slavery and Capitalism
12 Years a Slave, 4 Centuries an Oppression
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Society: Precarious or Persistent?
Plowing the Furrows of the Mind
Union Membership, Free Labor, and the Legacy of Slavery.