> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
In a clean game-theoretic terms, without making any moral or ideological claims about “who is smarter”, we’ll treat underlying advantage as any positional asset (intelligence, wealth, charisma, skill, social capital, etc.). The question is: If a subset of players has an advantage in a repeated, large-group game, how do they best play to maximize payoff and stability?
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent.
This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
arguably I'd say wars can be generally indicative of intelligence. Higher-ability groups are more likely to choose war when their greater power raises the expected payoff of fighting.
Climate change is also related to intelligence as it can argued that the more advance societies do end up consuming/producing more and thus create more Climate related waste. The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
I'm not sure I understand your point around late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of the common...
Are you really arguing that the western world has not been more advanced?
The European/Asian wars of the 20th century (ironically started by people who thought of themselves as superior races) wiped out ten of millions of lives and an untold amount of wealth. It led to the collapse of entire empires and nations. Surely you are not claiming that the wars were a net positive, are you? One indicator of a lack of intelligence is engaging in actions that are against your own interests.
Also, with climate change, may I remind you of quote from Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy:
> I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
Industrialization followed this pattern. Shitting where you live is a textbook case of stupid.
> The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
The people dying in extreme floods and fires tell me otherwise, and it's likely only going to get worse.
Watson was the one who described Franklin as "belligerent, emotional, and unable to interpret her own data" in his book. He also repeatedly referred to her as "Rosy", a name Franklin never used.
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
One professor that I had said that she met him when he was a bit younger (when he was in his 60s), and every time he would walk into a room, he would immediately pick out the most attractive young women, and ask them to sit directly next to him.
No, they rushed to beat Pauling. In a just world Franklin would gotten a co-author credit, but I don't think anyone holds that she was going to have the breakthrough on her own.
She literally did though. Both their papers were published at the same time too. Her research was finished a little bit later but they both got published in the same issue of the same journal. Hers came later in the pages so it seemed as if her work was simply confirming the work of Watson/Crick
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
> This US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023
If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)
There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].
(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)
(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)
Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.
[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based
Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and
interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite:
warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools,
districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test
taker populations."
[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"
No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.
Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.
