I've met a lot of black people, but I've never met the black race. I've met a lot of white people, but I've never met the white race. I've never met a race and I don't expect to.

I've met stupid people and smart people and a whole lot of people who were stupid one way and smart another, but I've never met anyone with an IQ and I don't expect I ever will.

Or as one notorious racist once put it: '"As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't.'

Ooo, I'm jumping into the firepit here. I haven't even read the article.

But if he's talking about what happened to groups of people, isn't it correct then to talk about characteristics of groups of people?

Normally, I would stay away from stereotypes and generalizations, and yet aggregate characteristics are useful about talking about what happens to groups of people.

The real trouble comes when you try to apply an aggregate observation to the individual. You can't. That's the racist bit.

Edit: Another problem is, and what we've seen here, is that observations or opinions about groups are often used to evaluate a member of said group when met. Curse our brains for taking shortcuts.

Also, I probably should have asked this upfront - are you up in arms about the construct of IQ, or the suggestion that that a group of people might differ in a particular characteristic?

I consider "racism" to be a mental/emotional disease and you describe it well: a logical confusion between "group", which is a mental construct, and the real individuals encountered in real life, leading to severe anti-social behaviour. Generalizations are useful, but people get fucked up on "race".

To answer your question, I am upset that someone as intelligent and otherwise interesting as the urbit fellow should suffer from the logic-disease of racism. It's like how Konrad Zuse is always neglected because he worked for the Nazis, so "fuck him", eh?

Generalizations can be useful, "race" typically isn't. "IQ" can be a useful shorthand, but if you take it too seriously... Let's just say that Mensa is a group of people who are almost, but not quite, as intelligent as they like to think they are.

To paraphrase Deckard, '"IQ" is like any other concept, it's either a benefit or a hazard. If it's a benefit it's not my problem.'

Thanks! I can tell you've put a lot of though into this issue.

You seem to be intentionally diluting the terms. The origins of this discussion trace back to BSA's 1995 report on intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unk... and that report is caused by some research work done by Herrnstein & Murray, results of which were published in a book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

What the research addressed was the IQ bell curves among various groups. What the research didn't address was correlation between IQ scores, intelligence, and general life satisfaction, difference between "academic smarts" and "street smarts", presence of various impurities among the ethnic groups, etc.