Re:Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions...
by runarberg on Monday April 04, 2022 @10:33PM
(#30914709)
I realized that I’ve shifted the goal post quite a bit here. From “The policies advocated by Hernstein and Murray can be considered racist” to “IQ is a scientifically uninteresting construct”. Or as you say—quite truthfully to be honest:
> But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
I did this a little on purpose (as you have noticed) because frankly the latter is a much more interesting debate (which I merge from a nibling thread I started where I made this claim).
So to address your concerns that I claim Hernstein and Murray are racist in their book The Bell Curve. First, I never called them racists directly. I claimed that their policies can be considered racist in the cultural context of 1990s american politics. I also claim that they blatantly and unapologetically use racist studies to back up their claims. So they are racists by association, and their work is racist as a result.
If they had made a convincing argument about the heritability of IQ and it’s importance in explaining behavior, and omitted citing blatant works of scientific racism to back up their case, I would be more hesitant in calling this work racist. I would just say that their conclusion is wrong. That we would need to make accommodations for people with lower IQ. We should keep affirmative action despite it being counter-productive simply because it is the right thing to do, etc.
However they did make a very unconvincing case that this g-factor explains the group difference in intelligence between groups. And they did cite racist studies to back up their case. And on top of that they used rhetoric to advocate for conservative policies which falls in line with what racists used at the time.
So to summarize my views on this less interesting debate. I consider Hernstein and Murray’s policy proposals in The Bell Curve to be racist because a) they use an unconvincing argument based on racist studies to advocate for set of policies, which b) were widely shared by other people at the time which were doing so because of their own racist beliefs. However you are of course free to disagree with my conclusion, although I hope you can see that these two premises for that conclusion have some reason.
> But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.
I did this a little on purpose (as you have noticed) because frankly the latter is a much more interesting debate (which I merge from a nibling thread I started where I made this claim).
So to address your concerns that I claim Hernstein and Murray are racist in their book The Bell Curve. First, I never called them racists directly. I claimed that their policies can be considered racist in the cultural context of 1990s american politics. I also claim that they blatantly and unapologetically use racist studies to back up their claims. So they are racists by association, and their work is racist as a result.
If they had made a convincing argument about the heritability of IQ and it’s importance in explaining behavior, and omitted citing blatant works of scientific racism to back up their case, I would be more hesitant in calling this work racist. I would just say that their conclusion is wrong. That we would need to make accommodations for people with lower IQ. We should keep affirmative action despite it being counter-productive simply because it is the right thing to do, etc.
However they did make a very unconvincing case that this g-factor explains the group difference in intelligence between groups. And they did cite racist studies to back up their case. And on top of that they used rhetoric to advocate for conservative policies which falls in line with what racists used at the time.
So to summarize my views on this less interesting debate. I consider Hernstein and Murray’s policy proposals in The Bell Curve to be racist because a) they use an unconvincing argument based on racist studies to advocate for set of policies, which b) were widely shared by other people at the time which were doing so because of their own racist beliefs. However you are of course free to disagree with my conclusion, although I hope you can see that these two premises for that conclusion have some reason.