"Race realism"? It's toxic racist crap. Let's discuss why.

Sherpa’s use oxygen more efficiently due to centuries of living at high altitudes. Europeans are less prone to lactose intolerance due to centuries of consuming dairy. And apparently Japanese don’t have body odor because I bloody cannot find any good deodorant in Tokyo.

Can we have with a more objective discussion, with the humility that I stand to be educated by people in this thread:

(1) Has Destarius has stopped beating his children?

I think if we can have a data-driven discussion, that would be really enlightening. I mean, I would love to think that Destarius has stopped beating his kids, but given his heated temperament, it seems to me rather naive to me to think that he has stopped beating them unconscious with jumper cables. FWIW, I’m short tempered, and I once yelled at my cat!

.
.
.
More seriously, one time on this forum you thought that someone was implying that you beat your kids. And you got super het up about it and thought it was out of line. Imagine if instead of that one time, it was a constant drum beat all through your life of people, just wondering, if you had stopped beating your kids. And all your family members have to deal with the same questions. And sometimes you think you’re done with the question, and you’re just going to have a nice conversation about Marvel movies, and then the question pops up again. And some of those people asking the question just might not know the history of your child beating or not beating, while others are trying to use the question as the tip of the wedge in an effort to have you sent to jail for child abuse.

Anyway, I hope that metaphor helps make it more clear why people have very little patience for this trope of “Are people X fully human? Discuss.” People don’t want to have to try and prove this, over and over again, to questioners who may or may not be white nationalists.

A more interesting question is this: Who’s more human than human?

All I know is that if some unscrupulous superpower decides to breed humans like dogs and cattle, I wouldn’t want to be the poor saps that turn out like Pugs or Fainting Goats.

What are those factors? What effect do they have? Why do you think that? What is your training in this area?

“Let’s have an honest discussion about race and crime statistics”

Is this Stormfront, /pol/ or The_Donald? Because they are the only type of places this occurs. It’s one of my prime “red flags” for spotting crypto-racists and concern trolls.

I mean, someone is basically saying even though actual scientists actually say X, I wonder if they can’t be entirely wrong and the truth is Y, which only coincidentally matches my own socio-political views. Now where have we heard that argument before?

It’s not possible to have a rational discussion so I will just delete all my comments and bow out.

What training do you have in the field that permits you to lead that rational discussion?

It’s a catch 22. Anyone from a scientific background who says so (and there have been many) is clearly in your eyes a racist, and therefore not qualified to say so.

That may or may not be true, but it’s irrelevant to the question what does an ignorant person have to say of any interest at all on the subject?

Who are these many? People with a scientific background have spoken in this thread, and articles have been linked, all saying this is not so. So again, who are this many you are referring to?

I’m guessing the usual suspects:

Today, the term “scientific racism” may be used by some to refer to research seeming to scientifically justify racist ideology. Contemporary researchers and authors include the late Arthur Jensen ( The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability ); the late J. Philippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund ( Race, Evolution, and Behavior );[127][128] the late Chris Brand ( The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications ); Richard Lynn ( IQ and the Wealth of Nations ); Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein ( The Bell Curve );[129] and Nicholas Wade ( A Troublesome Inheritance ), among others.[130] These authors themselves, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term “racism” and may prefer terms such as “race realism” or “racialism”.[131]

I think there are small differences in mental aptitudes and preferences on a biological level between different categorisations of people based on obvious physical characteristics. But is it worth trying to quantify them? It’s going to do a lot more harm than good in my opinion.

There are also much larger differences in preferences due to cultural/environmental factors, and that’s not always a bad thing (although it often is).

There are much larger differences in aptitude due to environmental factors and this is a huge problem - to the point that I believe the single most powerful thing we can do to address differences in outcomes for different groups is to ensure a universal high standard of public education.

What I find hard to deal with is arguments of the form “[minority] is [X%] of the population but only [Y%] of [this industry], therefore this industry is racist”(*). There are so many possible explanations - differences in education before people get anywhere near the industry, differences in preferences which mean people from that background are less interested in going into the industry, and, indeed small differences in mean aptitude of the groups as a whole (Although this is more of a trap because it’s an obvious place to look when looking for explanatory factors, but if there is an effect it’s small and looking for it both makes you look like a racist and actively helps racists).

Ultimately the “benign cultural preferences” thing is the biggest confounding factor:

It’s much more persuasive to me to take smaller less debateable datasets to really drive home the message. It also really focuses people’s minds on specific outcomes that need to change. (“women are 25% of tech firm hires, but only 5% of senior leadership. African americans are 10% of tech firm hires, but only 2% of senior leadership. This is evidence of institutional racism and sexist that must be addressed” [All numbers made up, but based on roughly what I would expect the real numbers to be]).

tldr; Yes race realism is toxic racist crap, but putting that aside the censorious attitude of left wing activists really irritates me. It’s not on my list of top 10 problems though, so it’s fine to be suspicious of people constantly waving the free speech flag and complaining about it.

(*: politics is an exception to this analysis. It’s self-evidently essential to the health of our democracy that different groups are all represented in governance roughly proportionately to their prevalence in the population)

Do people really make that argument? I hear people say things like it is because of racism or sexism that there aren’t more X in Y, but that isn’t necessarily an attack on Y so much as an attack on the society or environment in which X and Y exist. In other words, the social pressure or constraint is applied long before X even approaches Y, so that it can be that Y isn’t racist or sexist at all, but still few Xs attain it.

Not to mince words, but tough shit. It is a war; and getting irritated when the victims and their allies decide to fight back is, well, special.

I get the impression I see it all the time. Maybe I’m missing some nuance. shrugs

Hopefully not in Tom’s living room it isn’t :)

This is Sparta!

But seriously, people don’t bring this shit up because they are curious. They bring this shit up because they a racists who probably beat their children.

And then eat them, I presume?

The argument is that racism and sexism in the wider societies the industries belong to cause the imbalance. There’s imbalance because the racism and sexism, but it says nothing of the industry itself.

Imbalances in leadership/ advancement opportunities (and more toxic stuff, like unaddressed/sweep under the rug sexism and racism) do speak of the industries where that happens. But they are isolated issues.

You can have an institution (education in some places, for example) with equal representation but still ingrained sexism in the balance of high management positions.

In short, basic imbalance points to issues in the wider society, internal further imbalance points to issues within an industry.

And finally, regarding “benign cultural preferences” and the article you quote. Two male researchers show some good data showing an apparent contradiction and then:

That’s all and well, but it’s not trying to measure the effect of peer rejection. One suspects most women are going to be less likely to join fields where there are almost no women, independently on whether they think they’ll enjoy it. Probably the same applies to men and “historically female” professions. But there’s nothing benign in that. It’s ingrained sexism perpetuating itself.

Even if the preference has nothing to do with peer rejection, it could be just a factor of education and point towards sexism in how we educate our kids (no kidding) specially since in certain societies that preference is reversed (which points away from a biological explanation).

Why bow out? It’s been explained multiple times, in a rational way, how individual variation is significantly larger than any group variation. It’s also been explained by @Hechicera how near impossible it is to separate genetic effects within as group from the stronger environmental effects.

That sounds like a rational discussion to me, but instead of discussing that, you post multiple times in the thread how it’s impossible to have one and you’re just going to bow out. This isn’t a loaded question at all, but honestly what are you looking for, here? Again, not loaded! But you’ve had very knowledgeable people respond to you in this thread and you’re not engaging them, so I’m wondering what it is specifically you’re wanting in the discussion and not getting. I’m not implying any motive, I just don’t understand.

Rob Zombie!