Well, sure, I could tell you a story.
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
Are you aware that if there's anything less reliable than anecdotal evidence, it's got to be imaginary anecdotal evidence? You're proving less than nothing. Hell, I can make up an imaginary narrative to try and prove all kinds of crazy shit.
Whoops, I said "shit". Find that remarkable as well?
--grendel drago
Bukkake is violent?
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why is bukkake lumped in with rape porn in the original post, and why has no one challenged that? Sure, it's weird, but so are fursuiters or people who dress up like Batman. Just because it's weird doesn't mean it's morally equivalent to rape, faked or no. Sheesh. You know, some people enjoy a good bukkake.
--grendel drago
I concur. Troll, indeed.
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You should be thankful that the reviewer didn't start blathering on about "erototoxins".
While the anecdotes sound absolutely fascinating, the conclusions sound eerily similar to those of the Meese Commission. At first (1968 or thereabouts), there was a Presidential Commission put together under Nixon to research the effects of porn on people. In its final recommendation, the Presidential Commission called for (a) comprehensive sex education for everyone, (b) continued dialogue, (c) more research, and (d) citizen participation in all of the above. Hardly a stinging condemnation.
That Commission was ignored, its report buried, and upon the election of Reagan in 1980, a new Commission was founded which would give Congress the answers it expected, by simply making shit up. To quote from the article, which quotes from the Meese Report:
While admitting that establishment of a link between aggressive behavior and sexual violence "requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence," the Commissioners go on to say , "We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions...that are plainly justified by our own common sense"
It's the same tired shit that's been thrown against the wall since the Reagan Revolution, in the desparate hopes that it'll stick this time.
I wonder if I could write a similar book about people who overdose on Evangelical Christianity and require ever-stronger doses of legislative activism and repression of women to get their rocks off.
They essentially give Depo-Provera (a time-release hormonal contraceptive injection) to certain sex offenders to kill their libidos. Ask Alan Turing how well he did when they put him on estrogen to make him less gay.
To simplify tremendously---male hormones make you aggressive, hairy and horny. Female hormones make you passive and depressed. Also, they give you tits and painful joints.
What the hell are you even trying to say? What the crap does "chromosomal irregularity" mean?
Of course it's rare; hormones and genes nearly always go together. But if you change the hormones, the genes will express themselves differently. (Give an adult male estrogen injections and he'll grow breasts, for instance.) Which was his original point---hormones can be used to make someone into (well, to a certain extent) the opposite sex.
Geez, and this just after blowing $220 on that "A+" cert this weekend. Thanks a lot, agent at a staffing firm whose name I can't recall! (They said it'd make me easier to market. Sheesh.)
You can probably tell from the tacks I'm taking in my arguments, but I've recently finished reading "The Mismeasure of Man", and found it tremendously, tremendously enlightening.
Also, I remember claiming loudly that copyright infringement was Not a Crime, until someone pointed out that, well, it frequently can be, yes, even if you don't make any money from it. (I think geoffspear still has me listed as a foe from that argument.) I've tried to be more rigorous with my fact-checking and less mushy with my language here since then. I'm glad to know it's paying off.
(Pedantic hint for today: i.e. means "that is"; e.g. means "for example". "When celebrating a winter holiday, i.e. Christmas, decorate the house, e.g. with a wreath.")
Could you help me out here, and explain how, exactly, one would go about writing an unbiased test? Could you show me one? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
Or are you saying that women have special, "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing"? I hope not, because that'd be really, really reductive, and at least as sexist as claiming that women are inherently and immutably less intelligent than men.
And it's not nearly as useful as saying, "hmm, I wonder why our women aren't doing as well---perhaps there's something we can fix about this." IQ tests were originally intended to diagnose children who needed extra help, not to pigeonhole the disadvantaged (as has been done in the past), and certainly not to feed them the soft bigotry of low expectations, as you seem to be doing. Will you next claim that women just aren't good at physics, because physics was invented by dead white guys, and Principia Mathematica is just a rape manual? You're almost there, you know.
And out of curiosity, why do Asians do marginally better than whites? Are the folks at Stanford-Binet, Inc. (or whatever) secretly slightly Asian?
Very biased by sex and race (the vast majority in use were written by white men, go figure).
Could you point me to an example of an unbiased test? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
I think this is the worst subtext I've seen so far in this debate---the idea that because nonwhites and women do worse on these tests, the tests must be biased. It can't be that we culturally shortchange women and nonwhites, because we're all equal, right now, according to you.
So you posit "women's intelligence" or something like it. You're half an inch from "well, so what if black folks can't do math; they can dance real good!"---can you see it?
There is a movement in American (at least) to claim that Intelligence does not exist.
No, there isn't. Well, not in the way that you think there is.
The original construction of the IQ exam was designed to test a whole variety of seemingly unrelated tasks which all correlated with each other. "Factor analysis" (popularized and I think invented by Charles Spearman) is a way of dragging out a common factor, or rather, a measure of how interrelated these tasks are.
An aside: while IQ tests are relatively new, the impulse to find some quantity that is reliably measurable, linearly rankable, heritable and immutable is an old one. The idea is to place every person in a partial order by using a single number. A long line of people, ranging from the smartest to the least smart. It's a seductive idea.
Now, back to IQ testing. The idea of a "general intelligence factor", Spearman's g, which has insinuated itself into the national consciousness, is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction. Do (for instance) verbal and math skills correlate because they're manifestations of a single underlying general factor? IQ testing says nothing about that. In fact, one can extract "group factors", as L. L. Thurstone did, which show multiple, orthogonal factors responsible for performance on various tests, with no single overarching general factor. It's an abstraction. By itself, it doesn't mean anything.
So, yeah. Intelligence as you mean it---inborn, measurable, rankable, immutable---may or may not exist. See here for an analogy I'm rather proud of.
Causation is infered from a preponderance of correlations.
No, it's not. Correlation can only point the way. It can prove nothing. I can correlate my age almost perfectly with certain rates of continental drift, but that doesn't mean a damned thing.
A more relevant example: the results of the Stanford-Binet IQ tests given to American army recruits in the First World War correlated very, very well with national origin. Recruits with German and British origins scored the highest; recruits from Slavic nations scored the lowest. You could derive all the "preponderance of correlations" you could ever want.
Of course, the test results also correlated with the number of years since the test takers had come to America. Slavs were more recent immigrants, so they did worse---the test was very, very biased in favor of familiarity with American culture.
What happens when, without a doubt they prove that men are more intelligent than women, then what? What possible good can come from such a finding? This brings the study's author's ethics in to question. Much the same way someone proving that black's are inferior to whites.. etc.
Binet originally intended IQ tests to help in identifying students who needed extra assistance. IQ tests only place people on the Great Chain of Being (snot and rocks on the bottom, monkeys and black people in the middle, and white folks up top next to the angels and God) if you think that intelligence is singular, innate, immutable and (for race) entirely heritable.
On the other hand, you could take it as an indicator that our culture shortchanges women and black people. IQ tests only say that people are "inferior" if you buy into that particular model of intelligence, which has more basis in medieval theology than in actual fact.
Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.
What really galls me is that this says nothing about women's innate worth, even though the researcher will probably claim that it does.
Did you know that Binet's invention of the IQ test was designed to identify kids who could be helped by particular forms of special education? IQ wasn't defined as innate and immutable until it came to this country, and half the people on this thread seem to have bought that line---half crying out that women are inferior, deal with it, and the other half claiming that "women's intelligence" is different than "men's intelligence", which is at least as insulting as the first argument.
I'd be really curious as to why women score lower on these tests. Ah, but we've already decided that it's either because women are dumb, or because they have mysterious, probably "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing".
First, how well will men score on an IQ test designed by women to test women's intelligence?
Are you seriously proposing lowering the standards for women? What would this test consist of? Can you even define "women's intelligence"?
You're assuming women are inherently and immutably inferior to men, and the only solution is to move the goalposts. What you've missed is that the massive array of numbers amassed by the Ulster boys say nothing about cause. They've put together a convincing case for correlation between sex and the results of an IQ test---but that doesn't say a goddamned thing about why.
Oh, I see---you've bought into the idea that IQ tests measure something singular, innate and unchangeable. That's far from a proven fact. Shame on the researcher if he thinks that his data shows that women are innately inferior. And shame on you for thinking the same.
So... is the black stereotype of white people the same as the white stereotype of dorks? It would go along with white people having a stereotype of black people being cool. Unless socks-with-sandals has suddenly become a non-dorky thing to do. If it has, I missed the memo.
I can't even tell what you're trying to say. Are you saying that middle-school girls don't want to be smart because it's not cool, or that men like pretty chicks more than smart chicks? And what's up with the false dichotomy between pretty and smart?
Oh, and I assure you that my dorky qualities did not make me the most popular kid in middle school.
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man includes some laughably biased samples from near the turn of the century. Oh, it was marketed as measuring unchanging and unchangeable cognitive capacity, but it was really a test of how long someone had been in the United States.
Modern exams are much better about this, but if you're wondering where the idea of IQ tests being terribly culturally biased comes from, that's where.
Oh, sure, you're welcome to talk about intelligence, if you can do it rationally. But people seem to be really, really bad at that. There's a very common, deep-seated and misleading assumption that intelligence is conducive to the GCoB worldview---which it's really not.
Hell, the article doesn't even raise the possibility that IQ is anything other than absolutely inherent and immutable. "Women are permanently and forever less intelligent than men. Discuss." It did not, as you put it, say "hey look, I.Q. test show a sexual bias. I wonder what that's about...". The validity of the test was not questioned. And while there's surely a lot of good work to be done asking why women score lower than men, this study is hardly doing it. I mean, did you actually read the article at all?
Just because someone else in the past was dishonest about this research is no reason to assume that everyone who looks at the issue is also dishonest.
When he's being dishonest about his research in the exact same way that Goddard and Yerkes were, I'd say there's every reason to consider him in the same bucket.
It's not the 50's anymore, people, try to keep up!
Your argument is incoherent. On the one hand, you decry IQ tests as "affected by cultural components". (I'm aware that the original Stanford-Binet tests were laughably biased, but I've seen more recent tests and all they seem to require is eighth-grade math and pretty basic literacy. But hey, I can't speak authoritatively on this.) On the other, you posit a "model of [women's] intelligence", which implies a bigotry of low expectations. Next you're going to be talking about
... and after all correlatives of the societal norm have been maximized through the intuitive, the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, through the hard-won maturation of our collective emotive a priori dispensation-construct: regarded (herein) not as the mere imitative imposition of the aforementioned "will to power" (the now universally discredited patriarchal model) but a new model founded upon, to reiterate, the intuitive, the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, pursuant to, but not inextricably bound within the ad hoc antecedent culture and/or cultural imperative...
Is that what you meant? Or did you just toss out a reference to a "model of [women's] intelligence" without thinking about what you were saying?
The effect you mentioned is the Flynn effect, and it affects those with lower IQ scores more than those with higher scores.
Fun word here: "reification". The idea that just because you name something, it exists. The assumption is that intelligence is a single, rankable, immutable thing. ('Cause if it isn't, you can't say that one person is better than another, and suddenly it matters a whole lot less.)
See, various tests tend to correlate with one another. The idea of IQ is to have a subject take scads of these tests in the hope of measuring the quality that they all have in common.
But this "general factor" is nothing more than a convenient mathematical abstraction. We don't know if it represents a single quality of intelligence that white people tend to have more of than black people.
It's a very seductive idea, this plan of ranking everyone in the whole world on a big scale from Smartest to Dumbest. But here, let's take another example:
People's height and weight tend to correlate. Taller people tend to be heavier. But let's take the product of height and weight to get a Size Product, or SP. Now we can rank everyone in the world by size from Biggest to Tiniest. The problem is that our ranking doesn't really say anything---we've squished two factors into one, and have lost a great deal of information. We've manufactured a number that seems to reflect size, but it's just an abstraction.
So, is intelligence a real single entity, or is it just an abstraction of multiple quantities? I don't think the answer has been conclusively established, and until it has, attempts to locate people on the Great Chain of Being are highly, highly suspect.
You will accept that Black people are (for example) more likely to develop anaemia than White people, or more likely to have curly hair than White people, and so on, but nobody treats Black people differently because of this. These are just irrelevant statistics.
The reason why the debate over intelligence is so turbulent is because while saying "black folks get sickle-cell anemia more often" isn't an effort to place everyone on a partial order, to rank them and decide that one group is better than another. The effort to consider intelligence as a single number, as something unitary and immutable (and heritable, if we're talking about race) is irrevocably tied to the idea that we're all on a scale from nothingness to divine perfection---the same idea that leads to people thinking of "evolution" as inevitably proceeding "upward", of spiders and giant redwoods as "less evolved" than humans.
This is a holdover from the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which was a method by which scientists used to arrange everything on a scale, with snot and rocks at the bottom, then monkeys and black people, then finally white people, angels and God. Except the angels and God weren't around, so white people were in charge. 'Cause that's the way it was meant to be.
Do you see why talking about intelligence is different from talking about sickle-cell anemia?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you aware that if there's anything less reliable than anecdotal evidence, it's got to be imaginary anecdotal evidence? You're proving less than nothing. Hell, I can make up an imaginary narrative to try and prove all kinds of crazy shit.
Whoops, I said "shit". Find that remarkable as well?
--grendel drago
Why is bukkake lumped in with rape porn in the original post, and why has no one challenged that? Sure, it's weird, but so are fursuiters or people who dress up like Batman. Just because it's weird doesn't mean it's morally equivalent to rape, faked or no. Sheesh. You know, some people enjoy a good bukkake.
--grendel drago
You should be thankful that the reviewer didn't start blathering on about "erototoxins".
While the anecdotes sound absolutely fascinating, the conclusions sound eerily similar to those of the Meese Commission. At first (1968 or thereabouts), there was a Presidential Commission put together under Nixon to research the effects of porn on people. In its final recommendation, the Presidential Commission called for (a) comprehensive sex education for everyone, (b) continued dialogue, (c) more research, and (d) citizen participation in all of the above. Hardly a stinging condemnation.
That Commission was ignored, its report buried, and upon the election of Reagan in 1980, a new Commission was founded which would give Congress the answers it expected, by simply making shit up. To quote from the article, which quotes from the Meese Report:
While admitting that establishment of a link between aggressive behavior and sexual violence "requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence," the Commissioners go on to say , "We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions...that are plainly justified by our own common sense"
It's the same tired shit that's been thrown against the wall since the Reagan Revolution, in the desparate hopes that it'll stick this time.
I wonder if I could write a similar book about people who overdose on Evangelical Christianity and require ever-stronger doses of legislative activism and repression of women to get their rocks off.
Congrats on your marriage, by the way.
--grendel drago
They essentially give Depo-Provera (a time-release hormonal contraceptive injection) to certain sex offenders to kill their libidos. Ask Alan Turing how well he did when they put him on estrogen to make him less gay.
To simplify tremendously---male hormones make you aggressive, hairy and horny. Female hormones make you passive and depressed. Also, they give you tits and painful joints.
--grendel drago
"Here's to the habeman, up and out..."
Aren't you thinking of "The Game of Rat and Dragon", though?
--grendel drago
Ooh, am I ever going to get some serious SHUT UP, HIPPIE mileage out of this.
--grendel drago
What the hell are you even trying to say? What the crap does "chromosomal irregularity" mean?
Of course it's rare; hormones and genes nearly always go together. But if you change the hormones, the genes will express themselves differently. (Give an adult male estrogen injections and he'll grow breasts, for instance.) Which was his original point---hormones can be used to make someone into (well, to a certain extent) the opposite sex.
--grendel drago
Itm was some UNIX guy.
--grendel drago
Geez, and this just after blowing $220 on that "A+" cert this weekend. Thanks a lot, agent at a staffing firm whose name I can't recall! (They said it'd make me easier to market. Sheesh.)
--grendel drago
You can probably tell from the tacks I'm taking in my arguments, but I've recently finished reading "The Mismeasure of Man", and found it tremendously, tremendously enlightening.
Also, I remember claiming loudly that copyright infringement was Not a Crime, until someone pointed out that, well, it frequently can be, yes, even if you don't make any money from it. (I think geoffspear still has me listed as a foe from that argument.) I've tried to be more rigorous with my fact-checking and less mushy with my language here since then. I'm glad to know it's paying off.
(Pedantic hint for today: i.e. means "that is"; e.g. means "for example". "When celebrating a winter holiday, i.e. Christmas, decorate the house, e.g. with a wreath.")
--grendel drago
Could you help me out here, and explain how, exactly, one would go about writing an unbiased test? Could you show me one? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
Or are you saying that women have special, "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing"? I hope not, because that'd be really, really reductive, and at least as sexist as claiming that women are inherently and immutably less intelligent than men.
And it's not nearly as useful as saying, "hmm, I wonder why our women aren't doing as well---perhaps there's something we can fix about this." IQ tests were originally intended to diagnose children who needed extra help, not to pigeonhole the disadvantaged (as has been done in the past), and certainly not to feed them the soft bigotry of low expectations, as you seem to be doing. Will you next claim that women just aren't good at physics, because physics was invented by dead white guys, and Principia Mathematica is just a rape manual? You're almost there, you know.
And out of curiosity, why do Asians do marginally better than whites? Are the folks at Stanford-Binet, Inc. (or whatever) secretly slightly Asian?
--grendel drago
Very biased by sex and race (the vast majority in use were written by white men, go figure).
Could you point me to an example of an unbiased test? Or at least one biased in the other direction?
I think this is the worst subtext I've seen so far in this debate---the idea that because nonwhites and women do worse on these tests, the tests must be biased. It can't be that we culturally shortchange women and nonwhites, because we're all equal, right now, according to you.
So you posit "women's intelligence" or something like it. You're half an inch from "well, so what if black folks can't do math; they can dance real good!"---can you see it?
--grendel drago
Thanks; I'm flattered! I spent a few minutes trying to come up with something good. Glad to know it was appreciated.
By the way, does your sig mean "help yourself, and God will help you"? My French is rusty, and my Middle French is nonexistent.
--grendel drago
There is a movement in American (at least) to claim that Intelligence does not exist.
No, there isn't. Well, not in the way that you think there is.
The original construction of the IQ exam was designed to test a whole variety of seemingly unrelated tasks which all correlated with each other. "Factor analysis" (popularized and I think invented by Charles Spearman) is a way of dragging out a common factor, or rather, a measure of how interrelated these tasks are.
An aside: while IQ tests are relatively new, the impulse to find some quantity that is reliably measurable, linearly rankable, heritable and immutable is an old one. The idea is to place every person in a partial order by using a single number. A long line of people, ranging from the smartest to the least smart. It's a seductive idea.
Now, back to IQ testing. The idea of a "general intelligence factor", Spearman's g, which has insinuated itself into the national consciousness, is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction. Do (for instance) verbal and math skills correlate because they're manifestations of a single underlying general factor? IQ testing says nothing about that. In fact, one can extract "group factors", as L. L. Thurstone did, which show multiple, orthogonal factors responsible for performance on various tests, with no single overarching general factor. It's an abstraction. By itself, it doesn't mean anything.
So, yeah. Intelligence as you mean it---inborn, measurable, rankable, immutable---may or may not exist. See here for an analogy I'm rather proud of.
--grendel drago
Causation is infered from a preponderance of correlations.
No, it's not. Correlation can only point the way. It can prove nothing. I can correlate my age almost perfectly with certain rates of continental drift, but that doesn't mean a damned thing.
A more relevant example: the results of the Stanford-Binet IQ tests given to American army recruits in the First World War correlated very, very well with national origin. Recruits with German and British origins scored the highest; recruits from Slavic nations scored the lowest. You could derive all the "preponderance of correlations" you could ever want.
Of course, the test results also correlated with the number of years since the test takers had come to America. Slavs were more recent immigrants, so they did worse---the test was very, very biased in favor of familiarity with American culture.
Correlation can point the way. Nothing more.
--grendel drago
What happens when, without a doubt they prove that men are more intelligent than women, then what? What possible good can come from such a finding? This brings the study's author's ethics in to question. Much the same way someone proving that black's are inferior to whites.. etc.
Binet originally intended IQ tests to help in identifying students who needed extra assistance. IQ tests only place people on the Great Chain of Being (snot and rocks on the bottom, monkeys and black people in the middle, and white folks up top next to the angels and God) if you think that intelligence is singular, innate, immutable and (for race) entirely heritable.
On the other hand, you could take it as an indicator that our culture shortchanges women and black people. IQ tests only say that people are "inferior" if you buy into that particular model of intelligence, which has more basis in medieval theology than in actual fact.
--grendel drago
Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.
What really galls me is that this says nothing about women's innate worth, even though the researcher will probably claim that it does.
Did you know that Binet's invention of the IQ test was designed to identify kids who could be helped by particular forms of special education? IQ wasn't defined as innate and immutable until it came to this country, and half the people on this thread seem to have bought that line---half crying out that women are inferior, deal with it, and the other half claiming that "women's intelligence" is different than "men's intelligence", which is at least as insulting as the first argument.
I'd be really curious as to why women score lower on these tests. Ah, but we've already decided that it's either because women are dumb, or because they have mysterious, probably "spiritually nutritive" "ways of knowing".
How disappointing.
--grendel drago
First, how well will men score on an IQ test designed by women to test women's intelligence?
Are you seriously proposing lowering the standards for women? What would this test consist of? Can you even define "women's intelligence"?
You're assuming women are inherently and immutably inferior to men, and the only solution is to move the goalposts. What you've missed is that the massive array of numbers amassed by the Ulster boys say nothing about cause. They've put together a convincing case for correlation between sex and the results of an IQ test---but that doesn't say a goddamned thing about why.
Oh, I see---you've bought into the idea that IQ tests measure something singular, innate and unchangeable. That's far from a proven fact. Shame on the researcher if he thinks that his data shows that women are innately inferior. And shame on you for thinking the same.
--grendel drago
So... is the black stereotype of white people the same as the white stereotype of dorks? It would go along with white people having a stereotype of black people being cool. Unless socks-with-sandals has suddenly become a non-dorky thing to do. If it has, I missed the memo.
--grendel drago
I can't even tell what you're trying to say. Are you saying that middle-school girls don't want to be smart because it's not cool, or that men like pretty chicks more than smart chicks? And what's up with the false dichotomy between pretty and smart?
Oh, and I assure you that my dorky qualities did not make me the most popular kid in middle school.
--grendel drago
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man includes some laughably biased samples from near the turn of the century. Oh, it was marketed as measuring unchanging and unchangeable cognitive capacity, but it was really a test of how long someone had been in the United States.
Modern exams are much better about this, but if you're wondering where the idea of IQ tests being terribly culturally biased comes from, that's where.
--grendel drago
Oh, sure, you're welcome to talk about intelligence, if you can do it rationally. But people seem to be really, really bad at that. There's a very common, deep-seated and misleading assumption that intelligence is conducive to the GCoB worldview---which it's really not.
Hell, the article doesn't even raise the possibility that IQ is anything other than absolutely inherent and immutable. "Women are permanently and forever less intelligent than men. Discuss." It did not, as you put it, say "hey look, I.Q. test show a sexual bias. I wonder what that's about...". The validity of the test was not questioned. And while there's surely a lot of good work to be done asking why women score lower than men, this study is hardly doing it. I mean, did you actually read the article at all?
Just because someone else in the past was dishonest about this research is no reason to assume that everyone who looks at the issue is also dishonest.
When he's being dishonest about his research in the exact same way that Goddard and Yerkes were, I'd say there's every reason to consider him in the same bucket.
It's not the 50's anymore, people, try to keep up!
1950s?! The great chain of being is a medieval concept.
--grendel drago
Is that what you meant? Or did you just toss out a reference to a "model of [women's] intelligence" without thinking about what you were saying?
The effect you mentioned is the Flynn effect, and it affects those with lower IQ scores more than those with higher scores.
--grendel drago
Fun word here: "reification". The idea that just because you name something, it exists. The assumption is that intelligence is a single, rankable, immutable thing. ('Cause if it isn't, you can't say that one person is better than another, and suddenly it matters a whole lot less.)
See, various tests tend to correlate with one another. The idea of IQ is to have a subject take scads of these tests in the hope of measuring the quality that they all have in common.
But this "general factor" is nothing more than a convenient mathematical abstraction. We don't know if it represents a single quality of intelligence that white people tend to have more of than black people.
It's a very seductive idea, this plan of ranking everyone in the whole world on a big scale from Smartest to Dumbest. But here, let's take another example:
People's height and weight tend to correlate. Taller people tend to be heavier. But let's take the product of height and weight to get a Size Product, or SP. Now we can rank everyone in the world by size from Biggest to Tiniest. The problem is that our ranking doesn't really say anything---we've squished two factors into one, and have lost a great deal of information. We've manufactured a number that seems to reflect size, but it's just an abstraction.
So, is intelligence a real single entity, or is it just an abstraction of multiple quantities? I don't think the answer has been conclusively established, and until it has, attempts to locate people on the Great Chain of Being are highly, highly suspect.
--grendel drago
You will accept that Black people are (for example) more likely to develop anaemia than White people, or more likely to have curly hair than White people, and so on, but nobody treats Black people differently because of this. These are just irrelevant statistics.
The reason why the debate over intelligence is so turbulent is because while saying "black folks get sickle-cell anemia more often" isn't an effort to place everyone on a partial order, to rank them and decide that one group is better than another. The effort to consider intelligence as a single number, as something unitary and immutable (and heritable, if we're talking about race) is irrevocably tied to the idea that we're all on a scale from nothingness to divine perfection---the same idea that leads to people thinking of "evolution" as inevitably proceeding "upward", of spiders and giant redwoods as "less evolved" than humans.
This is a holdover from the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which was a method by which scientists used to arrange everything on a scale, with snot and rocks at the bottom, then monkeys and black people, then finally white people, angels and God. Except the angels and God weren't around, so white people were in charge. 'Cause that's the way it was meant to be.
Do you see why talking about intelligence is different from talking about sickle-cell anemia?
--grendel drago