Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an opium addiction too. We should legalize drugs and help people who get addicted, not just ban substances that some people use responsibly.
You're right --- but as John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, "In the long run, we're all dead".
In the medium term, it is unreasonable to expect middle America to compete with workers from countries with no environmental laws, no safety regulations, and no worker safety. Likewise, it is unreasonable for ask us free people to compete with H1-B holders who cannot leave their jobs without being deported.
Besides, historically speaking, we make productivity advances fastest when labor is expensive. In a sea of cheap labor, technology stagnates. Of course, in the long run, we're going to have a single integrated global economy. But a policy of immediate free trade and free movement is not a feasible or fair way of getting to this state.
> I'm not sure what number of undocumented Syrian refugees I would trade for every American citizen who believes that immigration is "dysgenic", but I think it's probably a high number.
Unfortunately, I don't think this administration considers itself bound by laws. That Trump made his contempt for laws and norms clear before his election and won anyway indicates a deep-seated frustration with the current legal and social framework of our country. Part of this frustration comes from the denial, in the face of all evidence and logic, that different groups of people differ in intelligence and temperament. If we deny reality, we're going to make bad policy. Bad policy doesn't solve problems and breeds resentment.
I don't like this situation any more than you do. Maybe CRISPR will let us boost everyone's intelligence to some biological maximum. In the meantime, we have to acknowledge reality.
The biggest issue with illegal immigration is that it is intensely dysgenic. A legal immigration program can select people of some distinction. An uncontrolled illegal flood has the effect of burdening society with another society's least able and most desperate contributors.
Those escape religious or political persecution, like the Puritans, some Christian middle east refuges, scientists from 1930s Germany, etc. don't count --- we all know that when we talk about illegal immigration, we're talking about a flood of low-skill economic migrants.
I'm an American citizen and a very senior software engineer. I'm also a white male. Immigration restrictions will raise my wages. These measures also infuriate those who regularly denounce my race and gender in the name of fake "diversity". Why shouldn't I be in favor of this program? Of course, in public, I'll denounce Trump, but in private, I'll root for expanding bans and reducing the H1-B supply.
While I'm sure that corporate executives feel a certain personal level of frustration with this administration, I suspect that the prospect of rising labor costs also prompt a certain shrill activism.
My stance is indeed cynical. I'm an unabashed cynic. Cynicism doesn't make me wrong. While it's true that many people in the valley are foreign-born and that wages are high, wages are still far below the value each worker produces. Take a major tech company. Divide its annual profit by the number of people it employs. The difference between that number and the money you're paid is the value of your work that you've failed to capture.
IQ is not boosted much by intensive education, especially in adults. Intensive education can raise IQs during childhood, but by the time these children mature into adults, their IQs are roughly where you'd expect by extrapolating from demographic factors.
Education is a prerequisite for making best use of one's intellect. Do you propose witholding education from boys so that adult outcomes are more equal?
IQ correlates very well with all sorts of things, including career choice (e.g. physicists have very high IQs) and lifetime earning. By any objective measure, IQ is at the very least a prerequisite for brilliance.
More likely, I think, is that it contradicts the feminist narrative that every gender disparity that disadvantages women is the fault of the patriarchy and every gender disparity that favors women is evidence of inherent female virtue.
This belief is accurate. Men and women have similar IQ means, but men have greater variance. This difference implies that there are more low-IQ men than there are low-IQ women, and also that there are more high-IQ men than high-IQ women.
Denying reality, even with the best of intentions, ultimately does everyone a disservice. We should of course encourage intelligent and driven women to succeed. We can do that while acknowledging that, yes, brilliance is more common in men.
> It's increasingly difficult to opt out of browser autofill
Good. I hope browsers autodetect these web font tricks and pop up similar warnings. I can't stand when some random website make thinks it can do a better job of credential security than major browser makers.
The crimethink goes deeper than that. IQ indeed differs by heritage. Why shouldn't other personality traits? What if one group has personality traits that on average lead to greater success getting through the process at a corporate hell like Oracle?
It shouldn't matter. I dream of a day when we look at people and people and not representatives of their identity groups.
> relatively small and unstable difference in average test performance between populations
I'm glad that you at least acknowledge that group differences exist. I think you'd be surprised at the magnitude of the group differences: US white and black populations differ by a full standard deviation as measured by contemporary IQ tests; this difference has been stable since at least the 1970s --- the Flynn effect changes the absolute scores, but not the difference. This difference is stable even when we subtract the effect of environment (e.g., adoption studies).
No, it's not stereotype threat either: stereotype threat is one of those convenient social science theories of recent years that rests on experiments that happen not to reproduce. That is, it's bullshit.
> attributing more significance to observed similarities than observed difference
Significance depends on our purpose. For example, take technology: tech is a high-IQ field. We want people on the right side of the standard distribution. Some population groups (usually identified with races) are under-represented in tech, and many people have called this situation a "problem". The standard narrative is that prejudice and discrimination cause differences in representation and that the appropriate remedy is to take extra, unfair-to-individual steps to bring representation in line with the general population. This line of thinking inevitably leads us to the concept of "privilege", "unconscious bias", and in the end, because none of these measures actually work, we're left with brute-force quotas, unfairness, and resentment.
The problem with the standard narrative is that it's built on the assumption that all groups have equal IQ distributions. If we relax this constraint, a simpler theory emerges: tail effects matter; the current system treats individuals fairly; differences in representation reflect real population differences.
I'd prefer to look at individuals as, well, individuals, but some people have made racial representation an issue. These people picked a scientific fight, not people like me. It so happens that science is not on the side of the endless discrimination narrative. It's only to defend against charges of racism that we need to study racial IQ distributions at all.
> But the relation of those groups with what we call "race" is almost zero.
The everyday races correspond to real, observable genetic clusters. There are real characteristics shared by members of these large groups, e.g. the epicanthic fold in East Asians.
The genetic phylogeny doesn't lie. The Sub-Saharan diversity you're mentioning --- e.g., between Bushmen and the Igbo --- is about large-separation clades within the larger continental grouping.
Why would it be surprising that the child of someone who is white and someone who is half white might go on to appear mostly white? You yourself mention that your genetic makeup (presumably from 23andme or something) also suggests a "mostly white" appearance. In this case, there's a pretty good match between phenotype and genotype.
You absolutely can predict someone's phenotype from her genotype, roughly speaking. In cases of recent admixture, the exact gene expression can be uncertain. Just look at Mendel and his peas! Even this variable heredity has limits. There was a zero percent chance that you'd end up looking like a typical Japanese person.
I don't understand your point. I'm not claiming that the classic races are fixed for all time. I'm not suggesting that we can't arrange genes in new combinations. I am claiming that people today cluster in certain historically-contingent ways and that these clusters reflect the everyday understanding of race.
When you take a big corpus of genomes and split them using impartial mathematics into similarity-clusters, you get clusters that almost perfectly match the continent-scale races that people self-report. That's not "arbitrary". Furthermore, people in these groups differ in characteristics that are measurable and important.
When I say that "race exists", I mean that there are real differences between the k={3,4,5} groupings and that almost always tell someone's group affinity by sight alone. The existence of marginal cases doesn't somehow invalidate the reality and utility of the high-level groups.
When people say "race doesn't exist", the general public reads that as "there are no differences on average between people from the various continents", and this claim is not only false, but it's so false that one doesn't need sophisticated instruments to tell.
I believe that this confusion is deliberate and is part of a misguided attempt to eliminate bigotry by delegitimizing the classification schemes upon which bigotry is built. This strategy is doomed, because you can't take away people's eyes and ears.
> Could you list what races you think exist, and some kind of paper that establishes a scientific method for where the dividing lines in the genetic gradients are drawn and why such a line needs to be drawn at all?
Let's define our terms. By "race", I mean the classic continental groupings of people whose ancestors come from areas centered on Europe and the near east, east Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. When we say "race", we're talking about that category to which people readily self identify and to which we can easily assign others. When we say "race exists", it means that these categories are not arbitrary.
More generally, they're big ancestor clusters. You can see the clusters yourself if you take genome corpuses and run principal component analysis (or other grouping algorithms) on them. If you select k=3, the classic continental races come out of the data.
I'm not sure how much more real a taxonomic classification scheme can get. We use the same genomic approach for organizing the rest of life.
With more groupings, you get finer-grained population clusters nested inside the larger ones. If you look for enough clusters, you start seeing an "Irish" grouping. Can we agree that, say, the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs are distinct hereditary groups? Can we agree that they're more similar to each other than, say, the Irish are to the Pygmies?
You could, in principle, put everyone into her own cluster. Sure, at k=7e9, race doesn't exist. But that's not a very useful classification scheme, because it ignores the reality that there are high-level classifications that we can see with our own eyes.
> How do you convince yourself you're not one of them and therefore actually the cause of the very problem you lambast scientists for?
That's an excellent question. Epistemology is hard. The best we can do is try to explain observations using the best-predicting theories we can find. I reject the "race does not exist" theory because it fails to explain observable facts about the world. This theory requires, in order to explain our observations, elaborate systems of oppression. It's full of epicycles. Even so, it fails to predict the result of studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.
The "race corresponds to allele clusters" theory makes better predictions. It explains heritable and persistent differences in measurable characteristics. It agrees with genomic observations. It requires no hidden assumptions. This latter theory isn't politically correct, but this status can't affect its truth value. We delude ourselves about things all the time.
Look: the traditional continental race classification scheme is a crude folk theory. It's very embarrassing for science when even a crude folk theory makes better predictions than the best theory to come out of the academy.
There are strong reasons to believe that the observed genetic differences between races have profound phenotype effects. After all, the races are different, physically. It's not "just skin color". Can you really argue that Koreans and bantus have the same physical characteristics except for skin color? Facial structure, stature, metabolic diseases, hair texture, and even earwax differ markedly between different heredity groups. These differences persist even when koreans and bantus move to the United States and have children; it's the people, not the dirt. These physical differences are heritable. Mixed-race children usually exhibit some mixture of the characteristics of their parents.
If we don't agree that people from different races can differ across an array of physical characteristics and that these differences are genetically encoded, I'm not sure we can have a conversation. I bet you're also the kind of person who denies that men are much physically stronger than women.
But suppose you accept physical differences. Why would you then reject cognitive ones out of hand? Evolution and genetic drift act on the mind as much as they do the body, since the brain is a physical organ built with proteins encoded by the same sorts of genes that code for eye color.
The persistent very large racial gaps in IQ (one whole standard deviation) across different studies and population groups tells us that population differences are not merely physical. These differences are robust under twin studies and other measures that control for shared environment. Given that IQ is tightly coupled to life outcome, I'd call these differences quite "impactful".
I know that nobody likes to read a paragraph like the one I just wrote, but we can't hide from facts. We can't make effective policy unless we start acknowledging reality, however unpleasant it may be.