Slate Incompetence and Mendacity Watch

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: Racists Polluting My Race Science!: I'm a little bit confused by Will Saletan's mea culpa here:

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

Saletan, basically, is apologizing for having cited a racist's work in penning his column. Which would be a reasonable thing to do, except that the thesis of Saletan's column was that one of the key empirical claims of white supremacism is true. In particular, calling on whites to "shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy" is exactly what Saletan was doing in his own article. Similarly on the crime front. It's well known that African-Americans commit violent crimes at a higher rate than do white Americans. And if the Saletan Thesis of intrinsic African-American genetic intellectual inferiority is true, extending the analysis to explain the observed gap in violent crime rates seems like an obvious move.

Saletan was busy trying to have his cake and eat it, to, and when confronted with Rushton's rhetoric suddenly finds himself choking on it. But of course the research "proving" blacks' genetic inferiority to whites is shot through with racism; what else would the race-science paradigm possibly be infused with? Somehow, Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn't notice what side he'd landed on.

Comments

[Doctor Jay]

I would like to see responses to the inferior IQ meme based on factual data. I was delighted by some of the data presented earlier by Brad, particularly the time-sensitivity data. You can hardly call something hardwired genetically if its changing over time in the same population.

The point is that a priori there's no reason to think that intelligence wouldn't be affected by genetics, and hence race. Other stuff is, notably skin color, etc. I think the cause will make much more progress if we present data and stay away from the shaming.

There are those who disagree with me. The difference is that their strategy is to make people shut up, but mine is to actually change their minds. Not all minds can be changed, but some can.

[nemo]

"Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn't notice what side he'd landed on."

Isn't this a common problem with Slate's writers and editors? Michael Kinsley may not be with Slate any longer, but he was one of its founders. He often concentrates so hard on coming up with a counterintuitive take that he stops noticing that he's dead wrong.

Mickey Kaus has made an entire career out of nothing but wrong-headed counterintuitive pirouettes. Why does anyone bother to read Kaus?

Slate is full of writers who seem to think we read columnists for choreography, instead of for thinking, researching, and writing clearly.

[Peter K.]

"I would like to see responses to the inferior IQ meme based on factual data."

I tend to agree with you, but also the onus is on them to supply data and prove the inferior IQ meme given the history of racism in various western societies. One should also fully acknowledge this history, because people always always brush it away. I mean only 40 years ago, the level of racism in this country was pure insanity!

[Psychohistorian]

Iglesias' objection does not make much sense.

There is an empirical fact. This fact is completely independent of anyone's personal opinion. Consequently, a person with no racist motivations could either confirm or disconfirm it.

It was wrong to cite a racist in this case because it is essentially repeating propaganda for a despicable cause. Given its source, the information is inherently untrustworthy.

That and saying that Saletan's claim is that an essential empirical claim of a certain, despicable belief system is true is, at the very least, misleading. Supporting empirical claims of any particular belief system is not wrong if that is what the evidence says. It is the normative claims that matter.

Were I to say that because whites are, on average, taller than Asians, Asians should not be allowed to vote or own property, there would be nothing whatsoever wrong with agreeing with my empirical claim, which is entirely true. It would be decidedly immoral (not to mention just odd) to agree with the normative inference. Saletan explicitly disagrees with the normative inference here, so this criticism that he's supporting racists is no more valid than for conceding to someone with the above-mentioned position that whites are taller than Asians.

That said, Saletan should have done better research and probably renounced some of the claims of previous parts of the article. But this criticism goes a bit overboard.

[I, for one, welcome our genetically superior asian overlords]

Doctor Jay, the burden is on you to provide evidence that any gap recorded by an IQ test is genetic and not environmental.

Here is Brad writing on Nov 18th:

"The average IQ score of America's "white" population today is 100. According to Ulric Neisser, America's "white" children in 1932 had an average today's-test IQ score of 80. Dutch army conscripts in 1952 scored 30 IQ points lower than conscripts in 1982. Dickens and Flynn (2006) estimate that the African-American IQ test average rose by 6 points relative to the "white" average between 1972 and 2002. According to Brierley (1970), in the 1960s African-Americans from Ohio had an average IQ score greater than that of whites from Arkansas by 10 points. Thomas Sowell reports that in Northern Ireland the Catholic average lags the Protestant average by 15 IQ points."

So Jay:

1. Did "white" genes change to make "whites" across America score 20 points higher on IQ tests than their grandparents did? Did it make Dutch conscripts in the 80s score 30 points smarter than their parent's generation? What is the mechanism for this?

2. How does racial genetic determinism explain a 6 point rise in African-American IQ score in the past 30 years in comparison to "whites"?

3. How does the idea that "whites" have genes that lead to smarter kids than African-American genes explain the 10 points African-Americans had over whites in Arkansa in the 60s?

4. How does genetic determinism explain the Catholic/Protestant spread amongst whites in Northern Ireland?

The American far right has to latch onto racial pseudo science because the alternative is to contemplate that class and the education, access, health, and quality of life benefits from different economic classes.

[BillCross]

Doctor Jay, as far as I can tell no one claims there is zero heritability of intelligence. Instead the points are that 1. non-intelligence related issues in testing far outweigh any purported differences between "races"; 2. Race is such a poorly defined word that claims are dubious and 3. The differences between members within a group are much larger than the differences between groups.

therefore, any supposed genetic differences are nonsense.

[Ed Baptist]

Is "skin color determined by race?" Or is skin color determined by DNA coding for melanin?

Given the history of the concept of race, and given what we now know about genetic variability within "races," I would say that the onus is also on those who want to prove that there is a scientific-empirical thing called "race."

[robertdfeinman]

As others have pointed out the unexamined axiom is that there is a valid meaning for "race".

In the US a great number of the "black" population has some "white" ancestors as well. There was a PBS program about this where well-known people had their DNA tested. The results surprised many of them.

So trying to correlate anything to race is really a variation of the "just one drop" form of racism that has existed in the country for several centuries.

At an earlier time this was the subject of much discussion. There are even two semi-fictional novels on the subject:
"The Marrow of Tradition" by Charles Chesnutt and
"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson.

Apparently Krugman's recent book is timely after all, racism is alive and well in the US as he argues.

[BrianZ]

Psychohistorian, is it an empirical fact that affability is genetically determined? Or is "affability" a vague term that covers a range of behaviors and attitudes which are influenced by a melange of genetic and cultural factors? Is there a single-number Affability Quotient that can be assigned to every human being?

The idea that "intelligence" refers to something as tangible and measurable as height is rubbish. The reason why so many people are ready to believe, in advance of anything that could be called solid evidence, that intelligence is genetically determined and varies by "race" is that this provides a reassuring justification for real inequalities.

What is easier to measure: existing social and economic inequalities, or complex behavioral patterns? The numbers for the first are easy enough to work out. Wealth, income, teacher-student ratios, etc. The meaning of every measure of the latter are a matter of debate. The only reason that racial inequality in America is attributed to genetics (80% of black Americans have some European ancestry; 20% of white Americans have some African ancestry) is -- well, racism.

[piotr]

A politico-sociological question is: why did Saletan produce a piece that amounted to racist propaganda?

Possible answer number one: because, sadly, this is the truth.

Possible answer number two: because, sadly, he is a racist, and this is what racists do.

Both anwers are refuted by his apology. (My assumption supported only by subjective plausibility is that no group of goons of political correctness chopped off the head of Saletan's favorite horse and delived the bloody thing to his bedroom).

My theory is that there exists a political/intelectual factions of fanatical moderates. They are moderate in the sence that they refrain from having strong a-priori opinion, and, the second part is very important, they are infinitely more sophisticated and clear thinking than the shrill rabble on left and right.

So far so good, especially that certain jobs are reserved for individuals infinitely more sophisticated etc. But one you reside on such perch, you must periodically prove that you remain imsacttsrolar. That is done by making a difficult feat of debunking a myth. Now we have a little problems: right wing myths are often so easy to debunk that the chore is not worthy of an imsacttsrolar. So we have to go, more often at least, for some left wing myth.

Some imsacttsrolar position are well crafted and they indeed are far from "both extremes". For example, the right to abortion is probably a good thing, but it is unfortunate that it rests of SCOTUS decision that was wrongly decided.

Altogether, I think that Saletan succeeded. He proved that he is not shy attacking even the most sacred cow of PC if facts dictate him to do so, and that he is mesch enough to admit an occasional mistake. First he score 100 for the correct attitude, and 50 for the execution (his great mind was elsewhere at that moment), next, 100 for the correct attitude once more. Very imsactsrolar.

[sab]

Why can't we just send these racist critters back to Canada from whence they came. Canada gets all the good niceness p.r, while they export their truly reprehensible folks (axis of evil David Frum) to the US. Lord knows the US has enough racist baggage from our own history. We don't need to be importing it from Canada or the UK (Sullivan).

[sab]

Why can't we just send these racist critters back to Canada from whence they came. Canada gets all the good niceness p.r, while they export their truly reprehensible folks (axis of evil David Frum) to the US. Lord knows the US has enough racist baggage from our own history. We don't need to be importing it from Canada or the UK (Sullivan).

[wood turtle]

What are you made of? TAGHeuer

[ben tillman]

What's DeLong made of? He's a censorous pussy.

[From Wikipedia:

"Benjamin Ryan Tillman (August 11, 1847 - July 3, 1918) was an American politician who served as governor of South Carolina, from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator, from 1895 until his death. Tillman, of German descent, was born near Trenton, South Carolina. He left school in 1864 to join the Army of the Confederate States of America, during the American Civil War, but was disabled by an illness that later caused the removal of his left eye; he never served in the Confederate Army. During Reconstruction, he became a paramilitary fighter in the struggle to overthrow the interracial Republican coalition in the state and disempower the black majority. He was present at the Hamburg Massacre in July 1876, during which black Republican activists were murdered by Tillman's fellow "Red-shirts."...

He was largely responsible for calling the State constitutional convention in 1895 that disfranchised most of South Carolina's black men and required Jim Crow laws. As Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting]...we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it"...]