Tuckahoe Joe’s Blog of the Week: THE “LET’S BE AGNOSTIC ABOUT RACE SCIENCE” CLOWNS ARE IN MY TWITTER TIMELINE AGAIN…
This was snagged from Brad Delong’s blog:
The debate in the comments is worth the read.
“THE “LET’S BE AGNOSTIC ABOUT RACE SCIENCE” CLOWNS ARE IN MY TWITTER TIMELINE AGAIN…
Clowns (ICP)’
“Over on Twitter: 1500 GENERATIONS SINCE RADIATION FROM THE HORN OF AFRICA is not very many, n’est-ce pas? A genetic difference that gives you a—huge—extra 0.1% chance of surviving to reproduce will take a gene’s frequency from 1% to 5% of the population in that time.”
“Melanin and vitamin D, lactose tolerance and herding, sickle cell and malaria—all things with an order-of-magnitude bigger than 0.1% differential? Certainly yes. Other things like “general intelligence”? Almost certainly no. I don’t see how you can do the math and still claim otherwise.”
“And so I don’t see how those who claim otherwise—or even claim “agnosticism” about whether it is likely that there are “important” differences between “races”—have done the arithmetic.”
“Can’t do the arithmetic?”
“Haven’t done the arithmetic?”
“Reject the arithmetic because they want to justify some form of racial privilege?”
“I don’t really care.”
“As @ezraklein just wrote: “[such] race science… is not ‘forbidden knowledge’… [but rather] America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality…” As Charles Manski wrote back in 2011: “Decompos[ing] cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable genetic and environmental components”, no. “Measur[ing] specific genes and us[ing] them as observed covariates when predicting outcomes”, quite possibly.”
Races do not exist but racism does.
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