Following the appearance of Watson on the front page of the Independent claiming " Black people are stupid " I see some "Scientists " ,are defending him . I have been fuming about this ever since I saw it . THe following is a tidied up version of a comment on the magnificent Dizzy:
Watson was not acting as a scientist, he was acting as celebrity,( publicising his book ). This is comparable to the blithering lunacy Chomsky got away with in the day , because he was a genius at linguistic analysis. I have no special objection to old, men being rude and acquisitive .I do object to the Independent putting it on the front page and to the unwarranted genuflection before ill-mannered garbage .
This is the right wing version of political correctness.The statement ‘Black people do worse at IQ tests is’ is, at a simple level, true . Righties deliberately confuse it with that much more slippery substance ,’ the truth’. The following statements are also "True"
1 Black races are unusually subject to poor childhood diet. This effect is un quantifiable
2 The phenotypic effects of genetic inheritance in new environments is un quantifiable .For example are Indian men genetically prone to heart disease or predisposed to certain diets in the aggregate . What is the causality ?
3 It is perhaps the weakest caveat but the cultural input of IQ testing is not something that can be ignored, neither can the class and economic group bias . I appreciate that the effort is resolutely to achieve sound methodology but only a misunderstanding of science assumes it has been successful, because it claims to have been
4 We are all descended from a small group of Africans recently . There are at least four other out groups in Africa . Which black people are you talking about ?
5 Races are not fixed and nascent adaptive features can spread quickly though populations in particular circumstances which cannot be called racial characteristics . Islanders tend to become larger over a short period of time . This not a racial feature, it might become one and such shifts are swirling constantly in the liquid landscape in which the incidence of features occurs.
6 If I were to say Samoans tend to be fat this does not make the Samoan babe in front of me fat nor does it mean that Samoans have to be fat nor does it mean it is racial feature and nor does it mean my measurement of fatness is objective.Given the right diet and training samoans are,incidentally , the most man for man gifted set of athletes in the world. Nutrition and enviroment act with inheritance in un foreseebale ways .
7 Homosexuals.Explain that scientists? No-one ,as Richard Dawkins admitted , can at this time . There are whole vistas concerning inheritance of pesonality traits where we have absolutely nothing but guesswork to go on
.We know the avaricious egomania that drove Watson and let him be free to drivel. I am free to pour scorn on that vile rag the Independent for sinking to such depths and for anyone who pretends to the Western religion of science worship (usually adopting an ignorant cowering posture familar to accolytes of magical religions world wide )
This is the opposite of science and surely we must be aware of how misunderstanding of Darwin has given encouragement to the worst sort of self love and brutality in the past.
Science is not outside poltical cultural input .We do not wander wide eyed like curious Alice into medical surveys conducted by the Tobacco industry, or Climatology financed by superstates.Scientific work on passive smoking and anything else pertaining to immediate social question should be met by a default response.......
" What the fuck do you know about it , who is paying you and why do you ask ?"
The answer here is
Nothing
Your Publisher
To make money and show off
4 comments:
Sorry N I haven't read the whole post but last night we were discussing this survey that has proved that middle class drinkers are drinking too much. My brother's girlfriend said wasn't it interesting that no-one ever gets funding for studies that investigate the positive side of the "bads" like booze or pot or whatever. Governments only give funding for projects which will further their political ends which in the case of booze is to try and ban it..
Worry not Ed I have been getting an bit long winded recently and what you say is relevant .
I am thinking of broadening my scope a bit into the arts and so on to break it up. I think being a non specific Conservative blogger does get a bit dull by its nature from time to time ..
I thin i wnat to tru to do mroe of a blog spectator and les of a blog viz...dunno anyway change is a comin`
The Watson's and Eysencks of this workd really P*ss me off.
I want to throw another idea at you, n, this is that we should be questioning all IQ tests as a species because they are fundamentally defective and profoundly flawed. These tests have an inbuilt bias towards over valuing some of the less useful forms of intellect and under valuing other, useful and essential forms .
IQ tests measure nothing but the ability to work within a set of rigid, culturally, historic and gender specific, parameters which the originators of the tests (such as that mental and intellectual defective Eysenck) dictate - and which they alone deem to be 'intelligence'.
IQ tests are, for example, designed to exclude vital affective forms of intellect which are the basis of the dominant position which females have in the educational system.
Despite the claims that there are now IQ tests which are designed to test the forms of logic women use, females still underperform in these tests. Why? Because in truth IQ tests are deliberately constructed to undervalue us and the affective logic which females rely on to a greater extent than males.
According to a recent analysis of data at Manchester University conducted by Dr Paul Irwing:
"All the research I’ve done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women."
Yet he admits:
"The results of both studies were a shock to me....My findings don’t fit my view of the world at all. Girls often do better than boys at school.
***There has to be some female compensating factor***,
most importantly the ability to process speech sounds, which means women read faster and more accurately and have an advantage in basic writing tasks. And women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technically correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded."
So women, who are underperformers in IQ tests and in the terms of these meaningless measures, nevertheless outperform males in education.
You know what Socrates, one of the father's of real logic would have said about all of this? That if we're going to be really thorough in our critique of these tests then we really need to examine the whole edifice of what passes for logic in our society - which, many would argue, is a static, undialectical, unreal and s*dding useless stereotype - and change it.
He'd also have laughed his dick off when another, alleged, father of logic, Bertrand Russell, took to bed with depression for a fortnight after finding his precious (IQ style) logic, was a complete fantasy.
Auntie Flo'
I don`t think teres any need to go that fasr Flo its just that people misunderstand what they are beung told ....I agree very much with the emphasis of your comment though which is a Flo classic !
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