Alpha Unit: Facts about behavior stand on their own. But it’s perfectly okay to question someone’s assertions about why people behave a certain way.
Oh of course! I agree with that 100%. Actually the B-W IQ gap controversy has shifted over to that.
In the journals, the people on the Left surrendered a while back on the tests not measuring intelligence or being culturally biased. They now agree that the tests are real and that there are intelligence gaps between races.
The argument now has shifted over to what’s causing them.
- The Left says it’s environment
- The Right says it’s genes
- Others say it’s both
I regard all three positions as completely valid hypotheses and I do not think any of these positions is a racist position.
It’s hard to say if there’s any consensus at all. A statement authored by Linda Gottfriedson and signed by 100 intelligence researchers in the New York Times in 1996 said the consensus was that they were not sure what was causing the differences, but the trend was for researchers saying that both genes and environment were involved.
To me, this is a much more productive discussion.
Unfortunately, in the popular press and mind, the arguments for the tests not being accurate or being culturally biased are still bandied about although they were abandoned in the journals a long time.
In other words, the Left in the press and in the individual minds of the Left continue to promote ideas that are so far to the Left that they’ve even been abandoned by the far Left in the journals.
What is bizarre is that things that are now taken for granted even on the far Left in the journals, such as:
- The tests measure actual intelligence
- The tests are not culturally biased
- There is an actual B-W intelligence gap between the races
will get you called racist, fired or your career destroyed if you say them in public because the public is 20 years behind the journals.
In other words, you will get called racist, be fired or get your career destroyed for taking positions that are regarded as scientific fact even by the farthest Left intelligence scholars. That’s just bizarre and not only that, it’s totally pathetic.
