I was too much of an asshole; here it is in comment form.

I'm taking a 24 hour break, thom. I was over worked up, and I let it spill into this comment thread, overreacting to what people said.

I've probably acted like a jerk. not completely devoid of purpose, but a jerk nonetheless. I'd like to apologize for all of that. I had no call to be so rude to all of you.

Gah. I suppose I should repost this to the top.

Let me try to summarise the obvious parts of the situation as I understand it. I contend that:

(A) There are some measureable differences between ethnicities that are most plausibly attributed to biological differences. (There are some famous examples, such as greater susceptibility of some people to skin cancer, or sickle cell anemia. I assume there are smaller differences elsewhere. If anyone seriously disagrees, say so.)

(B) These are massively dwarfed by the correlation of ethnicity with cultural differences in almost all cases.

(C) There is a social taboo against admitting (A)

(D) There is a large correlation between ethnicity and various cultural factors, and between cultural factors.

(E) It is sometimes possible to draw probabalistic inferences based on (D). Eg. With no other information, you may guess that someone on the street in London is more likely to be a British citizen if they are Indian than East Asian (or vice versa, whichever is true).

(F) The human brain deals very badly with probabalistic inferences. If you guess someone's culture based on their ethnicity or dress, you are likely to maintain that view as long as possible even in the face of new information, until you suddenly flip to the opposite view. Because of this, there is (rightly IMHO) a social taboo against doing (E) even when it might make sense.

(G) People who are and/or think they are good at drawing logicial inferences a la (E) but don't have as much personal experience fo the pitfalls described in (F) are likely to resent the social taboo described in (F) because it seems fussy and nonsensical to them. I am somewhat prone to this error (not so much with race, but with other things)

(H) The word "racist" is horrendously undefined. It is used both to mean "someone or something which treats people differently based on 'race', rightly or wrongly" (including examples where treating people differently is the only possible thing to do, such as preventative advice for medical conditions, or advice on how to avoid bad racism from other people) and to mean "someone or something which is morally wrong to discriminate based on race." Thus a description of whether something is "racist" is typically counterproductive.

I admit I only skimmed the OP's transcript, but my impression is that he fairly describes why he is frustrated that it is difficult to talk about these issues, but I am extremely leery of a lot of the examples he uses.

I was going to write more, but am not sure how to push it. How am I doing so far...? :)

Not really on-topic, but I am the only one who find video a very bad support for rational thinking ? You can't first give a quick glance to the content first, you can't read it carefully at your own pace, or re-read certain parts when needed, or make a pause to ponder or check a fact or an argument, or make a criticism by quoting parts and writing your opinion on the part, ...

All that in addition to technical issues : video require much more bandwidth, a working sound system (right now I'm during lunch break at work, I've no sound, but I can read text), is much harder to understand for non-native speakers, and is much less accessible to people with disabilities.

I don't get this fashion of doing everything through videos... am I the only one to feel that way ?

There doesn't seem to be much content here that hasn't already been said in a more informative, more detailed and more careful and nuanced fashion by Razib Khan. Discussing these issues without being mind-killed is very difficult, and it is even more difficult when the person who starts a post off responds in a hostile fashion to even mild criticisms about the medium of their comments.

(Based on metatroll's transcript (thanks!).)

[EDIT: expanded, original below.]

Unfortunately, you seem to fall prey to the usual errors:

• you do not mention high-education-results subcultures. Analyzing educational results leads to the non-mainstream and actionable-to-you result "tiger moms are awesome" (one prominent LWian does think in that direction). However, when race realists do this analysis, they always conclude (only) "blacks suck". (To be explicit: you've been hanging with white supremacists.)
• parents' social standing is highly influential. Serious civil rights legislation has only been in place for fifty years or so; there are huge confounding factors when inferring "inherent" intelligence from current life outcomes, which should at least be mentioned.
• name-calling is not an argument.
• you rail against feminism, but that seems somewhat unrelated. More importantly, women do pretty well in society (in particular, in the educational outcomes you cited above), so a straight "black people are poor - women are poor, too" analogy seems to fall flat. (This also furthers the impression that you've been hanging with a particular kind of white dude.)
• "affirmative action discriminates against whites" is not a fair and full evaluation of that policy, since that is indeed exactly what it's supposed to do. Your "awesome black doctor" is an argument against affirmative action, but you have not really engaged the core goal (improve chances for black people).

[Pre-EDIT: was: Unfortunately, you seem to fall prey to the usual errors: not mentioning Asian-American or other high-education-results cultures; not mentioning history; name-calling; linking it to unrelated causes including "men's rights"; attacking affirmative action without even considering whether the good outweighs the bad.]

OK, I read the transcript. Conclusion: Whether or not "race realism" is racist (my opinion, FWIW: no, it needn't be, and some version of it might well be right), Aurini sounds very racist indeed; and since Aurini is an LW regular doing his best to present "race realism" impartially for an LWish audience, my estimate of the credibility of "race realism" just went down.

Of course "X sounds racist" isn't much of an argument. Allow me to pick out a few things that seem to me to point that way. (Generally because they seem to me unreasonable in ways best explained by underlying racist attitude.) Quotes like this "..." are actual quotations from Aurini; ones like this '...' are quotations from others; ones like this <<...>> are paraphrases.

(1) Going straight from <> to "it does make sense to avoid events where there's going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety". (No, not without much finer-grained information about that difference in crime rates, it doesn't.) Also, btw, "The Color of Crime" is not "done by the FBI"; it's put out by an organization called the New Century Foundation. Readers may consult Google and make up their own minds about the impartiality and trustworthiness of that organization; I'll say only that learning that Aurini's numbers came from them greatly reduced my confidence in their correctness and relevance (though I believe it's a very robust finding that in the US black people commit a lot more violent crime than white people).

(2) That 2.1 million dollars thing: there's something super-fishy about this. Suppose you have two groups of people and you spent a lot of money trying to improve one group's educational outcomes. This might work or it might not, but why would you expect whether there's a genetic difference in their intelligence to have much to do with whether it works? Unless the less successful group are, literally, completely ineducable, it seems like pouring money into helping them do better ought to do something either way. So if there's a big effort and no effect, for sure it's interesting, but on the face of it it says nothing about the origins of whatever differences there were. (Also: On looking up the Cato Institute page, the figures seem very different from $2.1 million (perhaps it was $2.1 billion?) -- which is just as well, because $2M over 12 years isn't actually all that much -- and it seems like the city's black students were not actually terribly well served by the initiative: 'the district had discovered that it was easier to meet the court's 60/40 integration ratio by letting black students drop out'; 'Although the plan was ostensibly designed to benefit black inner-city students, in practice it required spending hundreds of mlilions [...] while neglecting the needs of inner-city blacks for health care, counseling, and basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.' So this really doesn't seem like good evidence about "race realism" or "human biodiversity". And as for the description of it as "a social experiment that should never have been performed in the first place" -- why not? Because everyone should have known it's a waste of money to spend money trying to help black people because they're Inferior, or what?

(3) "And so if blacks are underachieving [...] and if they are more likely to go to prison [...] we need to actually to come up with a theory of mind, a theory of evolution that explains these differences between the races." That's quite a leap you've made there.

(4) "so long as these popular grievers are out there, messing with government and stealing public money" -- stealing? Srsly?

(5) "the attack on white culture, the attack on civilized culture".

(6) "And most whites have experienced something where they were subtly threatened or just plain insulted by a group of blacks. And so this does arouse the passions, and in some cases it goes so far as hatred." -- Guess what? Most black people have been "subtly threatened or just plain insulted" by white people, too. It takes quite a remarkable level of obliviousness to play the Poor Beleaguered Threatened White People card here.

(7) "imagine you're a black doctor. [...] if I see that you have black skin, I am going to assume on default that you got the job through affirmative action, that you're nothing but a token" -- if you are really going to assume that, just because you see someone with black skin, then I am sorry but you are a total idiot and you don't get to blame the regrettable consequences on anything but your own idiocy and that of others similarly afflicted.

So, even without the extraordinary viciousness of Aurini's responses to the mildest criticisms (and in some cases to actually being agreed with) in comments here, my personal estimate of Pr(Aurini's views on race are at least partly the result of racism) is quite high.

"Human Biodiversity Theorem" has no Google hits and sounds crackpotty.

Links without commentary aren't suited for the main area and should be put in the Discussion section.

I've read the transcript. Some thoughts, which accidentally turned into a giant wall of text:

Just as you avoid high crime neighborhoods, it does make sense to avoid events where there's going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety.

• This may well go without saying, but clearly one needn't feel unsafe going to, for instance, an African-American Studies department brunch, or a symposium on improving education in the inner cities, both of which will be disproportionately attended by black people.

• Different levels of educational attainment can probably be explained by geographic or socioeconomic factors, which are a priori more likely than genetic explanations because such socioeconomic gaps knowably exist.

• Can you cite some evidence that affirmative action is as prevalent as you claim, or that it leads to negative perception of blacks in the workplace? My impression was that there are enough highly qualified candidates for most things, and little enough difference in ability between them, that institutions can (often/usually) favor blacks without accepting underqualified people.

That we aren't allowed to have workplaces where men can fart and make off-color jokes, but that any office you go into, you will hear the women making very insulting jokes about men.

Is there any way you can provide evidence for this? It doesn't match my experience, and I'm not even sure this is the sort of thing one can easily keep track of.

Then there's the widespread attack on civilized values. And you see this throughout the media. Over the past 30 or 40 years, the TV husband keeps getting dumber and dumber, he becomes more... Homer Simpson was bad enough, now we have Peter Griffin, a complete retard. People living in the suburbs are made out to be lame and boring. Meanwhile ghetto culture is glorified. There's a consistent attack on people that obey the law. There's a consistent attack on people that contribute to society.

This is a separate claim from all your others and requires some sort of citation or supporting evidence.

• regarding the bits about Trayvon Martin: you say that the story in the media is false, but you don't say what you believe the truth is or give any evidence that the commonly accepted story is false.

• you don't give any stats on black-against-white hate crimes, and this is the sort of thing there's very likely hard data on. I'll look it up later, but if you have a source please cite it.

EDIT: According to wikipedia, about 13% of the US is black and about 18% of hate crime offenders are black. This doesn't say much about whether the black hate criminals are committing crimes against whites or against women/gays/hispanics/other minorities. Different rates of conviction among people of different races (it's widely believed that the US courts are biased against blacks) may also be clouding this. Given that, I'm not confident that the difference is statistically significant, especially if one were to control for poverty. I couldn't find much about black against white hate crime specifically, because google mostly gave me results from weird fringe groups. Overall I see weak evidence at best for the OP's assertion.

Just because I think that most women are bad at math

The commonly accepted view is that women and men are equally good at math on average, but the best men are better than the best women because there's more spread. "Most women are bad at math" is an exaggerated stereotype.

I would encourage you not to delete this post. This definitely is not a topic that should be posted on LW, but now that it is, you should just leave it. It will eventually get buried by other posts, and the fact that it was downvoted should be a good example "pour l'encouragement des autres".

I think the best reason to lock out hot-button topics like this, is not because they mind-kill LWers per se (with some exceptions, the debate here has been vastly better than it would be in most forums), but because it attracts people who want to talk about politics, and they ruin everything. Part of the reason the quality of discussion here is so good, is that LW is full of obscure topics, like Newcomb's problem and efficient charity, and people who care about those things tend to be cautious, quiet thinkers. Less Wrongers can actually have a pretty good debate about these things, but it might attract a different, more political element to our walled garden.

Thank you for bringing this topic up again! I believe that LW is capable of discussing politically incorrect issues without mindkilling, and I'd like to test that belief. I'm also curious about the latest research on race and genetics for its own sake.

By the way, you mention that you're breaking the law by posting this video. Congratulations on having the guts to do it with your face showing. Can you say what the law is you're breaking? (I don't live in Canada and I'm not familiar with their free speech restrictions.)

A brief PSA: I think we should have an open, honest, rational conversation on possible genetic differences between members of different races. Right now, the OP being easily offended with regard to preferences for text versus video is threatening to sidetrack the thread and/or make it uncivil. So I'd like to ask everyone to stay on topic and stay polite.

This is interesting, I wonder if there's anything to it: International variation in IQ – the role of parasites . Could be as big as lead. Raise the sanity waterline: improve health!

A good video on a usually mind-killing subject.

You manage to warn about the problems of people becoming tribal about this without descending into the typical "oh noes this is too dangerous to talk about" moralizing one normally sees, since you quite correctly notice that as with any question where an individual is confident he is right and society is probably wrong, one must be on the lookout to prevent a sort of pride in having something like superior or hidden knowledge developing into an entire identity that you wear on your sleeve.

I also like you have taken some effort to explain and emphasise how approaching this from the wrong direction can be hurtful and rude. This isn't so much original content about the theory of rationality it is however I think, a good example of applied rationality. Which probably needs to be showcased more. And no I'm not talking about guides to learn how to knit or swim or draw (though I don't mind those either). I think several people have complained that we have let the politics is the mindkiller taboo strife all interesting discussion on the main section. Anyone here recall the old wild Overcoming Bias days? OB is still sort of that place, just that now its now only Robin Hanson's voice. A very interesting voice and intellectually brave one, but man talking about status all the time is boring. More posts to discussing a wide variety of real world issues, even ones where there are people who will break down, might be just what we need here. Why let contrarian blogs have all the fun?

I also think it does a good job of showcasing an example of things that society as a whole need find a way to rationally discuss or evaluate but individuals don't really benefit that much from knowing (I'm referring to the hereditarian hypothesis for the IQ gap, crime stats are probably good to know if you live in a high crime envrionment).

Because I know this is an abiding debate here on LessWrong.

You are right on this, but I'm sure there are plenty of LWers who probably fully miss this. The discussion is rather low key and only comes up when relevant. Like when someone mentions education gaps, economic development strategies or discussions of bias in academia. Human biodiversity theories are also often mentioned in "unspoked dark ideas that are probably true" threads like these ones.

Downvoted just for associating LW with those no-I'm-not-racists. This discussion is not valuable enough to be worth it.

Nitpick:

[03:15] It's between 7.5 and 8 times as likely that a black person will commit a violent crime as a white person.

How was this statistic collected? I suspect what they actually found is that it's between 7.5 and 8 times as likely that a black person will get caught having committed a violent crime as a white person.

Prediction: this post will end up in Discussion one way or the other.

For reference: It is currently 11:20 EST, Wednesday, May 16th. The comment to the main article saying "I've been a jerk, will delete this in 48 hours" was posted at 04:05 EST, Saturday, May 12th, approximately 103 hours from now.

I do not support deleting articles which have been posted and to which you've received a negative response to, but I also wanted to point out that the last statement made is another factual error. My preference, if anything is done to correct this, would be simply to remove the "This will be deleted in 48 hours" and possibly be replaced with an apology, if Aurini feels apologetic, or just leaving the "I've acted like a jerk" on its own.

Are races real? Human differences are real and whether you want to call them races or breeds or subspecies dosen't really matter...

The above links to an interesting interview with Henry Harpending on the subject of race and HBD/RR.

Given that the burden of proof regarding the equality of intelligence of human populations that have evolved in reproductive isolation from each other for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, and in radically different environments (of varying survival difficulty), lies with the egalitarians claiming that all human populations have the same intelligence distribution - I'd say that this article doesn't even belong on LessWrong.

What we need instead is either: a) An article explaining natural selection to those who don't understand where people who don't believe in human neurological uniformity are coming from; b) An article that proves that ALL biomes on planet Earth have had the exact same selection pressures for intelligence in modern H.sapiens throughout the past 100,000 years. Furthermore, unless you have a belief that Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans had the exact same intelligence distribution, this article must prove that the 2-3% Neanderthal admixture in all non-Africans and the 5% Denisovan admixture in some Oceanians is not related to brain function and intelligence.

Sadly, we live in a world where human neurological uniformity is the null hypothesis even for people who should know better, given knowledge of evolution by natural selection.

I really thought the fist time I commented would be about Kolmogorov Complexity or Quantum Mechanics... but this was too much. There are so many things wrong with this... I had to seriously ponder necroing this, but, no... just no.

"Racism. The term has essentially lost all meaning ... the original meaning of racism was." This is already incorrect. Our colloquila definition of racism is not /at all/ related to the original meaning. The original meaning was "The belief that humans are distinguishable by races." That is it. It is the belief that there is such a thing as race. Note, that already, 'race realism' is just another word for "racism", and studies that base things on race are definitionally racist by the "original meaning of racism".

You want the term racism to be "irrational unjustified hatred for the sake of hatred". Which already doesn't make any sense because it is completely devoid of the use of race... but perhaps I'm just being pedantic.
The problem with this is that it completely ignores the fact that racism was a 17th century invention of European colonialism. No one refers to White and Black people before Chattel Slavery in the United States. It is entirely and exclusively an invention of European Colonialism, and that is a historical fact.

So when we talk about 'race realism', we're studying "Is there a biological justification for a distinction invented to entrench colonial powers". That in and of itself is not a question without merit, but it has an extremely low Bayesian prior.

"When it comes to violence, there is a very large gap between white and black incidences of violence. " Sure this is true. However there is a strong correlation between a /bunch of really terrible shit/ and being black. Which given this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ey/learned_helplessness/ would suggest a very high likelihood for a strong correlation between increased crime and lower IQ. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886984900242

"it's between 7.5 and 8 times as likely that a black person will commit a violent crime as a white person. That is an absolutely enormous difference. And that fact is something that's important to remember in your day to day life. Just as you avoid high crime neighborhoods, it does make sense to avoid events where there's going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety." That's incorrect as it ignores the bas rate fallacy and the targets of crimes. You are more likely to be victimized by a White person than you are to be victimized by a black person regardless of your race. This is a simple Bayesian inference and should be obvious for anyone who follows LW/

"That's a fact... It's not racist, it's a fact." Yeah, sticking with the actual definition of racist, not your incoherent one... it's still racist even if it is a fact.

"Atlanta City. Between 1985 and 1997 they spent 2.1 ... Cato Institute." One attempt to equalize education, spending an unknown amount per pupil shows absolutely nothing from a rational and empirical standpoint. There are so many unknowns here that it could mean anything,

"The egalitarians insist that we are all absolutely identical, black slates at birth ... for some reason, one person makes a million dollars, and another person winds up in poverty, and that there's a systemic demographic pattern of this, that there must be some sort of evil force at play, holding the poor person down."

Yes, because the preponderance of evidence indicates that the demographic differences are small, and very unlikely to be innate. It is more likely from a rational and empirical standpoint that social factors are the cause.

"Now the pure fact of the matter is that if you take any two groups, and assign any variable to them that differentiates between the two groups, and measure outcomes, you're going to see different outcomes." That's only true in a trivial sense. If you took connected or unconnected earlobes for example and measured enough people you would see a difference. That's why statisticians have methods for determining the meaningfulness of these statistics. In the Bayesian world, the update would never be considered "strong", so we'd ignore the data because trying to use it for predictive purposes would probably make our models worse.

"Inequality of outcomes is inevitable because we are all unique. And when you put us into a demographic, yes, each demographic is going to have its own outcomes. " Actually, there's a bunch of strong predictors of income, and a strong wage disparity remains even when those things are controlled for.

"these rich grievance-industry government lobbyists are aligning partly on race. You also have feminism as another huge grievance industry" The amount of money contributed from social justice lobbies compared to corporate lobbies is so small that this statement is only true in bizarro land.

"this leads men to work harder than women at dirtier jobs, whereas women are more likely to stay home and raise kids, thus earning less income." Actually, when these factors are controlled for the pay gap remains... did you do any research before making this video? At all?

"Our foundational myth is the blank slate. And so if blacks are underachieving in school as a demographic and if they are more likely to go to prison as a demographic, we need to actually to come up with a theory of mind, a theory of evolution that explains these differences between the races." Or, rather than attempt to revolutionize cognitive science we can see what is staring us right in the face, and infer from very well established scientific results. Namely, black people bear outrageous conditions, and that has created learned helplessness in large portions of them.

"to fight this idiotic squandering of funds" I'm noticing a theme or "They're spendin' my taxpayer monies...". Any attempt to focus on this as a form of waste is premature optimization. http://lesswrong.com/lw/g8a/macro_not_micro/

"Because there are differences between races." Wait! You didn't establish this. You didn't even establish that they are measuring something meaningful. You pointed out two facts that are easily explained with learned helplessness. Did you even think of alternative explanations for the data set? I'm not even saying 'learned helplessness' is /the/ reason, it is simply more likely than "Colonialists conveniently had it right"

Downvoted for use of the term 'race realism' (that's verbal bullying).

Human biodiversity is real, very real:

http://humanbiologicaldiversity.com/