That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ credo as stated in the post disembowling Andrew Sullivan that John linked to below.
In that piece, Ta-Nehisi writes of his having mostly avoided the race-intelligence pit o’ fail, because he does not to his own satisfaction know enough about the technical arguments there. As John says, that doesn’t prevent Ta-Nehisi from accurately diagnosing the moral bankruptcy of Sullivan’s thinking.
But his framing of the post did drive me back to one of the best web sources of insight on issues of method and meaning in statistical reasoning, the invaluable Cosma Shalizi, proprietor of the Three Toed Sloth blog. Given that Ta-Nehisi provided an implicit shout out for such sources, I thought I’d dig back into Cosma’s work to provide some context.
Back in 2007, when William Saletan decided to trumpet the “work” of notorious race/IQ “scientist” J. Philippe Rushton, in seeming ignorance of Rushton’s long and well documented record as an associate and aider-and-abetter of overtly racist segregationists,* Cosma wrote a series of long and very carefully reasoned posts explaining what’s goes terribly wrong with most writing about IQ and anything — not just race. For an overview of the problems with concept of “g” — a general intelligence trait — see this honking elephant of a post. I can recommend two much shorter and nicely wicked dialogues on the question of intelligence and plasticity — or, really, on the ease with which really bad thinking slips into such questions.
The point of all this, worked through in some detail in the third of his four posts on the subject, is that studies of intelligence that assert “truths” about connections between some conception of the heritability of IQ and race do so from a position of what may most kindly be assumed to be simple incompetence — though in some cases a presumption of malice seems justified.
“a bias toward knowing what I’m talking about”Post + Comments (73)