User:Plusdown
People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle.---Foucault's Pendulum
Disclaimers, etc.
[edit]Those who read my edits may well come to the conclusion that I am not a new Wikipedia user. They are correct - I have worked on this site before. I created this account specifically to edit articles on the controversial topic of race and intelligence (and related fields), since I would rather avoid having my IP address show in the edit history. I do not have any other active accounts on Wikipedia at the moment - in other words, these are the only articles I am working on for now. While this could therefore be described perhaps as a 'single purpose account', it is emphatically not for trolling, and is not a sockpuppet (in that I don't log in as anyone else these days). I hope that there won't be any conflict over that.
As far as those articles go, I intend to remain 100% neutral and try to maintain a scientific detachment. I am worried that some of the dedicated editors declare on their userpage that they have very specific views concerning race: while on the one hand, it is, I suppose, a good thing that they wear their bias on their sleeve for others to identify, on the other hand the very fact that they are so avowedly biased may lead to problems. That being said, I have every confidence that the articles, which are currently in a tremendous mess, can be fixed.
As for my own bias with regards to the topic (and yes, I think everyone has some sort of bias), I'll say this. I have no vested interest - personal or professional - in one or the other side of the debate being proven correct. I personally lean somewhat towards the hereditarian side of the debate, based on my own understanding of the evidence (both psychometric and genetic, in terms of what 'races' are), but it is not tremendously important to me that the hereditarians are proven correct. I find the topic immensely interesting, but since I don't use the 'conclusions' to the debate to support political opinions (whether racist or egalitarian), I won't get emotionally worked up over material on the environmental side of the argument being included, or criticisms of the hereditarian view, or whatever. Frankly, I think that anyone who has seriously studied the matter would have to agree that at this point, it is still way too early to put large sums of money - or base public policy decisions - on anything that comes out of it.
One thing that does annoy me, however, is when scientific results are distorted, overlooked, falsified, discounted, etc., for purely political reasons; and both sides of the debate tend to be guilty of that....roughly speaking, we find that hereditarian arguments are appropriated by the far right to try to support their strange views on racial superiority, while in among the environmentalists we find members of the radical left who use their political conclusions as assumptions for their science. And this happens in the scholarly literature, in the 'real world', and on Wikipedia.
I understand that people have very strong political opinions, and I respect that. However, when dealing with a subject as sensitive as this one, it is particularly important that a strong delineation is kept between science on the one hand, and politics on the other. This is because the nature of the subject itself is such an intertwinement of the two fields: while most researchers do try to maintain objectivity, the manner in which the debate has been presented to the public is overtly political. This is part of what makes the topic so interesting, but it is also part of what makes it so very difficult to come up with a neutral, factual article on it.
OK, Wikipedia must have terabytes of people's personal testimony as editors, and of course on the race/intelligence debate. Enough from me - I hope that if anyone who sees me editing the articles bothers to read all this, they will at least understand somewhat more about what I am trying to do here, and that this might help avoid conflicts which I very much fear are going to be inevitable.
A very sensible point of view
[edit]In the book Practical Ethics, philosopher Peter Singer wrote that:
Let us suppose that the genetic hypothesis turns out to be correct... I believe that the implications of this supposition are less drastic than they are often supposed to be...
First, the genetic hypothesis does not imply that we should reduce our efforts to overcome other causes of inequality between people... Perhaps we should put special efforts into helping those who start from a position of disadvantage, so that we end with a more egalitarian result.
Second, the fact that the average IQ of one racial group is a few points higher than that of another does not allow anyone to say that all members of the higher IQ group have higher IQs... The point is that these figures are averages and say nothing about individuals...
The third reason... is simply that, as we saw earlier, the principle of equality is not based on any actual equality that all people share. I have argued that the only defensible basis for the principle of equality is equal consideration of interests... Equal status does not depend on intelligence. Racists who maintain the contrary are in peril of being forced to kneel before the next genius they encounter.