Another Collapse

Heh I'm sure.

I don't get why anyone would try to defend the Bell Curve with a straight face, even on the internet.

Maybe Brits didn't get the memo but the BC and all the "researchers" associated with it are a complete joke in the U.S., have been completely discredited, and we've all moved on to arguing with newer, more subtly ridiculous claims about "race"-based genetic predispositions toward intelligence...

nomadthesecond said:

Mr. Tea, if you're talking about the Bell Curve [again guh], I suggest you get a copy and actually look through the data and "research." I'm sure anyone who is getting a PhD in physics will be able to spot the gigantic holes in their controls...

Click to expand...

I'm not saying their research wasn't flawed - in fact if you look back at that thread you'll see me saying I think the conclusions were spurious for several reasons - I was just pointing out the idiocy in one of HMLT's/waffle's arguments as to why it was flawed.

nomadthesecond said:

I don't get why anyone would try to defend the Bell Curve with a straight face, even on the internet.

Click to expand...

Also, would you care to point out exactly where I did this? Look, just because something is factually or even morally wrong that doesn't give you carte blanche to make whatever statements about it you like. Am I "supporting" George Bush when I say that, as far I'm aware, he isn't a child molester?

I mentioned it because I was struck, for the umpteenth time, by our resident schizo-troll's ability to state both P and not-P in the same sentence in the apparent belief that this constitutes making a point.

waffle said:

Reviewing that thread, we see that you ACTIVELY defended such racist dementia, and now you're doing it yet again

Click to expand...

No, you just decided I was defending the study because I wasn't prepared to swallow your fundamentalist dogma that "race doesn't exist".

Race exists--as a social construct.

As a biological fact it's non-existent, except in the minds of racists, who believe that there's some kind of "species within a species" heirarchy of human genetics.

Racism is always racism, no matter how good a racist's intentions may be.

Can't wait till the Bell Curve "researchers" come up with a new batch of data that proves the inherent inferiority of women, based on biologically-based propositions such as "women are more emotional by nature, therefore they are not as logical" type of scientificalist thinking.

None of this does anything to elucidate the fascinating phenomena of Ziono-Nazi propagandists or my allegedly relativist-absolutist personality...

Mr. Tea said:

Let me get this straight: I'm a "pomo relativist" because I believe my viewpoint is the only correct and valid one? Do you even know what the word means? Do you know anything at all?

I'm reminded of the time you claimed some researchers fixed their findings on race and intelligence because they were a) Jewish and b) influenced by Nazi race doctrine.

Click to expand...

Since when is Zionist automatically = Jewish? The illogic employed by Bell Curve researchers (races have inherent [highly abstract] traits) is exactly the same sort used by Nazis like Mengele.

nomadthesecond said:

Race exists--as a social construct.

As a biological fact it's non-existent, except in the minds of racists, who believe that there's some kind of "species within a species" heirarchy of human genetics.

Racism is always racism, no matter how good a racist's intentions may be.

Click to expand...

This is my position as well. That said, there is one potential blindspot here - namely, the varying genetic susceptibility of different "races" to diseases, which is a biological fact.

I'm not entirely sure what consequences could be drawn from this, but it strikes me that - potentially - some troubling ones could be, if someone wished to invoke some further metaphysical supports to their cause - such as a pseudo-Darwinian "survival of the fittest" device. So I wonder what the defense would be, mainly because I think this question might take us into some interesting waters.

Mr. Tea said:

Hmm, I'd certainly take issue with the assertion that termites "understand" anything at all - unless, maybe, we're prepared to go into extremely hypothetical realms about the possibility of consciousness of a 'hive mind' constituted of components acting in some sense as cellular automata. Not a subject I know the first thing about, but it's undeniably a tantalising possibility. In fact, this whole related set of ideas such as implicate order, emergent phenomena and gestalt systems is diametrically opposed to the 'reductive scientific viewpoint' that jambo talks about in the Dawkins thread, without necessarily being any less scientific, I think. The field or meta-field of intelligence, consciousness, complex systems, emergence and cybernetics could well turn out to be the great science of this century, don't you think?

Sorry, bit of a tangent there, but it's fascinating stuff...

Click to expand...

It took me a while to digest this comment, but I think it does impact on the question of the status of science, for the reason that science itself can be understood in such terms = that is, as a kind of theoretical excrescence of an assemblage of processes.

Consider the recent development of the CERN particular accelerator. It is obvious that such a machine could only developed in a particular social epoch - our own - possessed as it is of certain structures, agents, projects, aims. What I am interested in, is the extent to which the model of the physical universe which lies at the heart of CERN might also be read as a model of the socio-economic universe which it produced it.

Further - and even stronger - with a little translation, could it read as the best socio-economic model we possess?

josef k. said:

It took me a while to digest this comment,

Click to expand...

I can't blame you, considering how rambling it was.

josef k. said:

but I think it does impact on the question of the status of science, for the reason that science itself can be understood in such terms = that is, as a kind of theoretical excrescence of an assemblage of processes.

Consider the recent development of the CERN particular accelerator. It is obvious that such a machine could only developed in a particular social epoch - our own - possessed as it is of certain structures, agents, projects, aims. What I am interested in, is the extent to which the model of the physical universe which lies at the heart of CERN might also be read as a model of the socio-economic universe which it produced it.

Further - and even stronger - with a little translation, could it read as the best socio-economic model we possess?

Click to expand...

Yes, the idea that theories (and even entire worldviews or 'paradigms') in science compete with each other while constantly undergoing mutation and even interbreeding, just like biological organisms, is an idea I've come across before, and I think it's fascinating and potentially illuminating. It goes back all the way to Popper or Kuhn, doesn't it?

I'm not sure I quite understand your last sentence, could you clarify it a bit for me? Do you mean the CERN or the LHC (a very particular accelerator indeed ) is a sort of microcosm of the whole of the global capitalist system? Not sure I see it myself, but I'd love to hear more.

Mr. Tea said:

Do you mean the CERN or the LHC (a very particular accelerator indeed ) is a sort of microcosm of the whole of the global capitalist system?

Click to expand...

Yes, precisely - this is my conjecture. I offer it as a conjecture, and am not sure I can convincingly stand it up, though, as I lack fluent knowledge of the discourse of particle physics, and thus lack the ability to translate from that discourse in any adequate way.

But I would call attention in the meantime to the following point: the LHC is both a complex machine itself, and the product of a complex machinery. A huge number of different factors were involved in its construction - economic, political, discursive, techno-scientific. How do all of these factors interrelate? This question is clearly quite significant, across a huge number of spheres, for the reason that these factors are the crucial components of social life as such. If this question could be satisfactorily answered, it would help to reveal how society itself functions. So, if one wished to construct a model, how would one go about it?

I propose that the empirical reality of the LHC - the simple fact that the project has been realized - suggests that there is already a model - and that the LHC is the instantiation of it. I further propose that the LHC inscribes this model into the purposive scientific rationality that it hosts. Clearly, this is not a closed model - the LHC has an formal agency of its own, insofar as it is itself attempting to find something out. What is ultimately attempting to find out? The cornerstone of the next model...

Hmm, well for my part I'm not really too hot on global economics, but we may be able to get somewhere all the same.

Something that's just struck me is the possibility that the huge amounts of cash* that have been lavished on the LHC by many countries around the world have been forthcoming because of a feeling that, despite the project's long time scale and unimaginable complexity, and the fact that the phenomena it's going to be used to search for are incredibly subtle and described by arcane theories that only a tiny proportion of the population understands, it nonetheless represents 'progress' and a large, identifiable human achievement in the face of economic stagnation (or collapse), social fragmentation, climate change, international terrorism and burgeoning fundamentalism, political corruption and all the other things which governments seem to have no control over (or actively collude in) and which defy the best efforts of brilliant, serious people to overcome.



(*still a pittance compared to military budgets or bank bailouts - or even a modern Olympiad)

josef k. said:

This is my position as well. That said, there is one potential blindspot here - namely, the varying genetic susceptibility of different "races" to diseases, which is a biological fact.

I'm not entirely sure what consequences could be drawn from this, but it strikes me that - potentially - some troubling ones could be, if someone wished to invoke some further metaphysical supports to their cause - such as a pseudo-Darwinian "survival of the fittest" device. So I wonder what the defense would be, mainly because I think this question might take us into some interesting waters.

Click to expand...

But actually, the differences in susceptibility to diseases has more to do with catastrophe and other environmental factors and their effects on populations (and the offspring of these populations) evolutionarily.

For example, African-Americans tend to have higher cholesterol and higher incidence of heart disease than do some other groups of Americans. But the same is not true of all black people in the world, but specifically of African-Americans. There are many theories about why, one being the conditions slaves had to endure on the Middle Passage. Only slaves who could use sodium less efficienty were likely to survive months and months on a slaveship.

Also, when people talk about (eg) "Jewish" genetic diseases, what they're talking about are almost never diseases found in people of actually "semitic" origin--they're people from Eastern Europe whose ancestors converted to Judaism. Many of these diseases are also observed in other populations, just not as often.

It's not only imprecise to talk about race general, it's damaging to science, especially medicine. At a certain level, I'm sure the same genetic problems that cause, say, Bloom's disease can be found in all kinds of Eastern Europeans who don't have Jewish last names--they're just not as common because when communities don't intermarry for several generations their genetic predispositions tend to get less similar rather than more.

waffle said:

The varying genetic susceptibility of humans to diseases. Defence? That 'disease' itself can be scrambled, can in fact itself transpire to be a 'survival of the fittest' outcome. Take, for instance, Sickle-cell disease: in primarily Sub-Saharan Africa, where the incidence of another disease, Malaria, is common, those with alleles of sickle-cell disease are completely resistant to malaria (because sickle red-blood cells are immune to the malaria parasites), with the result that populations in those areas over time become Sickle-cell dominant, that is to say, in those countries where malaria is common, there is a clear survival value in carrying a single sickle-cell gene. Whereas in the West, where malaria is not a threat, those with Sickle-cells are subject to derogatory labelling, etc, on racist grounds, as with 'disease' generally.

Click to expand...

Yup, exactly. x-post.

nomadthesecond said:

Yup, exactly. x-post.

Click to expand...

Again, this makes a lot of sense to me.

But the only thing I would note is that although this fact, in the grand scheme of things, is plainly contingent and metaphysically meaningless, it does provide fodder for a racialist taxonomy. In modern and post-modern times, such taxonomies have, at their intellectual bedrocks, always tended to return to Darwin.

To continue playing the Devil's Advocate, you can easily see the culturally-relativist racialist (he need not, I guess, be an actual racist) saying: "I know perfectly well that the global distribution of genetic traits is completely environmental, based on rational evolutionary algorithms, and so on... but this contingency has nonetheless delivered a world of genetically-distinct races."

In order to be truly successful, the racialist needs to solder biology (and especially, the biology of a racial taxonomy) and culture together somehow. This is not impossible, since there is no hard and fast separation between culture and biology to begin with - culture too deals in biological matter - adrenaline, serotonin, and so on.

Clearly, we are quite a long way here from simplistic ideas about Blacks & Jews and Arabs. On the other hand. we are not too far from colonialism. More philosophically, the vital question here seems to be: How do you handle difference? What abstractions is it appropriate to make from difference? And this is of course a very old question.

I don't think it's so difficult to parse the difference between populations scientifically and the cultural differences that have been constructed over time socially. Is it? Maybe it is for some people.