Re: James Watson loses job over speech

Murray Arnow <arnow@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

tony cooper wrote:
J. J. Lodder wrote:

We were talking science here. In particular the claim that it is a
scientific truth that blacks are on average dumber than whites.


Where was this claim made? What Watson said was "All our social
policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as
ours, whereas all the testing says not really."

The claim was about the results of testing. Pointing out test results
is not the same as claiming a scientific truth. Particularity when
the tests were not administered by the scientist doing the pointing
out.


It seems we are seeing a recycling of history. Some thirty years ago
another Nobel Prize winner, William Shockley (a physicist), did more than
screwup an interview; he actively professed the genetic basis of the
inferior intelligence of blacks.[1] He caused a bigger brouhaha than
Watson, but Watson wasn't fired because of this single remark; it was a
list of his bumbling stupidities that preceded this incident that did him
in; e.g., "some anti-Semitism is justified." The laboratory that he worked
for got fed up with his embarrassments and handed him his pink slip.

[1] Shockley used all sorts of data to prove his point. His screwup was he
didn't pay any attention to the errors in the data. The data was very
biased and culturally skewed. But his greatest error was not giving any
thought to the consequences of his pronouncements. The smartest man I've
ever known, Dale R. Jones, succinctly stated the problem with Shockey's
argument, "It serves no useful purpose." This is exactly why Watson's
remarks are so stupid; they serve no useful purpose.

One of the point of the 'bell curve wars' of the seventies
was precisely that the test result -were- made to serve a purpose.
They were used to argue among other things
that spending money on better education or remedial teaching
for blacks was a waste of taxpayers money,
since those blacks had been shown by testing
to be too stupid inherently to profit from better education anyway.
It is of course arguable whether or not that is a useful point.

A mere point of academic dispute wouldn't have generated so much heat,

Jan


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Fred Reed weighs in on James Watson debacle.............
    ... Science as Politics Occasionally Contaminated by Reason or Truth, ... ravings, and made me feel humble, and this Watson business made me feel mouthy, ... science--of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology, which is almost science. ... Saying that Jews are smarter is equally as racist as saying that blacks ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • Re: Fred Reed weighs in on James Watson debacle.............
    ... Science as Politics Occasionally Contaminated by Reason or Truth, ... ravings, and made me feel humble, and this Watson business made me feel mouthy, ... science--of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology, which is almost science. ... Saying that Jews are smarter is equally as racist as saying that blacks ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • Re: Fred Reed weighs in on James Watson debacle.............
    ... Science as Politics Occasionally Contaminated by Reason or Truth, ... ravings, and made me feel humble, and this Watson business made me feel mouthy, ... science--of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology, which is almost science. ... Saying that Jews are smarter is equally as racist as saying that blacks ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • Re: Watson, and black IQ
    ... James Watson, discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, ... There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual ... equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will ... I've worked with blacks and whites and I ...
    (rec.martial-arts)
  • Re: James Watson loses job over speech
    ... scientific truth that blacks are on average dumber than whites. ... What Watson said was "All our social ...
    (alt.usage.english)