John Derbyshire, eminent race realist and (as I brag about incessantly) a reader of this very blog, gave an interview with the HL Mencken Club where he champions data above all else:
And it [mathematical training] gave me a deep respect for data. I always want to go to the data. And if somebody tells me that society is in this state or that state, show me the data that tells me that...And I think a proper conservatism should rest on respect for data.He goes on to discuss empiricism, the world of facts, and the application of these facts to understanding the human world. Over at GLPiggy, Chuck and others had a discussion about female licentiousness and tattoos and piercings. A commenter, Retrenched, offers this quip on what he considers the rather obvious connection:
They needed a study to tell them this ["females with tattoos more likely to engage in risky behavior including sex"]? Really? What next — “research shows that Minnesota gets more snow than Florida”?Clearly, Mr. Derbyshire's approach contrasts with that of Retrenched. And thus a conundrum arises for the empirically inclined conservative, individuals who ostensibly respect the insights of yesterday yet also understand the power of modern science.
One notes that the evident truths of yesterday, such as racial intelligence differences and the existence of stable gender norms, have been undermined by Boasian anthropology and social constructionism. Society no longer accepts these facts as even acceptable avenues for inquiry. Prior to the great PC purge of the 20th century, people just knew some things, such as those noted above, to be true. You had your eyes and that sufficed in understanding group predilections and other social phenomena, as in men don't like fatties. A modicum amount of anecdotal evidence substantiated popular conceptions and stereotypes.
No one championed convoluted explanations for obvious genetic propensities. No one questioned what they say right in front of them every single day. People just knew stuff and everyone agreed because it was so damn obvious.
Yet according to Mr. Derbyshire, we need an empirical approach to understanding the complexities of human behavior. We need data to substantiate our claims about how the world works and how people act. Simply, I'm not convinced. I don't need studies to convince me to eat paleo, I only need to look in the mirror (eye placement and teeth shape). I don't need complicated statistics to convince me of racial intelligence differences, I merely need a day at the mall and another in a public school. I don't need a study to tell me girls like assholes, I need a weekend at the Jersey Shore.
Further, we can no longer trust the academic and intellectual elite to produce accurate data. Quite simply, they lie and do so almost without shame. Here's my takedown of diet luminary Dr. Dean Ornish's praise of an anti-paleo study and a similar intellectual disembowelment of the much celebrated China Study from Denise Minger. In the realm of gender, here's a blogger who argues that these women are ugly only due to Western insularity. With regards to race, here's David Brooks on the much heralded, and ultimately flawed, Harlem Miracle. Of course, there's the now infamous ClimateGate scandal as well.
All this blatantly dishonest scholarship implies that even if we did accept data over our own observations, we no longer have a dispassionate intellectual edifice to trust. The left has taken over the intellectual landscape and I personally trust my own instincts more than the almost always biased work of professional intellectuals.
26 comments:
Assuming you are amenable to contrasting points of view, the following may be of interest to you and your readers in light of the preset topic:
http://traditionalcatholicism.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/the-dangers-of-reductionism/
Happy Friday!
I'm all for science and data, but I try to keep 2 things in mind.
1. Ideologues will manipulate "science" in many different ways. They might deliberately falsify results, but this is rare. More often they will "spin" a finding to support their position, whether it actually does or not.* Sometimes they will do bad science, by constructing a method that is more likely to confirm their position.** Most frequently, they will simply highlight studies that confirm their position and ignore those that do not. Most of this is not done deliberately, but is just the result of unconscious biases influencing their work. It doesn't help that most of the media and general public has no fucking idea what is science and what isn't.***
*http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh011911.shtml
Washington post article cites a statistic supposedly showing that Arizona has a dismally low level of community spirit. The actual study from which the statistic was pulled says that "Arizona’s percentage is among the highest of all geographic areas studied to date using this index."
**http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/
A study on gun violence measures the correlation between gun deaths and 21 factors. The whole study is garbage for many different reasons, but guess which factor turns out to be the #1 cause of gun deaths? McCain Vote Share. How convenient! A study that just happens to confirm the media's knee-jerk reaction to the Giffords shooting! Can't argue with the facts.
***http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018445.html
A "study" found that blacks and hispanics were twice as likely as whites to have done heroic deeds. How did they find out? They asked people whether or not they had done heroic deeds. This is blatant propaganda disguised as science. Moreover, if whites had reported themselves twice as likely to be heroic as blacks and hispanics this fact would have been omitted, or spun some other way.
Clearly, Mr. Derbyshire's approach contrasts with that of Retrenched.
I don't know about "clearly." On a practical level, intuition and prejudice are little more than the human brain performing a formal empirical study as well; except in hyperspeed.
Its data is personal observation, hard-wired subliminal response to certain stimuli, and inherited wisdom.
Blacks and Latinos commit more crime on average than whites, richer neighborhoods are generally safer than poorer, Far-East Asians score higher on IQ tests created in the West than do the Westerners ourselves. Also, Far East civilizations perceive what has made the West successful, rugged individualism, as a vice, men have also have more and greater intellectual achievements than women do. Yet, it is important to understand that these are only general statistics that shouldn't be taken out of context and applied to an individual. It wouldn't be fair to Niel DeGrasse Tyson if people thought he was dumb and violent just because of his skin color.
Although statistics should still be considered when making decisions. If a black person had a choice between a black neighborhood and a white one, he would chose the white one almost every time because white neighborhoods are generally safer.
Likewise, Israel should do whatever it can to prevent a bloody Islamic theocracy from taking it over.
A fundamental concept of leftism is mass hallucination- if a whole bunch of people believe something, it becomes true. Thus "reality" has no meaning to them- the scientifically observable reality of HDB is is just the bourgeouis hallucination of the world. Leftism is extremely resistant to reality.
I like data, raw. Studies allow researchers egregious latitude to draw conclusions after controlling for variables including those variables which can actually be causal. Intellectuals certainly can be dishonest, but there is a club like mentality that protects bad intellectuals who should be excised from intellectual circles, not for their opinions, but for their dishonest reporting practices. From the actuarial science perspective, the data are very useful, which is how insurers make money. So, it is possible to make sense of the data, once the interested parties are properly motivated.
What's your criteria for "obvious"? This supposed folk wisdom that you you supposedly derive from anecdotal observation and "instinct" is based upon ideological assumptions. People who have the opposite ideological assumptions are "seeing" very different things than you are on a regular basis, and their experiences are leading them to a very different set of conclusions.
Also, anything that claims to be "paleo" has to rely upon data for any credibility at all, considering that it involves making a statement about the prehistorical diet, something which you have no immediate experience of whatsoever. Upon the basis of experience, you can state with validity, "I feel better when I eat X and when I avoid eating Y", but that has nothing to do with what paleolithic humans did or didn't eat. Recent studies have shown fossilized grain particles in the excavated teeth of Neanderthals, which strikes a huge blow to the notion that there's anything paleo about the paleolithic diet. If you personally feel better when you avoid grains though, you should probably continue to do so, regardless of whether or not Neanderthals ate that way.
Data is cool.
People can be dishonest at any time, whether their arguments are based on statistical data or general propositions. Or experience.
A wrong statement may rely on any of the three.
There's a reason why anedoctal evidence is dismissed by serious scientists - it can't be proved wrong.
The error in handling statistical, on the other hand, might be objectively pointed to.
But I might as well be wrong. When dishonesty prevails, it doesn't matter if statements can be logically validated or not.
I'm most confident when data and experience support each other.
The answer to dishonest (or at least self deluded) research is transparency. Insist on getting all the data and metadata.
Light is the best disinfectant. It's fundamental to the scientific method.
Further, we can no longer trust the academic and intellectual elite to produce accurate data. Quite simply, they lie and do so almost without shame.
Just about the most lazy, obnoxious, stupid, and pig ignorant thing I've ever seen written by an HBD blogger.
Because you acknowledge a couple of obvious facts where the elite is wrong does not give you license to shit all over science and statistics or mean that you are some great oracle of knowledge that is above scientific consensus.
The scientific consensus is normally correct and crackpot fringers like HIV denialists are normally incorrect. In the case of race realism, the establishment is incorrect but that does not mean the fringe nutter right (or left) is the ideal area to get quality information from.
Only on a few politically charged issues do scientists have to obfuscate, and I would say in the case of race and global warming that the consensus among ACTUAL scientists is in favor of the anti-establishment position but they only go along with the establishment argument because of political pressure, not because the data support the left on race and global warming.
According to a Snyderman Study, a majority of psychologists agreed with Charles Murray and Hernstein that the black white IQ gap was largely genetic, but those psychologists only agreed with the hereditarian position and took the survey under condition of anonymity.
Even Franz Boas didn't say there was no difference between whites and black in terms of intelligence.
He acknowledged that, since blacks have smaller cranial volume than whites and because there was a moderate correlation between cranial volume and intelligence, that blacks were less likely to produce men of "High Genius" than were whites (Google, "Men of High Genius" and "Boas"). His point was that there was enough overlap between blacks and whites that blacks could be encouraged to assimilate into American middle class norms, not that blacks could be equal whites in terms of civilizational output.
Basically, Boas' ideas were not out of tune with reality albeit still to optomistic.
Boas ideas were used later to justify blank slatism (along with Behviorist psychology), but that was largely because his ideas were taken beyond his original intentions for POLITICAL REASONS by politicians who became disenchanted with the excesses of the Hitler regime, not because the empirical evidence of Boas supported extreme blank slatism.
Just about the most lazy, obnoxious, stupid, and pig ignorant thing I've ever seen written by an HBD blogger.
Because you acknowledge a couple of obvious facts where the elite is wrong does not give you license to shit all over science and statistics or mean that you are some great oracle of knowledge that is above scientific consensus.
This is a political and cultural blog, thus most commentary I offer is applied to political and social phenomena.
So am I "shitting all over science and statistics" if applied to the general study of nature? 100% no. I think science is wonderful in building airplanes, studying bacteria, discovering new physics, etc.
But in regards to politically applicable (and often polemical) phenomena, organized science has largely failed us. There's a reason why conservatives criticize a technocratic elite.
(Honestly I thought this qualification of my post was quite obvious.)
"In the case of race realism, the establishment is incorrect but that does not mean the fringe nutter right (or left) is the ideal area to get quality information from."
Whatever happened to the Hegelian dialect? The thesis and antithesis do not necessarily have to be from a fringe, but in the end the correct from the right and the correct from the left will converge into one objectively best center.
As for those who disparage science:
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
Special Relativity forbids superluminal travel, more energy consumed than is worth for space travel. Moreover, the common ancestor for all life with bifocal vision was here on Earth, and the odds are far too great for evolving any life, never mind intelligent life. In light of these facts, we should not investigate the ET matter further.
http://www.anti-relativity.com/
-The proof for relativity has already been established.
http://www.fixedearth.com/
Do I really need to explain here?
In summery I will say that the authors of aforementioned quack sites are infamous for not applying Occam's Razor.
The global scientific conspiracy is so grand! There is an interdisciplinary effort by almost all scientists to perpetuate heliocentricism and evolution, the Moon landing "hoax", depopulation (yet the population is growing...) all as a conspiracy against them!
Also, no one tell the fundie conspiracy theorists that evolution and Christianity are compatible:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/19021_58398_ENG_HTM.htm
But in regards to politically applicable (and often polemical) phenomena, organized science has largely failed us.
I don't see how science has failed because the actual data supports the conservative position on many issues.
The studies have long supported the weight losing benefits of low-carb diets, that blacks have lower IQ than whites and that IQ is largely heritable, and that there are psychological differences between men and women.
In the case of Global Warming, I'll admit the data can be interpreted in favor of the Gaianists but the right also can use the actual data to support their position.
In all of these cases the problem isn't the actual scientific data and the scientists who collected them (IQ tests and heritibality studies have almost always supported the hereditarian position), the problem is that data is being ignored or distorted because of a political agenda, not a scientific agenda, albeit many scientists go along with the political agenda for the purposes of career climbing.
@ TUJ:
The studies have long supported the weight losing benefits of low-carb diets, that blacks have lower IQ than whites and that IQ is largely heritable, and that there are psychological differences between men and women.
So you're saying someone can't look at studies in mainstream academic journals and get the exact opposite ideas?
I think there's ample data on both sides, due to the other side simply lying or massaging their results to fit their leftist narrative (see Ancel Keys, China Study, Dean Ornish, Steven Levitt on HBD, Harlem Miracle, global warming, etc...).
So on one hand, I agree that one can find tons of data supporting conservative/HBD positions (see Roissy's post today), but on the other hand, there's plenty of misleading data out there as well.
In the end, I think basic commonsense and experience shouldn't be ignored because some fancy study says otherwise.
"In the end, I think basic commonsense and experience shouldn't be ignored because some fancy study says otherwise."
The problem with many of the fancy studies is that the data included in the data tables in the reports themselves do not support the conclusions of the reports.
Half the time they don't even bother to massage the data. They just outright lie and the media reports the conclusions without even reading the reports. It is utter madness.
Case in point:
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/05/military-fit-to-serve-index-by-state.html
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/05/militarily-fit-to-serve-by-state-round.html
@One
Feelings are great. I don't want to diminish the value of your feelings and emotions in determining what's true and what's important.
The value of data is that it can be shared. We can all better agree on the value of a number.
Your personal impressions of the truth can be valuable to you. But they're personal. They can't be shared in the same way. That may be why your stability depends on hiding out here and limiting yourself to communications with people whose personal impressions of the truth are similar to yours.
The downside is: as you rely more on personal instinct and feelings to define your own reality, and the less on more communicable information, you risk becoming profoundly isolated.
"The downside is: as you rely more on personal instinct and feelings to define your own reality, and the less on more communicable information, you risk becoming profoundly isolated."
Hilarious. Gee, Onestdv, if you would go along with groupthink, you could join in the warm fuzzies of the ad populum fallacy.
Personally I agree on the usefulness of data but not so I can have more friends!
One:
I seem to detect a disconnect between your usual very sharp analyses and your defense of common sense. In general TUJ is absolutely right because science is in fact our best means of learning how things work. There are no other alternatives.
People like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil make a fortune elaborating on methods that defy science and encourage subjectivity.Science fifty years ago began to gain widespread support from the American public but the political evolution of America led the mass mind far astray so that quackery, confusion, and superstition have reached heights unimagined in those simpler days.
Two books should be read by all of you: Denialism by Michael Specter and Beyond the Hoax by Alan Sokal. Specter's great contribution is a journalistic defense of science using 5 hot topics:(1) The Vioxx Scandal by Merck,(2) The organic food hoax,(3)The vaccine/autism myth,(4) The vitamin myth, and (5) The race/medicine debacle.
Specter is a liberal whose critical thinking neglects a frontal assault on liberals while still showing them to be unusually vulnerable to stupidity. In this book he even shows how Oprah Winfrey's blind ignorance supports a maniacal irrationalist like Jenny McCarthey.Liberals are also the target of Sokal's highly sophisticated treatise on post-modernism and its pervasive anti-intellectualism.Academia is seething with irationalism within the social sciences, humanities, and marginal race and gender studies.
TUJ is exactly right about the need to ground beliefs as often as possible in empirical fact. We can't check every datum or claim but the closer our beliefs are to established science the more reliable is our knowledge. We must fight endlessly against the monster called relativism and keep poetry and feeling in their proper places.Specter and Sokal will bring you back to reality.Alas, the liberal media will remain quite indifferent because they smell the stench of liberal idiocy and they prefer not to acknowledge it. OneSTDV may be favoring "common sense" but he usually demonstrates tougher thinking than that. In general, my friends, the work of research is tedious, difficult, and objective. Frauds are relatively rare and can destroy reputations. The East Anglia scandal in no way discredits oceans of basic research showing climate change as reality. TUJ and I would gladly take One back because he seems to intuitively favor science anyway.
"Further, we can no longer trust the academic and intellectual elite to produce accurate data."
Bingo -- science has been corrupted.
Trust your experience implicitly.
--
Haumea
Experience alone never serves as an infallible basis for knowledge. I strongly suspect that this discussion is a product of the success of liberalism in its post-modern guise. Unless you do science regularly or steep yourself in good critical thinking books and Skeptic Magazine, you could easily imbibe the toxic waste of liberalism, namely subjectivism.This meme leaves millions lost in the reveries that imply "empowerment" and makes of them intellectual cripples as they follow Jenny McCarthey, Oprah Winfrey, and numerous True Believers.
While conservative True Believers follow their own issues, liberals now stand exposed by Specter and Sokal as absolute misfits because they have moved away from science toward subjectivism. Remember Tomothy Leary? He created a whole cult of liberal misfits thinking that LSD hallucinations were REALITY. TUJ and I would have you return to science for structuring your knowledge of the world because every other route is mined for delusion, illusion, and myth.
Finally, no-one runs around trying to discredit the laws of physics because experiments based upon given facts do indeed work. Data can be abused on occasion and the scientific community eventually corrects its errors, as in the vioxx case. It is in the structure of its procedures that science provides us with reliable knowledge. If you distrust its solid, verified foundations, you likely suffer from immense ignorance or intellectual incapacity. Creationists in general suffer from both problems but liberals today have morphhed into society's pit bulls against science because of intoxication by subjectivism. Lunacy has become epidemic.
Undiscovered Jew:
Depends what you mean by "HIV denialists." One sort of denialist is someone who scoffed in 1986 when CDC said that by 2000 one in 3 Americans would have HIV. We knew then it would never break out into the wider heterosexual community, and we were right. They, on the other hand, never admitted they had no basis for the prediction, and still will not concede it was politically motivated at the time.
@ Cornelius Troost:
I assure you I'm a hardcore skeptic. In fact, I was very much into organized skepticism, i.e. Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, prior to my political awakening.
As I say in the update, this discussion pertains almost exclusively to social and political phenomena.
One:
You are, of course, perfectly right about the value of commonsense knowledge based upon numerous observations. For most of history people were uneducated and depended upon such experience. Nonetheless, many errors were made as observations were entwined with emotional interpretations that led to "witches" being killed,etc. Most people believed in a flat earth once upon a time.
You again are correct that racial group differences are obvious to careful observors. Today these obvious differences are not seen as they were 60 years ago. According to Audacious Epigone race realists went from 30% to 10% over the last 30 years. Why? The effects of liberal propaganda were powerful enough to shame the nation into changing their perceptions!! Now young whites view the distressing behavior of blacks as perfectly OK and their schoolroom stupidity viewed as a product of societal malfunction or psychological manipulation by whites. Nowhere can whites imagine simple genetic differences as a primary causal factor because it violates liberalism.
Steve Sailer and Parapundit are two very smart thinkers who combine respect for statistics with respect for observation. Inductivist relies heavily on data but also clever interpretation counts as it should. Ideally we must depend on both statistics and experience. They often reinforce each other. The Bell Curve ignited a vast war between the Left and Right because well-known statistics were not accepted by liberals while HBD'ers have no such qualms. All the IQ data in the world did not stop a Michigan scholar from promotimh blank slate madness.Obama and millions of Americans do not believe their eyes. Data do indeed count in science and in life, but we must promote science to the masses to counter the ill effects of liberalism that values subjectivity.It is a most important battle.
Ironically, OneSTDV is right for one of the reasons people like us tend to ignore, because it's underdeveloped in our case: our natural intuition for people is in many ways more sophisticated than a controlled study, because we evolved to navigate a social world where people frequently have incentive to lie. It's hard to tell who a woman's *really* attracted to without sticking a probe up her vagina--and how many women want to stick around for that?
Combined with the capture of academia by the left, OneSTDV has a pretty good case for the primacy of empirical experience over something coming from a bunch of guys who fear losing their jobs if something not PC comes out.
Re the feminist blogger: Actually, she kind of had a point in that calling yourself a feminist while going on about women's attractiveness is sort of like running an HBD blog while going on about how intelligent Obama is--theoretically possible but somewhat counterintuitive (and in the case of the feminist, offensive to that sensibility).
And, oh, yeah, those women are FUUUUG-LEE. At least the shoggoths at scifi conventions are fun to talk to.
As others have pointed out, digging into the actual data from most studies in social science fields which promote the liberal line, one tends to find either bad study design, which means the study is meaningless (which happens sometimes for data which support the conservative line, too), or data which doesn't support the liberal conclusion nearly so well as the study authors claim it does.
Global warming is a somewhat different case: while the data largely supports the conclusion that the earth's climate has been getting warmer, it doesn't support the conclusion that significant further warming is that likely - there are too many unknown confounding factors in atmospheric science to make that claim. And there is *no* scientific data which leads to the normative conclusion that destruction of the industrial economy is necessary to reverse global warming; nor even to support the normative conclusion that the predicted warming is on balance bad for "the earth" or for humans in general.
Oh - I'd be willing to bet that even Australian aboriginal men would find those women fugly.
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