Against "Race Realism": my DNA & IQ debate vs Ask Yourself.

I used to live and do research and
engage in humanitarian work in northern Laos specifically the northwest of Laos an area where in many ways the map was wiped clean by the American army so the clock was reset the US Army there the northwest they didn't rely so much on aerial bombardment they didn't want so much on airplanes to destroy villages they were able to use more soldiers on foot with the all-mighty Zippo lighter going from village to village and forcing all of the population to leave and burning down the buildings that remain and so on so there was a militarily enforced mass migration that in most areas where I was specifically northwest of Laos reduced the population to zero now in some cases those people were moved into refugee camps in some cases that has moved into larger cities several days march away and yet there were actually cases where they were put into tents and massacred I've seen some documents or evidence of that I guess probably just because they became inconvenient for the US Army to to relocate nevertheless this relates to the topic of this video in the following rather dynamic way when ask yourself Isaac when Isaac was making his impassionate or is impassioned argument in favor of quote unquote race realism in favor of you know a racist view of how DNA determines intelligence I pointed out to them that there are circumstances in the world where you can compare two villages on the map in this area of northern Laos where everything was destroyed and then they started rebuilding the village at the same point in history like after the war with the Americans ended the school was built in two villages at the same time um you know people started to emerge from illiteracy and absolute poverty at the same time economic development happened at the same pace like for example they both had no electricity and then received electricity at the same time where really you had about the same advantages and disadvantages over maybe a 50-year period even and you could claim that DNA was really a decisive or major variable in separating the two villages now the ethnic groups of Laos do belong to completely different language families and there are really significant ethnic differences between people all of whom may be referred to as as Lotion especially in that part of Laos it is very very very ethnically diverse and is very linguistically diverse and culturally diverse so you could look at a village that is entirely populated by the acha the a cover one ethnic group and you can compare them to a village of people who are Hmong Mong is spelled HM Ong you could look at a village that is tightly and compare it to a village that is Thai dang you could compare people who are part of the Mon Khmer language family they are very ethnically different from the Thai Cateye language family and all living close together in the same climate with broadly speaking many of the same economic advantages and disadvantages so I said to him if you or any of these people were sincerely interested in the relationship between ethnicity and ni q why wouldn't you be looking at this sort of circumstance why would you be engaged in the the insincere arguments from my perspective insincere arguments that you are looking at you know Georgia in the United States of America or Texas what-have-you and pretending that socio-economic factors and indeed explicitly political factors do not explain what you call the quote unquote achievement gap for things like home ownership in the United States America if you guys don't know you can just google redlining redlining is a term it's a simple term that combines a pretty complex phenomenon that ultimately comes down to federal government policy united states america but includes fact that black people united states were forced to live in ghettos that they were not able to buy property that white people were able to buy that they were not able to get bank loans to own a home these are political decisions ultimately made by the president United States of America that's where they all trace back to the directives and carried out by government functionaries and then ultimately implemented by banks and properties for homeland corporations at the end of World War two look at the benefit package that a white War veteran received very often directly linked to free education and housing and house ownership was provided for white soldiers in World War two the opportunities they had and then look at the situation of a black War veteran African American for veterans at the end of World War two it's a really stark difference and this is not ancient history this is this is history that directly impacts my generation I'm 40 years old both way and I know I know this impacted my own family and so forth you talking about a situation of very dynamic inequality very directly linked when talking about African Americans and what European Americans didn't say it's America and it's even more observing you want to talk about indigenous Canadians so the Cree the ajeeb the Mohawk the Inuit you know I really did engage them Socratic like how much do you know about the political history of what an Indian Reservation is like economically and governmentally I remember asking him specifically like you do realize that the school on an Indian Reservation is not provided by the provincial government like you realize like legislatively and politically like there are differences in education that that both exist on paper ahead of reality and of course that's changed a lot in the last 50 years we are not in a position in Canada to pretend that we're comparing people in a laboratory where all variables other than DNA have been controlled now it's also true that if you did this kind of research in northern Laos where there are there are fewer uncontrolled variables where you can say look the American army came in here and completely demolished everything and then the Communist Party resettled these people in villages basically tribal villages of separate ethnicities speaking separate languages they all built their first school at the same time they dug the first water well at the same time they started farming rice what have you you could intentionally design a study or you pick a cluster of villages that are as similar as possible where you try to get rid of other variables so for example you only pick villages that farm rice and you exclude villages that farm pineapples or some other crop you pick a bunch of villages that are absolutely as similar as possible in every way one of the main ones would be access to a highway access to electricity these kinds of things you try to narrow it down as much as possible so that you could look at genetic differences between these people and still you know the role of DNA in this I'll say a little bit more but why I am so skeptical would be minuscule compared to the significance of language nila Isaak again is someone who has none of this experience he's someone who speaks out of crass ignorance to some extent and he someone who speaks out of an echo chamber of you know fascist racist apologists who just recycle talking points from J Phillipe Rushton and the bell curve and what-have-you try to take scientific racism and make it seem respectable these in these contexts um you know why am I so skeptical about ethnicity in DNA I'm going to digress at this point against it to say this um around the Year 1965 it would have been very easy for people to generalize about Chinese people's ability to drive a car about in the United States I mean Chinese Americans how well they could drive a car how well they do on driving tests and it would be completely absurd to claim that this was because of a genetic hereditary property in Chinese people around 1965 that impaired their ability to drive a car very obviously around the Year 1965 you could look at the conditions Chinese people had grown up in in China like their access to a car or how much how many of them really had grown up with a car and then even if they had a car what type of car they drove in what conditions what kind of roads what kind of laws and then that these are people who made the transition maybe from growing up in China between 9 forty and 1965 and they immigrated to the United States of America and passed a driving test and they'll have to deal with totally different road conditions having a driver's license statistically speaking is a very powerful predictor for economic outcomes and even how well you do on your driver's license and one of the main excuses given for racism like the IQ is the idea that IQ has statistically powerful predictive power for how much money you're going to earn a lot of that is negative in the following sense if you have a driver's license you can access employment you can drive to a job interview if you have a driver's license it means you're not visually impaired you're not blind means you don't have a range of physical disabilities that would impair you there are a lot of things excluded just by performing well on a driving test you know you probably don't have verbal and facial tics and twitches or nervous condition that would prevent you from from driving and that would also impair your ability to be economically successful in our society most of the time it would that would make it much more difficult for you to be an economic success story so there's a very very powerful link between having a driver's license and economic success it's also true that the type of people who learn to drive young and learn to drive well are probably people who grow up with privilege etc etc people who didn't just immigrate from China now another another culture I know what by the way I speak reading write Chinese I used to live in Cambodia where I studied the Cambodian language you had a lot of immigrants coming from Cambodia to the United States of America and specifically coming from refugee camps so if you told me there is a difference in how well those people perform on their driving tests that they that Cambodians perform more poorly in getting a driver's license or even that they are worse drivers the Unites States America I can say right away of course it's not genetic of course it's not DNA have you been to Cambodia even worse have you been to a Cambodian refugee camp do you know where these people come from and even if someone makes the further argument that they want to believe driving ability how will you do on a driver's license that it's heredity because it will look on the second generation the children of these people who came from Cambodia came from refugee camps they also perform worse well obviously this is whether you call this culture or Pico culture it's gonna be do a less or extent but yeah maybe if you grow up with a father who's a terrible driver and who normalizes really poor driving because he grew up driving in a totally different culture totally different system of roads and convention different cars and everything else really really different situation growing up driving in Cambodia sure maybe there's some influence there the passes on obviously we were talking about the status of African Americans United States you're talking about a situation of dynamic enforced inequality not random inequality um that was created and sustained by very clear government policies including redlining including what happened at the end of World War two in terms of veterans benefits and so on and including yeah slavery have you heard of that and what happened in the process of reparations and resettlement and integration of black people into its what society a very slow process indeed so it didn't happen overnight with the end of the United Civil War so sure there are a long term knock-on effects in economic and educational attainment from that history that are completely obvious to everyone who has any sincere interest in the social sciences and he was not trying to cynically weaponize these differences and attribute them to DNA now why do I take this approach it is because very fundamentally I am an IQ skeptic I regard the IQ test as being just as meaningless as a driver's license and in the same sense it is meaningful precisely at the low end of the spectrum iq is really important in a legal context of establishing are you responsible for committing murder are you responsible see there are people who are severely mentally disabled mentally impaired IQ tests can be very important in kind where the government will give someone benefits if they're so stupid and so mentally impaired that they really can't hold a job or they struggle to even buy groceries of themselves so there are gradations of intelligence at the low end that are quite important to be able to test empirically by the same token there are gradations at the low end that the driving driver's license tests are that's what they're established to measure what we really want to know is are you a danger to yourself and others on the road a driver's license test does not establish your brilliance it does not establish how how excellent a driver you could be at the upper end are you a stunt car driver are you a racing driver can you perform extraordinarily well under pressure the whole test is set up it's calibrated and intended to regulate and enforce at the low end of the spectrum and that's where it's meaningful but if you know anything about social science distal University degree in political science Isaac has absolutely no education whatsoever he doesn't know how to analyze social scientist exceed ever done this kind of computation and doesn't have this done at bagram education just by excluding the people at the low end of the of the range the people who are for example blind that will itself produce the statistical artifact of a person with a driver's license and a person with a high score on their driving test being more financially and economically successful in every way at every stage of their life now of course also being born wealthy is going to result in you in better on your driving test statistically speaking on this size on the scale of a society of 100 million people people who are born wealthier have access to opportunities like owning a car that makes it easier for them to practice driving learning drive they have the money to hire a professional teacher and go to school they have all kinds of advantages because of their wealth that will show up in the driver's license test whether they just barely pass or pass really well they have advantages over our Cambodian immigrants especially at Cambodian immigrant who comes from a refugee camp at every stage of that process and indirectly their driver's license test is gonna map to those other scores outcomes and achievements so in the same way we talked about the IQ test yeah sure there's gonna be a relationship between performance on the IQ test and real-world both arms but you know there's also gonna be a pretty strong correlation between how wealthy your parents were and how wealthy you are right is anyone in any doubt about this and there's a pretty strong correlation between you know what happened to your grandfather at the end of World War two for me imagine it's only my grandfather both of my grandparents served in World War two so the deal they got in terms of education and benefits my two grandfather's at the end of World War two completely explains my socioeconomic status today a hundred percent right it's not distant so the way black people in America were treated at the end of World War two is an incredibly powerful of formative factor for their status today and the history of segregation redlining ghettoization black people being unable to get a loan to buy in on a house being able to unable to buy a house it's in a white only neighborhood property violence being openly racist in excluding black people access to employment whether or not they can even have certain classes of job access to education cetera oh these things if you just talk about the end of World War two to the present of course they improved dramatically in the decade of the 1980s the status of African Americans in the 1980s improved absolutely fabulously the decade of the 1980s compared to the decade of the 1950s there is no comparison things improved amazingly it's also true that if you're a refugee who moves from Cambodia to Long Beach California materially your life brews in all these ways but nevertheless there were knock-on effects for yourself and maybe even for your children in how well you can drive a car how well you can compete in this economy instead of exam so coming back to the question of northern Laos of small villages that could be more closely comparable in terms of their history where you could be looking more at the effect of DNA on intelligence it's also true that the effect of DNA is going to be trivial absolutely trivial compared to language right now two factors work with language and religion okay so even if we have this study we pick villages that are perfectly comparable same level of education same level access to electricity farm everything everything is the same guess what Thai do people grow up speaking Thai li Hmong people grow up speaking Hmong Mong kamae people grow up speaking one of them home combine languages let's say Kumu khmu okay so let's say those that's what we're comparing you don't think that factor alone makes a difference in what they can read and what they do read like the difference growing up in these three profoundly different language families without even getting into the psychology of language acquisition like to what extent does growing up speaking Chinese actually change the way you perceive reality versus growing up speaking ocean that's an interesting question but on a shallower level what can you read in the Kumu language growing up right even radio so let's say all three of those languages you grow up listening to the radio in your own language they didn't they didn't grow up listening to the same things I mean you okay how about religion so let's say we're talking about Hmong people who are Christian time view people who are terrified of Buddhists and Camus people who still practice tribal animism religion we don't really have a ancestor worship ghost warships pure worship the tiding also very animistic organized religion the akka very complex system of animism Kovak is not you don't think that that's going to make a difference much more profound in their daily life and the perception reality in what kind of intelligence they cultivate and what they do with it can these differences even be captured by an IQ test I you know I don't think in a meaningful sense they'd be captured by a driving test either this also part of my my criticism of the IQ test I don't think the IQ test tells us what it is that we want to know so guys this video is past 20 minutes I could say more not a lot of people express sincere interest in hearing me explain what it was that I discussed when I confronted ask yourself Isaac about his racist views to put it that way it is very clear to me that Isaac is a guy who was initially influenced by Jay Phillipe Rushton and especially a debate that took place between Jay Phillipe Rushton and David Suzuki these are people who are famous in Canada but they are not really so famous the United States or Europe and that debate is on YouTube I just mentioned David Suzuki is an idiot he really is however Jay Phillipe Rushton is a racist who has been so thoroughly discredited that if you even just look at his Wikipedia article it'll be obviously what did I think even look into this for five minutes and the answer is no he did not Isaac was really influenced by seeing this debate between Jay Phillipe Rushton and David Suzuki he lived in an echo chamber of people who reinforced his attitudes getting again and that only ended when he became friends with a medical doctor called dr. avi dr. avi I saw the chilling effect that dr. avi really put him in put him in check on this now once it became Browns doctor he suddenly got much more circumspect and evasive but what his views on race in IQ were but he got into a pattern that's easily refutable isaac of bullying people by saying to them well you can't possibly believe that IQ is equally distributed throughout all ethnic groups for the same reasons that you can't possibly believe that height is equally distributed throughout all the racial groups and then you proceeded with a series of kind of bullying and really false and quite easy to to refute arguments about race and IQ from there Isaac is a weak willed weak minded person who has no sincere interest in the use of philosophy reason or logic for his own benefit for he he's benefit or anybody's benefited he's only interested when it makes him feel powerful and strong and influential and smart and important and he becomes afraid of it as soon as it challenges him as soon as it makes him feel weak and humble and that he's done something wrong and that he needs to go and read a book so it was very challenging him for him to hear from me that he lives in a country that's built on genocide that there's this whole important history literally right under his feet of why Canada is the way it is and why the status and situation of our native peoples is so unequal and that no you absolutely cannot explain the current situation of the Cree in a way within Canada in terms of their quote unquote genetic inferiority this is it's this is not just racist it's false it's easily refuted and it's insane now I have to give him credit he was cordial he heard this and he responded and the discourse went on and on at some depth and some length and I think it's very meaningful that the final conclusion this came to what it revealed in a Socratic sense what was what was disambiguated in the conversation was that Isaac said of himself that his fundamental concern is that Canada should stay the same that in its ethnic composition he did not want Canada to change and he said I mean this is part of his justifying that he's not racist he doesn't just mean that he wants Canada made dominated by white white Christians but he said that he wants Canada to basically retain the same composition where some small percentages is indigenous I guess he doesn't want that to increase he'd also he's also saying that he's not racist in the sense that it's not that he personally wants to see the indigenous people disappear yeah well thanks not much of a bunch of a concession what I pointed out to him in response to that was that that is fundamentally conservative I said well your position is altered is all you're saying is that ultimately this is the status quo that you know and that you're willing to defend it that you want to uphold it I said my situation is that I am fundamentally a dissident I am very dissatisfied with than what it is in many ways including the legacy of colonialism and genocide and including racism believe many many other things between insanity I am so dissatisfied with Canadian society that I regard immigration and changes in the ethnic composition of Canada changes in the language spoken in Canada I regard that positively just because there is at least the possibility of radical and fundamental change in Canada I am so dissatisfied with Canadian society I'm interested in that radical and fundamental change even if it makes things worse so I have no illusions that Chinese people are superior to people I speak reading my Chinese but if you ask me do I think Chinese immigration to Canada is a good thing my fundamental reason for thinking is a good thing is that at least it raises new questions it results in new openness new challenges and the possibility of positive change in a country that has a political system that I despise as a system of education that I despise it has a system that I would like to see disrupted and challenged and to take on new directions so that is not how how Isaac feels and Isaac was led down a path first through flattery because these racist views as presented by people like Jay Foley brush done as presented by Steven Pinker as presented by Sam Harris they are fundamentally flattering to him we had a funny situation the other day here you may have noticed just yesterday I uploaded a video with a guy named Mohammed Mohammed's family is from the greater Palestine area mostly Jordan but he's his family history as part of the Palestinian experience and now with the rise of Israel mmm disrupted and destroyed the civilization that existed there before um British Empire also has a lot of the blame before it State of Israel but whatever and I pointed out to him we were talking about the politics of Israel Palestine the British Empire I said you know it's really pathetic that we live in an era when I am considered extraordinary for being opposed to apartheid when I am a pole way it's extraordinaire I'm opposed to apartheid when it could benefit me when for me as someone who's definitely Jewish I could benefit from this apartheid as it's sitting here on the same couch here's Melissa unless it's a white American who is not of Jewish ancestry we don't think it's remarkable that melissa is opposed to an apartheid system that would benefit her and that historically in the past did benefit her people like her you know point is back when there was a part-time United States in America people like Melissa benefited she has blue eyes more blue okay hazel what do you go with okay she prefers hazel to me they look blue in bright light Bella blue anyway this is uh this is a fair-skinned white person of mixed European ancestry she was one of the beneficiaries of that system of apartheid but we completely assume in a speck expect her to be opposed to apartheid even when it benefits her and yet it's remarkable it's considered remarkable for me to oppose apartheid one of the benefit me Isaac and all the people like Isaac it should not be remarkable it should not be exceptional for people like you to oppose scientific racism even when it benefits you even when it's flattering to you even when people like Steven Pinker are telling you that you're special and that you're intelligent because of your blood you're not none of us are