This is a text I’ve been writing ever since the Watson episode. I decided to finally post it because it has been so much time already… It’s not very well written, and has many subjects… Certainly not a pearl from my blogs, but now I’m happy I can move on to think other things!…

After Mr. Watson’s controversial interview , many people were quick to deny anything he said, and call him a racist. I even confess I dismissed his sayings as senile stupidity. But then I read this interview with Charles Murray and decided that people were in fact too harsh with Mr. James…

I’ve been giving a lot of thinking to this subject — with my own limited IQ — and I believe that while people discussing the subject are focusing on the test results, there are actually many other secondary questions related to it that were unfortunately missed by this polemic tsunami. I would like to dwell into a couple of these subjects. And I warn you already: I believe Mr. Watson is being a bit of a victim.

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FIRST ISSUE: What is racism?

Mr. Watson is being labelled a racist, but what exactly does that mean? To me, the epitome of what I call racism is a building where there is one elevator with a sign in it saying “no colored people”; Or perhaps that (said fictional) sign on the entrance of a park, in that Bruce Lee movie “Fist of Fury” (Jīng wǔ mén), saying: “No dogs or Chinese allowed”.

Racism is the denial of access to public services or benefits to a certain subgroup of citizens of a society. Those benefits can run from parks, toilets and seats in a church or bus, to jobs and school positions. It includes private shops, for example: you can’t own a bakery or a bookstore and sit in the door saying who can enter and who can’t.

People often think that “racism” includes more than that. They think it can include the hate or fear against some race. But can a government who wants to forbid racism make hating illegal? I don’t think so… Feelings and thoughts were still unrestricted last time I checked (tough some people out there loved the idea of “precrime” from that P. K. Dick-ean movie).

Some people think that if you call someone a pejorative name with racial thematic, you can be arrested for “racism”. This is not true. You may have committed a crime of insult, humiliation, aggression, public assault, stalking, whatever, but it is not a “crime of racism”. Even those situations I mentioned earlier can all be seen as simply a denial of a citizen to his rights.

What can happen in the legal fight against racism is the judge give you a larger reclusion time because that crime of yours had a “futile motivation” or something like that. Law should deny the possibility of classifying the citizens, be it by race or anything else (gender is the obvious example). The bad attitudes of a racist are bad per se, and the motivations and intentions of the criminal do not typify the act. What the law must say is that “everyone can use the elevator”, and not that “it is forbidden to restrict the use of elevators by black people”. This law makes official the existence of separate subgroups within the society, mistakenly turning it into a “racist law”.

When someone says someone made a racist action, or declaration, what is meant is that some (bad) action or declaration was made, and it had a “racist” motivation, what means hate / fear against a certain “race”. What exactly would be then the crime committed by Mr. Watson, had he or had not a racist motivation? Was it a lie? Well, it wasn’t! If he made the tests, and got the results and the statistics tell there is a correlation, well, then it was scientific, it is a fact, and he is reporting it.

People should not question the veracity of the test. They can argue about the conclusions and the methodology, but never about the numbers. Unless we are charging him of scientific fraud, for example. A racist ’’fraud’’, a racist ’’lie’’.

The production of an statistic from a rigorous test can never be seen as racism. Racism would be, for example, forbidding someone to use a certain elevator because his score was low in such an I
test.

Regarding his conclusions from his tests: If there are similar tests with different results, they must be referenced, quoted and used to confront Mr. Watson’s results. We must try to find a new and better way to explain his results, and not say he looks like a racist and deny that there might be a scientific finding in his experiments.

When dealing with a (potential) racist it is important to make his crimes explicit. Avoid using the potential motivation of his instead of the specification of his crime. Otherwise this becomes a witch hunt! When witch-hunting starts to get “hot”, the witches stop to be accused of having done specific things, as making potions, destroying harvests or bewitching some man. They start to be accused only of “being a wicked witch”!…

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SECOND ISSUE: Races and more races.

It strikes me that when discussing the subject people tend to start talking only about “blacks” and “whites”, only occasionally putting “Asians” and “American natives” in the discussion…

Of course I understand that coarse classifications make it easier to collect data, but why is it always coarse?? It’s very rare to see statistics that study more specific groups. And when we see it, those sub-groups are often from the “white” large group. For example, some I
tests focus on Jews…

I would like to see tests that break down the classifications. More then seeing how much intelligence (or any other variable) can be generally better or worse inside different groups, I would like to see the diversity of races and ethnicities and cultures being considered. This gives to people the consideration they deserve… It’s more respectful to use a larger resolution to classify them.

I would like to see tests comparing different “American-natives”… Specially because it is important to try to stop calling them like that, and try to use the name of their specific groups. How do Iroquois compare to Caribs and Guaranis on I
tests, for example?…

And regarding blacks, when we increase our concern on making a more specific classification we open some interesting debates, specially the one regarding the origin of the American blacks. It is very common to hear about how certain groups in Africa would go on kidnapping people from other groups to trade with Europeans. How do those imperialist un-enslaved Africans compare to the imperialist Europeans and the explored Africans?…

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THIRD ISSUE: Breaking the barriers.

Much more important then increasing our resolution when classifying people, is to increase the dimensions. Although sometimes it seems people even forget about it, human parents can have children regardless of their races / ethnicities / cultures. Yes, although this still seem to be a strange idea in countries like the USA, there are people out there whose parents might belong to different bells in Watson’s experiments!… I wonder: does he even know about it? What did he do in such cases in his experiments, dropped off the “half-breed” subjects as outliers?

Anyway, it seems to me that in USA and elsewhere people are talking a lot about “coexistence”, and “accepting the differences”, and “learning to respect people even if they are strange”… This has to be overcome. Here in Brazil we have miscegenation and religious syncretism, THAT is the future my brothers…

In the early 1920s Brazil had its modernist movement in the arts. Oswald de Andrade created the concept of “anthropophagy” that not only explained a bit of Brazil, but became an instrument for the modernists to make their work. The world needs a little bit more of anthropophagy. People who are not anthropophages are like autophages: They just go on eating their own parents, people from their own race. Let’s diversify a bit our diets!… We won’t need to (oeXis+ anymore if we honestly start to feel more that we are members of the same group then of smaller subgroups.

Mr. Watson’s tests classify people considering that they came from groups of with similar genetic characteristics, but unknown ones… All he finds out is that members from a certain gene set may score better or worse in as certain IQ test. This pisses people off, because it starts to sound like what we are looking for are correlations between the RGB intensities of your skin in your picture, the shape of your nose and your last math test grades. In the end everyone is confused and offended, and all we got was a clue that there might be a genetic factor in a persons intelligence. We don’t get nothing regarding what genes are those, and even less how do they influence in the organism, and how this biochemical phenomenon affects the mind. We are too much steps away of what we actually want to know.

If we start to make the test with miscegenated populations, it will become hard to tell if each subject probably came from the set of genes A or B. The skin color and high IQ genes get all mixed up, and Mr. Watson’s bell curves will stop to make that unpleasant noise. We will finally be forced to consider the people who scored more and the people who scored less, and look out for something else to correlate with the test results, because the “race” variable won’t tell us anything anymore.

Speaking more scientifically, those IQ tests are telling us that those different populations answer in different ways to the test, and this comes as no surprise, because they also give different results to many other scientific tests. For example, they have different skin colors, heights, diseases, performance in sports… If we want to know what what makes people more intelligent, it doesn’t help to look to a bunch of intelligent people who are all the same in many aspects, and compare them to a lot of less intelligent people who are also similar in other aspects. There are too many small characteristics that correlate. We need a more diverse sample.

So, what is Mr. Watson looking for? If he was studying intelligence, he still has a long way to go. Was he studying the differences between the different races that still exist in out planet? If so, then first he should hurry, while there are still racist people out there refusing to have children with people from different kins. Second, what other tests is he performing other then IQ ones?…

One way or another, this discussion must evolve. There are other tests to make with that two populations he tested, and there are other groups to whom apply that one test. We can’t get stuck in “black vs. white, high IQ vs. low IQ”. A couple of binary variable, the smallest statistical problem we can think of. Tell me more, please!…

Instead, the guy started to talk about politics, economy, development of mankind. Give me a break, this is certainly a much larger subject then a couple of IQ tests performed in a couple of populations. This talk about the performance of African governments and the IQ of the governors is pure science fiction to me. Interesting subject, and idea, but certainly a topic that should not be taken lightly, and that deserves to be always considered in its full extension.

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FOURTH: Science of making science

I’ve seen many people accusing Watson of racism, and too few (in fact, none) contesting his research, trying to expose flaws in his methodology or interpretations and conclusions…

Watson used a scientific test to spark the fiery debates about racism, eugeny and the rest, and people confronted him only using moral and ethical arguments. He was disregarded as scientist in an ethical trial, but without a scientific debate. This is not right. Science must be objective. He may “use” science for an immoral purpose, but that doesn’t make his scientific practice a bad one (tough it might have been). We must always acknowledge this.

Part of the reason people did this is because sometimes people feel oppressed by science. Some people believe that the moment a scientist discovers something regarding a subject such as the IQ of people from different groups, then scientific truths should automatically impose restrictions in our beliefs, feeling and laws and morality. This is wrong. The way people feel about something is often independent of science.

I’m not saying that someone can contradict as scientific fact based only on his mood (like it’s done with evolution). What I’m saying is that there are things that we believe in that are based only in non-scientific thoughts. We must understand this, because otherwise this happens: a scientific research seems to be questioning this belief, and then we feel like we are being illogical, when we are not.

Some people, specially writers of lousy science fiction, believe reason and emotion contradict each other. This is not accurate. They are better thought of as orthogonal, or parallel.

Too often people take it for granted that society wants thing such as being more productive, or more efficient, or that people want to suffer less, and have more luxury and have more money. These are all assumptions that must be brought to the surface. Poincaré once said that we should care more about seeking the truth then about avoiding suffering. Some people like Mr. Watson himself and also his detractors believe that we must seek the truth and use it all the ways we can think of to avoid suffering. Who said this should be so?… Let’s learn to separate scientific and moral issues better…

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FIFTH: does the government and allocating the intelligent people matter that much?

This is just a further development of the previous topic. Mr Watson seems terribly concerned in assuring that the best IQs get to run the country… First of all, he is basing his desire on the weak assumption that higher IQs does matter much in the running of a government. But who said we should care for a very “well-driven” government, with a Mensa seal of approval ?

Some people might argue that it is more important that a country be governed by its native people then anything else, even if it is a lower IQ population. We are talking of an argument such as “this government here is slow, imprecise, corrupt… But it’s still mine!” It’s one way of seeing things. Mr. Watson’s proposal has an implicit belief that governments should be neat works of logic, such as a beautiful chess match, and so does his opponents. Instead of denying Mr. Watson’s potentially democracy-lacking idea of putting high-IQ minorities in government, people argued that it would be a lie that those countries have low-IQ populations… People argued the secondary argument instead of the primary, because they actually think the same… But there is this other possibility of a counter-argument that I haven’t heard anybody defend (and I not necessarily do).

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SIXTH: does intelligence matter that much?

More then caring about governments and avoid suffering, people seem to be caring too much about this intelligence thing. I believe it’s because it is messing with people’s vanity.

Mr. Watson was only called a racist because people think intelligence is an important thing, such as freedom. When calling black people less intelligent, it looked just like he was suggesting they should be less free in their societies, because those would be two equally important things.

I don’t think so. Intelligence, and specially those specific intelligent capabilities that IQ tests try to measure, might in the end be only one of those things that we care about but try no to, just like we do with things like beauty, strength, penis length, hair, money, number of teeth and arms, etc.

If someone had done a test in high-schools, and measured the height, strength, or perhaps the length of the penis of the students, I doubt it that someone would be astonished and shocked if it turned out that blacks had much larger penises then whites. No one would say the people doing the experiment are racists, or say that it is a lie that whites have smaller penises, and that it is racism to do so.

(I doubt it that such an experiment would ever be done, specially with underage subjects and with and old man like Mr. Watson doing the measurements…)

I do believe intelligence tests reveal things not very different from the size of the penis of a man, or the attractiveness of a woman. I have looked upon a few of those tests, and I believe most of them are quite silly… Few of them has anything to do with science, for example. Many of them are based on conventional thinking, something that in my opinion a scientist must learn to distance himself from occasionally.

On the other hand, it might be true that people that do well in tests such as these are better workers in certain jobs… I’m not sure about running a country, but perhaps some said “technical” jobs… Many of us would like to say that it doesn’t matter, but in the end some people might in fact feel a difference in the way people with different IQs work. The influence of the size of the penis of a man in the sexual satisfaction of a couple is a very controversial subject very similar to this. It is often said that it doesn’t matter much, but from time to time it is also said that it’s a lie, and it does matter even tough it’s not pleasant for us to accept this.

In the Olympic Games, we don’t have a hard time accepting that Kenya has the best marathonists, and that the best runners are blacks. The same goes for east-Asians in table tennis. It’s something positive to say about a specific country and a people, so nobody feels like it is racism, and are easily convinced of the existence of a genetic determinism.

(((Interestingly, other kind of statistics are also easily accepted… It’s widely known for example that serial killers in the USA tend to be white males. You don’t see many people questioning this… I’m sure for example that few people would strongly doubt it if I started to say other bad things about white people behavior, like that they tend to perform more domestic violence, corruption or racist acts. I’m sure that a study showing that white people tend to be more homosexual would be very well accepted by a large number of people. It’s very interesting, take a look at Wikipedia, the article about white people is the only one that tries hard to enumerate flaws of character instead of qualities.)))

All these strong, scientifically determined characteristics are easily accepted by the public opinion. Why is it so different with intelligence?

I believe the problem is that intelligence is seen as something more important then the size of your penis, your performance in a sport, or even a limiting factor to do great science. Intelligence is seen as being related to your own soul. Intelligence is thought to be connected to your personality, to what makes you “human”, to the very core of “you”.

Many people see intelligence as what you might call perhaps the “manifestation of your own soul”. That is the reason that so many people feel so outraged by the idea of a group of people having less intelligence. These people think it’s like saying that this group of less intelligent people would be then less human people.

Nobody thinks that if you can’t climb a certain mountain in a certain time, then you are less human. Imperfections like this are sometimes thought to make you even more human. But with an intellectual activity it’s the contrary.

[Start crazy unbounded thinking]

I believe this shows a lot about our contemporary culture. I read the other day about a book by Ann Long that talks about how first Galileo and Newton show that humans are not the “center” of the universe. Then Darwin show that humans are not the “center” of the life on earth. The next revolution would be related to this abstract notion of being a singular human being. It’s the decentralization of consciousness and identity…

While we ceased to be the “center” of these more concrete universes, we kept bringing our safe harbor to a more abstract place. The most abstract of all is our minds…

I’m pretty sure that in the past people would be much more concerned if you told them their penises were smaller then the normal. I would like to read a research about this, but I fell that people in the past had a feeling about their bodies that we don’t have today. In the past bodies would have felt more like “I” then today. While we studied and analyzed the body, it started to be more like a tool. A small penis stopped to make you less human, and started to be just a defective tool.

Today the personification is well hidden, in our minds. And it’s much more difficult to measure then to measure a penis. But we are getting there, and the new scientific revolution will happen.