On HN I have seen people whining about their "innocent conservative viewpoints" being censored, but it turned out those viewpoints were that black people were intellectually inferior based on studies of IQ.
Like your counter-example elsewhere is that Facebook is a fine technology that helped your good friend find a partner. If we attribute that to Facebook, do we not also have to attribute, e.g., Myanmar? Don't situations like that prove that not only are people incapable of recognizing bad information, but also that these tools can exacerbate the effects when they are misused?
Are you suggesting we should censor IQ studies that show racial differences? That seems like a bad idea if, for example, you're interested in how good an education different racial groups are getting.
You're making decisions for an LLM company. People start using your models to write articles making those claims. Not to promote equal access to education, but to promote delusions that specific groups are genetically inferior.
Is that not what the science says though? "inferior" is a bit of a loaded word but if you take the emotion out of it, we compare all sorts of things that way. It still sounds like you want AI to hide some science that's offensive to popular opinion.
You... literally believe black people are less intellectually capable?
No, I don't think that's what the science says. To the best of my knowledge the only thing that says that was a biased study comparing children of wildly different backgrounds, and has been completely discredited by serious scientists.
I want AI to not assist people like whoever taught you to think that.
To quote Wikipedia, which is not biased in favour of race science:
> A 2001 meta-analysis of the results of 6,246,729 participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude found a difference in average scores between black people and white people of 1.1 standard deviations. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate settings (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).
I don't actually think it is controversial that there are IQ differences between ethnic groups. What is controversial is (a) how much IQ means, is it a good measure, etc. and (b) are the causes of these differences genetic or environmental.
Yes, the IQ difference is no longer controversial. It used to be when people supposed it might be due to cultural bias in the tests but that problem got solved, somehow.
Unfortunately, the topic is too politically sensitive for most people to talk intelligently about. When I find people who say it's entirely environmental, I usually try to ask their reasons in hope of discovering something but so far they've never come up with anything stronger than speculation and insults. As far as I know, there's no evidence that it's not genetic but I'd love to discover some. The Minnesota study I mentioned looked like it should have finally got to the bottom of it, but they made up a new hypothesis based on an uncontrolled variable after the data came in, which is bad science.
What I have found is that the whatever the cause is, it happens before the age of about 4. That's useful to know if you propose improving racial equality through better education because by the time kids go to school, it's already too late. Any such effort has to be multi-generational.
The social implications of the general society getting this wrong in either direction are huge, so it's definitely worth being honest about.
Are we in the same comment sections? These Nazis you speak of say a lot about "dangerous talk" !
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