Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?

[EgoDeath]

I would hope that most people are able to rationally consider each issue on its own merits, rather than committing wholesale to one extreme "label" or another. It almost becomes religious at that point.

I expect that far fewer people would hold all of these "expected" positions than people wishing to demonise them would make out.

Yea I'd probably agree. Most people decide on individual issues. But that's the problem with people who get into identity politics and that's why identity politics is dangerous... If you belong to this group, that social class or this race, you have to believe in this, this and that. That gets very screwy and when these people band together they often make themselves appear bigger and more influential than they actually are.

But I agree I think most people tend to fall someone in the middle on either side... as in, left or right but more toward the middle than toward the extreme ends.

To be honest, I expected to find that IQ differences were within the statistical margin, and that when controlled for economic background or other social issues (single parenthood etc.), they'd disappear completely.  I was perfectly read to talk about how clearly black people were oppressed with regard to salary and job opportunities, and how to force white people to stop that oppression.  I was kind of moving in that direction when google reared its ugly head.

The results I found are a worst case scenario for me.  The strong correlation between IQ and income might actually BE the main reason for differential income.  But even if it's not, it creates one hell of a confounding variable.  Poverty, you can potentially solve.  Quality of education, ditto.  But IQ?  The options are truly grim: 1) we find a way to remove IQ from the income curve-- i.e. establish a true forced outcome (Hello, communism. . . I'm sure you'll work out great this time!); 2) improve the IQ of black people.

With regard to (2), it's shown that while childhood boosts can be gotten by environment, heritability after puberty is at about 75% - 80%.  It's a monster.  So even though we create special programs and so on (and we should, if just for the enrichment of those children's lives), the effect on IQ in adulthood is going to be fairly negligible.  What are we left with?  Eugenics?  I'm quite depressed about it actually-- I literally don't see a practical way out of this situation.

Luckily, there is at least SOME hope for improvement.  I don't know what % of black children are faced with health issues so serious that they will retard development, but:

 Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores; however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects.

At least there's something we can actually work on.  Twin studies and adoption studies are a little bit contradictory, which is actually very good news-- because the normal results are really unambiguously bad.

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I would hope that most people are able to rationally consider each issue on its own merits, rather than committing wholesale to one extreme "label" or another. It almost becomes religious at that point.

It seems to me, rob, that the PC left is pretty much all about committing wholesale to extreme labels, and that it IS in fact very much akin to religion-- disagreement, even in part, isn't just an academic point for them-- it amounts to heresy.

Yea and all of this information you're posting might but true benny, but to be honest I don't really care. Not being rude! But my point is simply this...

There is sort of a flow of ideas in that each concept can be broken down into smaller concepts.

If the parent concept... let's say, Concept A is that:

There are differences between different races.

Then Concept B will be:

The differences in the races are X, Y and Z.

Concept C:

The differences in the races X, Y and Z, are interestingly enough, less to do with race and more to do with societal factors, genes in specific families, etc. These issues effect different races differently because of the socioeconomic problems that different groups of people face.

Concept D:

There is no reason to see other races as inferior, we are simply dealing with different problems due to a multitude of different factors. Despite these differences, everyone is human and deserves basic kindness and respect.

So...

Concept A --> Concept B --> Concept C --> Concept D

The problem is, many people involved identity politics will ignore the nuance in your idea and simply hear you saying Concept A, that there are differences in the races. Now you're automatically a racist and a nazi.

Some people will argue that this is due to some people not explaining their positions correctly but I find that to be false. Some people get so wrapped up in what they believe that they make it a part of who they are, so any statements they hear contrary to what they already believe will cause an uproar in their mind.

We do need to clearly state why we believe things but these efforts are often futile in the face of people wrapped up in identity politics. The dangers of IP is one thing out of the few that I agree with Peterson on.