I linked to Razib's interview with Greg Cochran, but let me highlight it further. I am uncertain about so many things because the experts hedge so much around political issues, and I take people at face value. Cochran is blunt, and thus controversial and one of the naughty researchers. He will call you a loon if you're a loon. He has tried hard to be nice to me when I'm being an idiot, even saying "look, I'm being as nice as I can." He is something of a paleoconservative who insisted that Iraq could not have weapons of mass destruction and we shouldn't even invade, much less stick around. Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute published the pivotal paper in 2015 that we had interbred with Neanderthals, which amazed everyone. Cochran, Harry Harpending, and John Hawks had been saying it for a decade before, purely from genomic data, (still largely) uncredited and ignored.
If you think I say the quiet part out loud, Greg really says the quiet part out loud. Steven Pinker eases you into the idea of racial differences, David Reich tells you that we will find racial differences but not to worry, because he will be there to supervise and make sure nothing racist gets out. Cochran acknowledges that they have to say those things to get funding for their research, but says they are flat out lying - which I suspected but didn't want to say, as it would be a terrible thing to be wrong about. I worried about Sasha Gusev's ultra-high bar for signing on to heredity, which boils down to "not until absolutely proven."
Cochran's response is that Gusev needs to try and teach AP Calculus to Australian Aborigines for five years before speaking again.
It's refreshing, if you can take it. Greg will tell you when he was wrong, which is seldom, and takes no prisoners on the data. Listen to interview to learn what is going on that you are not supposed to hear.
2 comments:
"Cochran acknowledges that they have to say those things to get funding for their research, but says they are flat out lying..."
That is ambiguous. They are lying when they say that there will prove to be racial differences/races, or they are lying that they'll keep the hard parts under wraps (but there definitely will be substantial racial differences)?
Thank you. You are right, it wasn't clear. They are lying in that they have known for decades that there are differences among the races but pretend we are "just sorta finding out some things that look racist, but they aren't really, so keep sending us money."
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