>Timothy Bates wrote:
>> The fact is that are reliable aggregate differences which have
>>meaningful social outcomes.
bernard correponded
>I see "reliable aggregate differences" as a fact. But "meaningful social
>outcomes" sounds like an opinion to me.
You are right that "meaningful social outcomes" is opinion. I made the mistake of being relativist.
To decide if you think they are important, decide whether you think that explaining variance in income, crime, solo-parenting, education, etc matters. If it does then race matters.
however, I recall having an argument with Phil Rushton at a conference where I argued the opposite: that race DOESN'T matter. It went as follows
The Bell Curve proposition is essentially that all observed racial differences are infact IQ proxies and that partially out IQ leaves no racism. In words, that means that current racial differences are entirely exlained by IQ and that Occam's Razor would suggest that we use just the one more general variable rather than keeping both. Race in this case could be viewed as an evolutionary or historical explanatory variable rather than a contemporary causal agent.
cheerio,
tim
Thomas Sowell.