Nevertheless, it does seem that a significant number of Americans always want to come back to "24" style scenarios, where a ticking bomb is about to blow up an American stadium somewhere and some terrorist holds the code to defusing it but won't talk. Even absent this kind of extreme scenario, there is a belief - not exactly discouraged by Dick Cheney - that torture could help save American lives by revealing information about terrorist plots. There are a lot of arguments floating around in the blogosphere and media now about whether torture does in fact yield valuable intelligence information, and as I read them I thought, wow, here's a place where good social research with modern methodological tools could really make an important contribution to a policy debate (which, not coincidentally, is one of the goals of this blog).
But here's where things get complicated. My original thought was that good social science research that shows that torture does not extract useful intelligence information would be the final nail in the coffin in any public argument in support of torture. But what happens if one of us gets access to the relevant data, does the empirical analysis, and then discovers the opposite: that torture does lead to useful intelligence information. What do you do then? Sit on the results? Would any political science journal publish such a paper? How would that look in a tenure review? ("Right, she's the one who said torture was valuable . . . ")
Dan Drezner gives an unequivocal no:
I, too, would welcome good empirical findings showing that torture does not work, but my answer to Josh's questions are "no." You have to publish your findings regardless of what you discover. That's the only way this business can work.
From a practical perspective, it makes little sense. Uncomfortable findings, if they hold up, will get discovered by someone. Sitting on them merely magnifies their impact. One of the few currencies social scientists can use is their research integrity. A short-term compromise of this integrity simply magnifies the impact of the discovery.
From an ethical perspective, social science results do not upend ethical arguments for or against a particular issue. In other words, even if torture works in extracting information, there are strong normative reasons to oppose its use. Covering up results, however, does compromise the ethical position of the person making the anti-torture argument.
In theory, I am entirely with Dan: the spirit of free inquiry should not be compromised--which is sort of why I argued that people should not employ effectiveness arguments against torture. When an important moral debate rests on the outcome of an empirical question, the study of that empirical question gets compromised. You haven't resolved the debate; you've just produced another round of dueling crap science.
In practice, however, the end of Tucker's second paragraph has a lot of weight. The guy who finds out that torture works is not going to have a happy life either in or out of academia--particularly if his work is used to justify something he finds morally repellant.
So what we get in practice on a lot of tough questions is that the people who are willing or able to do objective research on a question bow out, leaving the people who are only interested in finding (or publishing) one of two possible answers. The uncomfortable results don't get discovered . . . by anyone credible.
The few conversations I've had about the Bell Curve with professionals who work in cognitive sciences indicate that this is why most of the work about race and IQ seems to be written by crypto-racists with an axe to grind. Given what we know about evolution and cognitive science, it is possible that there are real and heritable differences between genetically isolated groups (and just as possible that there aren't.) What reputable scientist wants to risk being the guy who found credible evidence of a persistent, heritable, IQ gap? Moreover, given all the interesting questions there are to study, why on earth would you pick this one unless started out fairly determined to prove either that blacks are genetically handicapped, or that they aren't?
Is this a big problem? Well, for one thing, both sides of these debates end up over-reliant on poor quality evidence that allows the other side to reasonably proclaim that they are not arguing in good faith--it makes it harder to solve either the empirical or the political question. Indeed, the mere fact that Tucker is willing to ask this question will no doubt confirm the suspicion of many conservatives that academia is engaged in the business of putting out heavily biased "science" to undermine them.
I don't really think that Charles Murray fits the description of "crypto-racist with an axe to grind", though certainly some crypto-racists may have jumped on the bandwagon and taken it over afterwards. I do think that he was defined as a racist by virtue of having published his book (which really hardly mentioned race; it was mostly focused on explaining and defining intelligence measures). So it's even harder to publish reputable science on these subjects than Megan suggests. Anything that goes against someone's preconceived moral position is evil.
Megan didn't mention Global Warming issues, but it seems to me to be another good example. I think that most climate scientists believe in the "consensus". But there are certainly some of the best who don't, in various different ways (see John Christy, lead author of the 2001 IPCC report). Ergo, they are evil tools of the oil companies. Just Google his name, and you can read about (a) his remarkable expertise and (b) the calumny heaped on him.
How is science supposed to be done in such an environment?
I guess I should add that certain questions have common sense answers. Those common sense answers might be shown wrong under more study, but the burden of proof is on the refutation. So too here. Unless someone has an axe to grind, it's really hard to believe that torture doesn't work under the right circumstances. (Megan has pointed this out as well.) It certainly would work on me, while I flatter myself that no verbal method would. Am I unique, or does everyone reading this blog feel the same way?
All the commentators trumpeting what this one or that one said to the contrary - well, I just hear axes grinding real loud. Doesn't mean I'm not wrong; common sense can be. But absent real proof, that's the way I'd bet.
So when people bring the efficacy argument along with moral arguments, they're not just diluting the moral arguments with a weaker one; they're making the rest of us say, Who are you guys trying to kid?
If I were a social scientist opposed to torture on moral grounds, I would be screaming from the rooftops: Shut up, you idiots! It does so work! But it's evil, and we shouldn't be doing it.
What? Who is Joshua? I doubt that the question of whether soul food tasted good or not was really relevant for civil rights?
It should be clear by now that nobody here truly cares if torture works and/or what constitutes torture - only for different reasons?
Most people who reject torture on the same ethical grounds as anything else which is prohibited in the law books - most of these people know that there certainly are incidents where violence has benefits. Again - Reagan would not have started an international discussion on the subject if:
a) it would have been clear from the beginning that torture does not work, and
b) there were no real threats;
It is only under these circumstances that an ethical aspect arises. I repeat - only because there are real threats and only because torture might "work" in certain cases has Ronald Reagan sign the UN Declaration on Torture. In other words, stressing the points that there might be a real threat or that it might be beneficial is redundant to the whole torture discussion - those are prerequisites.
In the reality of human history - unless the mere basics of ethics are understood - even a paper that proves that torture is less efficient than other humane techniques would lead to torture being official policy. When might makes right - the mighty will use torture not as an interrogation tool but as an intimidation approach.
There are numerous Ivy league papers for example that prove that toxicity tests on animals are by far less efficient and more expensive than other humane methods. But because of a lack of ethics - we, USDA and FDA, continue to experiment on animals and despite the costs and risks to humans.
Ethics is here to protect yourself in the long-run and beyond short-term temptations. It is hence not your short-term cost-benefit analysis and also not the type of technique that determines if something is torture.. but ethics. But not too sound too lofty - in our concrete case - we are talking only about interrigation techniques with public common and case law backgrounds both domestically and internatinally. Domestic and international laws have been prohibiting these specific things in writing.
It should be obviously up to those who want to change the laws to prove that torture works. Not change the laws - then later scream that it "might" be beneficial but that the other side should prove first why the law was right and why torture might in the end not work.... Just writing this gives my head a spin. How low can we go both ethically but also logically and intellectually?
Nobody would look strangely at a scientists who proves that rape is pleasurable for the rapist. Nobody would look strangely at the scientists who proves that overall - having sexual relationships based on voluntary acts and not rape is more satisfying and worth defending beyond short-term urges.
The most important thing here is that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Stalin's regime tortured everybody and it is plain to see how he might have benefited from that in some context. But we "free people" with our democracies and individual rights... never mind. I have to go and find out who Joshua and Dan really are and what they are on...
I have a friend that is an engineer that got his PHD in Biomed and now does full time research. His experience is about two-thirds of all medical studies are seriously flawed to downright worthless. Two factors drive that in medical research, though I bet this applies to most if not all research, lack of rigorous scientific methodology and fraud.
Scientific method is hard to maintain when dealing with people. You tell a subject to take a blue pill once a day for a week, they actually take one the first day and six on the seventh and then you ask for confirmation and they lie. Volvo used to send their factory experts to virtually every major auto accident in Sweden. They were quite adept at figuring out what really happened based on the evidence and then they would interview the drivers. Virtually every time the drivers lied. Seatbelt usage was the simplest to check. In a moderate speed crash the weight of your body will cause burns at the pulley. Run your hand over the belt and you instantly can feel the melted fabric. No melted fabric means the driver wasn't wearing his seatbelt. An innocuous inquiry with no legal (at the time) ramifications and still everyone would lie. The need to be liked, the need to be seen as doing the right thing are very important and basic human emotions.
Fraud is frighteningly common. My friend ascribes it to the "pressure to publish" or just plain ego. It is just too easy to "fit the curve" by throwing out the "bad" data. A few years back my friend's university recruited a hotshot PHD. His first major study when he arrived was based on DNA analysis. My friend thought the curve fit was just too good so he reviewed the DNA samples. He found numerous usage of identical DNA samples throughout the curve. So the hotshot was using one result multiple times over to make a curve fit.
His advice has always been - never believe anything you see published once. As you surmised above we are not likely even to see studies on torture but even if we did they would probably be faked.
Do you have any additional examples similar to the Volvo one? I found it extremely interesting.
The Volvo story is one of my favorites when you want to discuss human behavior. Certainly it is nothing new to know a person that says one thing and then does the complete opposite. The Volvo study is very unique in proving it. In fact they have a special dispensation from the Swedish government to do their accident investigations without providing the data to the police or the risk of having to testify if there is a lawsuit resulting from the accident. Could you imagine if Ford tried that - they would be in court every day for one side or the other.
1) The effect described is absolutely real, and I specifically did not pursue a career in Social Psychology because I never wanted to be in a position where my results, my politics, and/or my morals were in obvious conflict.
2) Tenure is absolutely necessary (though obviously not sufficient) in terms of seeing such research done. That's why it exists.
3) FWIW, I'm guessing that torture "works" in much the same way that hypnosis in the service of recovering details from memory "works," meaning that you can get at real information that would be otherwise inaccessible, but you also get much more false and unreliable information than you otherwise would. In terms of the "24" scenario, imagine that you had a bomb, a keypad which would disable the bomb with the right code but explode immediately with the wrong code, and a suspect that you believed knew the code. If you tortured him for the code, would you be willing to punch in what he gave you yourself? I certainly wouldn't.
Since science is a career rather than an interest, its practicioners will weigh their earning potential against more intrinsic motivations such as a desire to seek the truth. Not that the truth can only come from intrinsic motivation, one may also simply desire to argue for ones side in a moral debate, or simply to cause trouble (no one pays the trolls). So, I guess the question is how much of a market is there for the god honest truth on politically salient questions? Is there a responsible party that wishes to know the truth in these situations and will pay for it? Who's interests are directly advanced by obtaining and propagating the truth?
"So what we get in practice on a lot of tough questions is that the people who are willing or able to do objective research on a question bow out, leaving the people who are only interested in finding (or publishing) one of two possible answers. The uncomfortable results don't get discovered . . . by anyone credible."
You're talking out of your ass here. How do you know these researchers are "only interested in finding (or publishing) one of two possible answers." Do you count Robert Putnam among these researchers?
"Researchers", actually, let's cut to the chase and just spit it out, show we? Steve Sailer and the rest of the HBD ilk are not considered "credible" because they find the "uncomfortable results", not the other way around.
Enjoy your "credibility" Megan. And your ignorance.
The problem with the ticking time bomb scenario isn't whether torture would work or not. The problem with the ticking time bomb scenario, as Michael Kinsley said, is that it doesn't exist outside of dorm-room fantasy. And anyway, when this country tortured, there was most certainly no ticking time-bomb scenario.
Or maybe outside of Sri Lanka. Or Israel. Or anywhere there is a conflict.
But let the comfortable myths comfort you. There are no hard decisions to make here. Only ones that are comfortable and paint others as evil.
And I agree with McArdle. I would let the bomb go off rather than torture. Let's not try to convince ourselves that tough decisions that will cost lives never need to be made. One way or another.
Derek
"Moreover, given all the interesting questions there are to study, why on earth would you pick this one unless started out fairly determined to prove either that blacks are genetically handicapped, or that they aren't?"
How much time and money goes into trying to eliminate the achievement gap, Megan? Clearly this is a pretty important topic in our multiracial society. Determining the reasons for the achievement gap are the first steps in trying to solve it.
Your characterization of HBD trying to "prove either that blacks are genetically handicapped, or that they aren't" shows just how utterly ignorant you are on the subject.
Shoddy quality evidence? Are you serious? I dare you to really search out a couple of 4 or 5 of the top blogs who describe themselves as "race realist", and then examine the sophistication of the posts and the kind of evidence they marshal. There is an ethos of "back up your assertions" precisely because what they debate is so sensitive. Only academic blogs by high-level professors like Terence Tao and a few others are as quantitatively informed and impressive. Indeed, I stumbled across a genuine Nordic type white-nationalist blog the other day, and even though I desperately disagree with his political philosophy, his pro-Nordic science isn't so easily dismissed. Their movement had to evolve to maintain any adherents at all; if you run into one online, you aren't speaking to the yokels from Stormfront. When you read the other side's material, they often invoke the same studies and names over and over again (Heckman, Jewish immigrants, US Blacks in Germany, phrenology), because they don't have the preponderance of evidence on their side - in decided contrast to their superior position on topics like global warming and basic evolutionary theory, which engenders the same type of quality (see sites like Real Climate and Talk Origins).
Blogs: Gene Expression
Audacious Epigone
Dienekes Anthropological Blog
Evo and Proud (Peter Frost)
RaceHist @ Blogspot
Steve Sailer (Isteve)
Inductivist
La Carrefour de la Sagesse
Many of them, in my opinion, firmly do have "ulterior" motives, but that doesn't make them wrong.
I'm not sure how Terry Tao came into this, but I seriously doubt you have any clue the sort of disparity of sophistication you're talking about.
Why not study the history of occupied France in WWII? I read elsewhere recently (sorry, no citation, don't recall where) how the Gestapo were able to control the population of France (40 MM people) with only 5,000 or so Gestapo agents and the aid of the French Police and the National Gendarmerie. The German Army was not used to control the population, but rather, manned the Atlantic Wall. Apparently, torture elicited enough information to keep resitance down to manageable levels. It certainly must have cowed the general population.
Moreover, given all the interesting questions there are to study, why on earth would you pick this one[?]
Because virtually all public policy has as its empirical justification the assumption that differences do not exist. If this assumption is false, we likely need new policy.
If this assumption is false, we likely need new policy.
Would you care to give an example of any society that has, at base, an assumption of racial inequality that you think is superior to our own? Any such society that we would not consider abhorrent?
That's why it's not worth studying. To say nothing of spending a generation or three living with the social effects of a science that would still be in its infancy and prone to reversing itself every few years.
Would you care to give an example of any society that has, at base, an assumption of racial inequality that you think is superior to our own? Any such society that we would not consider abhorrent?
That's why it's not worth studying.
WTF?
There's this newfangled "comparative advantage" concept that you might have heard about, and it suggests that forcing large groups of people to do things they aren't good at, via overapplication of affirmative action and quotas, just might result in worse outcomes than true race-blindness.
I don't see anyone arguing that the nursing profession should be 50% men. Socially relevant statistical racial differences are usually smaller than analogous gender differences, but insisting that the former can't possibly exist at all isn't consistent with belief in and understanding of evolution. (Especially if you're aware that, when it comes to less politically contentious traits like alcohol and lactose tolerance, the existence of racial genetic differences is undisputed.)
(Also, in the 21st century, genetic != immutable. If you're disgusted by the possibility of someone using the likely existence of statistical racial differences to justify policies that try to curb breeding of "undesirable" groups, support biotech and politics that'll make such concerns obsolete. That's my approach, anyway.)
just might result in worse outcomes than true race-blindness.
The possible inefficiencies due to assumptions of equality are *massively* small potatoes compared to the inefficiencies due to assumptions of inequality.
Human society and beings are predictably irrational. You can be *guaranteed* that if society accepts as truth of a slight inequality, we'll act (on the whole) as if its a universal law, with all the costs that entails. It's simply the way we're built.
The massive inefficiencies produced by that irrationality dwarf any possible mistaken assumptions of equality. (It's no coincidence that the efficient economic use of women in society is correlated with the growing assumption of de-facto equality.)
Kind of awkward interface here; unlimited levels of nesting with indentations geometrically approaching the maximum seems better than a hard limit of three. Ah well.
Human society and beings are predictably irrational. You can be *guaranteed* that if society accepts as truth of a slight inequality, we'll act (on the whole) as if its a universal law, with all the costs that entails. It's simply the way we're built.
If so, we're paying the costs of acting as if there's a universal law anyway. You may have heard of "revealed preference". How many members of our elite choose to live in communities with lots of blacks and/or Hispanics? How many send their kids to schools with lots of blacks or Hispanics?
Our elite doesn't practice what it preaches, and any decent economist (or student of human history) should know what that means.
So I think it's clear that the only kind of study that might be powerful enough to change this behavior would be the kind that was transparently honest enough to possibly tell us something we don't want to hear.
(It's no coincidence that the efficient economic use of women in society is correlated with the growing assumption of de-facto equality.)
I strongly suspect that in 20 years or so, we're going to find out the hard way that we didn't do such a great job of "efficient economic use of women" after all. Demographics matter, and having too many retirees per capable worker won't be fun. (The "good" news, I suppose, is that China's one-child policy will probably put them in deeper trouble than us.)
That said, I don't recommend much of a change in the gender status quo, beyond reduction of quotas/affirmative action. Until recently, evolution had little reason to cull men and women who didn't particularly want children; without ubiquitous and highly reliable birth control, it was sufficient for them to want sex. All other things being equal, future generations should be more demographically stable, being composed mostly of the offspring of those who actively wanted children.
How many members of our elite choose to live in communities with lots of blacks and/or Hispanics?
I think your confusing preference among the elites for living with same race with preference for living among those in the same culture and socio-economic class. My experience is that it's not what you are that matters, but who you are.
Successful business man is in, struggling hip-hop artist is out no matter what the color of your skin.
All other things being equal, future generations should be more demographically stable, being composed mostly of the offspring of those who actively wanted children.
Only if the desire to have children is genetically determined. I wouldn't be surprised if is a small component at best.
I think your confusing preference among the elites for living with same race with preference for living among those in the same culture and socio-economic class. My experience is that it's not what you are that matters, but who you are.
Oh, I totally agree that our elites aren't explicitly selecting on race, and they'd love to live with more folks like the Obamas, for instance.
But when do they ever put their own kids into the educational experiments they concoct, ostensibly aimed at educating more blacks and Hispanics to Obama's level or better? And, yes, sometimes they adopt black or Hispanic kids (hi, Angelina) (though see this, which just boils my blood), but I never see those kids going to top technical schools like MIT, whereas this does happen with Asian kids adopted by parents with the same socioeconomic status.
If even a small group of parents really believed in the irrelevance of genetics and was actually right, they could have provided a rather convincing proof of concept by now via adoption. The fact that no such thing has happened, despite the relative obviousness of the idea, speaks volumes. (If I believed genetics were irrelevant, I'd definitely adopt black and/or Hispanic kids and follow Laszlo Polgar's footsteps, except I'd focus on stuff with much better positive externalities than chess ability.)
Only if the desire to have children is genetically determined. I wouldn't be surprised if is a small component at best.
Yes, it isn't clear how heritable that desire is, partly because it isn't a single number in the first place (instead it's a function of the ambient culture). And there's a good chance my full-time job will involve doing my best to ensure that all other things don't remain equal, so I don't really want the answer to the question to matter. But I expect the collapse in first world birthrates to noticeably turn around in the medium term (it's already starting to do so, right?), and I don't think it'll just be because of women successfully having children in their 40s.
"Indeed, the mere fact that Tucker is willing to ask this question will no doubt confirm the suspicion of many conservatives that academia is engaged in the business of putting out heavily biased "science" to undermine them."
It certainly reinforced my impression of most academics. And I suspect that many, if not most, economists, sociologists, psychologists and other soft science practitioners fall into the same category as the academic community. They start with a deeply held belief and only see the data that supports their belief.
But reality wins in the end!
This is mostly BS. Bias does exist in some research, but the majority of researchers are trying to actually find the "truth". Sure there is pressure to publish which can make some people cut some corners, but being "right" is also a major motivation -- academics want to show they are smarter than others, and you can't do that if you know you're publishing crap.
I know this because I've done research and my overall impression is some shady behavior but , contrary to popular paranoid fantasies, if a researcher plays too fast and loose with the facts, they will earn a reputation for being shoddy. It sometimes takes a while, but murder does eventually out.
You most likely cannot show that torture "works" with a standard statistical analysis. These analyses require certain assumptions that most likely are not valid.
The effectiveness of torture in the past may not predict success in the future due to the uniqueness of the situation. Look at just some of the variables
Committment of the person being tortured
Intelligence/creativity of the tortured person to create false answers
Skill of the torturer
Nature of the information being sought and how easy it is to distort
So this debate on 'scienitfically proving' the effectiveness of torture seems like a waste of time. We might be able to make some guesses about the effectiveness of torture, but it seems very unlikely that the error in these guesses could be quantified the way that most experimental conclusions can be.
Torture working is, indeed, a very broad question and one that we're unlikely to be able to study. Some people might point to the arrest of Hambali as an example of waterboarding working. From this, logically, waterboarding must work sometimes. Still, we have a sample size of three to work with, so that's frightfully anecdotal. Historical witnesses who have found torture to be an effective aid to the discovery of truth, such as St. Augustine, were likewise bereft of a proper peer reviewed study conducted under laboratory conditions.
We can't get to a proper peer reviewed study because countries like the US don't torture, and don't even engage in enhanced interrogation any more. The countries that we now outsource our intelligence gathering needs to aren't going to be terribly interested in Harvard wonks watching over their shoulders. We do have massive programs in which this sort of thing is intensively studied while we train our boys to resist it, but this is all secret (or was), so their research couldn't be properly reviewed. It does appear that they thought that it was effective, but you can't trust them since they're torturers.
Fortunately, we can do a lot of scientific research with proxies. This also avoids some of Megan's concerns. For instance, if one follows cognitive psychology's studies in interrogations for police work, you'll find a lot of information on the way that cognitive load impacts the ability of witnesses to deceive their interrogators. Jogging on the spot, for instance, makes you a less effective lier. Other police interrogation gimmicks that work include asking people to narrate their stories backwards.
Now, it's possible, using some of the last couple of year's definitions of torture, to include jogging on the spot as torture. If you do, there are very good, peer reviewed, studies that show that it works. If you do not, these studies will tell you what the effect of cognitive load is on the ability to mislead investigators, but not much else. From there, you may wish to perambulate over to studies on cognitive load under other circumstances. For instance, how stress affects our ability to learn is highly dependent on the way that the stress impacts our cognitive load. There are studies on pain, surprise, and all sorts of other things out there. They're good resources to use for this because there's no intentional bias. When you write a study on how surprise impacts your ability to make decisions from, say, an automotive saftey perspective, you're unlikely to bias your results towards your preferred view of the efficiency of torture.
I've long wondered at the notion that the culling slavery created in black populations is at the root of most white racism. The weak didn't survive. That would mean that the bulk of the slave population were the best. How else to maintain power, when faced with people you've culled, but to suppress them in any way possible? Particularly if you're a "crypto-racist with an axe to grind." It's a notion that frequently occurs to me when I read posts here by people who are aghast at helping others (socialism); perhaps they think giving all those poor people an equal chance to succeed might have unintended consequences.
But it would be a topic of inquiry for those soft social sciences, and any statistical results gleaned would be unreliable.
But it would be a topic of inquiry for those soft social sciences, and any statistical results gleaned would be unreliable.
Why bother with all that work? You're doing fine slandering people, begging questions, and crushing straw men without data.
Actually, given what we know about evolution, it is certain that there are real and heritable differences between genetically isolated groups. Given any rate of mutation above zero, the chance of non-divergence is vanishingly near to zero. (There are many mutations in every generation.)
I think the word you are looking for is "substantial". Obviously nobody cares if European junk DNA differs from African junk DNA. What matters to people is phenotypic expression.
Well, we know there are racial differences in phenotypic expression (such as the alcohol and lactose tolerance examples I mentioned in an earlier comment). The question is whether there are differences that have serious social relevance.
Note that the definition of "serious social relevance" isn't constant over time. In the distant past, for instance, a genetic predisposition for myopia would have been a big problem, but now that we have glasses and contacts and LASIK, it doesn't really matter. It's entirely possible that there exist racial genetic inequalities that are currently relevant, but can be negated with development of appropriate technology.
I think that the argument that it does not work is trivial and arises only out of a sort of category error. The traditional (not modern) position of the English courts was that torture is an engine of state, not of law. In other words, use it for intelligence, not for courts. In the latter context, it may not "work" because the confessions extracted are unreliable. Again, you'll note that there's a strong continuity between the use of the rack and the iron maiden, and good police work done in the ordinary course of events. The police constantly strive to elicit confessions and frequently get them from the innocent. Nonetheless, torture gave prosecutors an overly free hand, so it was banned, along with hearsay and such. Hence "torture does not work", often given in full as "torture does not work because you can get them to say whatever you want".
In intelligence gathering, though, there's no value to confessions. There, while the benefits of an increased cognitive load may be outweighed by moral concerns, there are many questions to which the interrogator has no preference regarding the answer. A good example might be KSM's help in providing the CIA with locations where they could find people. Here, making him less able to lie had a clear benefit, with no false positives being introduced through the enhancement of the interrogation. There may be false positives, but he wouldn't be *more* dishonest as a result of his loss of aptitude for dishonesty, at least not unless the CIA made the foolish mistake of making him *really* hate America and caused him to lose his desire to be reasonable.
There's a lot of weighty historical evidence and debate about the positive or negative pragmatic value of judicial torture. I don't believe there's much at all about it as an engine of state, although again one can cause the issue to appear to exist by conflating it with broader question of the value of intelligence gained by allies or subordinates who have agendas of their own.
Obviously all these things need Megan's disclaimer that the use of torture as a commission/ ommission/ double effect expemplar.
Incidentally, one of the positive things about doing some research that didn't create a cognitive divide between practices that elicit confessions from people who did not wish to confess and practices that coerce confessions is that a lot of torture does appear to be unnecessary. Read the memos, for instance, and you'll find that the US Military people who ran simulated torture sessions found pain not to be useful, and that repetitions past the second of most of their techniques weren't useful either. If we could persuade people in the Uzbek government that it's not useful to inflict pain or excessive repetition, I'd have thought that this represented a pareto improvement for mankind.
"What reputable scientist wants to risk being the guy who found credible evidence of a persistent, heritable, IQ gap? Moreover, given all the interesting questions there are to study, why on earth would you pick this one unless started out fairly determined to prove either that blacks are genetically handicapped, or that they aren't?"
1. Government agencies classify people into racial groups and examine inequality along racial lines.
2. Intelligence strongly predicts academic performance.
3. If governments want to examine group inequality then research on group differences in intelligence is unavoidable.
4. Note that you are calling these researchers racist, but they consistently find that East Asians have a higher group average than whites. Are you going to say they have proved whites are genetically handicapped?
5. Also, these apparently racist researchers find Ashkenazi Jews average 2/3 of a standard deviation above the white mean.
6. If you are suggesting Arthur Jensen is a racist, then I suggest you need to re-examine his background. He was commissioned by Harvard Educational Review to look at the results of Head Start in improving performance and closing the achievement gap. He reported on the findings as an honest scientist, not an idealogue.
7. You seem to be committing the moralistic fallacy - because something is unpleasant it cannot be true?
8. Your comment reminds me of a piece David Friedman wrote about last year 'Who Is Against Evolution?'. Friedman observed:
People who say they are against teaching the theory of evolution are very likely to be Christian fundamentalists. But people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution, strongly enough to want to attack those who disagree, including those who teach those implications, are quite likely to be on the left.
...we know that members of such groups differ in the distribution of observable physical characteristics--that, after all, is the main way we recognize them. That is pretty strong evidence that their ancestors adapted to at least somewhat different environments.
There is no a priori reason to suppose that the optimal physical characteristics were different in those different environments but the optimal mental characteristics were the same. And yet, when differing outcomes by racial groups are observed, it is assumed without discussion that they must be entirely due to differential treatment by race. That might turn out to be true, but there is no good reason to expect it. Here again, anyone who argues the opposite is likely to find himself the target of ferocious attacks, mainly from people on the left."
9. As Steve Hsu has noted:
"There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.
What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster -- we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.
In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters ("races") during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance)." http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html