This past week I just shook my head wondering, what happened to the William Saletan I used to read with pleasure? The weakness of the case you made, and the carelessness with which you made it was only matched by the damage you've done to the public discourse. When you enter these waters, you owe it to us all to do it with exceptional care. You could have perfectly easily made the argument you say you want to make about egalitarianism without doing it in a way that will empower the worst racists in our society. If the case were solid, it would have been different, but it is most emphatically not.

*sigh* I reckon the whole idea was that he wanted to get to his discussion in part 3, which was a good attack on the priority-conclusions of a racist perspective. It was worth doing. The account of what averages really mean was excellent. I don't think he's gotten enough credit for his points there.

But the very fact that people on both sides here in the discussion have been largely ignoring his points there - breezing right past them to their favored point of view - shows how inadequate those points are to shape perspectives in this area. (I'm really unhappy about that conclusion.)

He should have made those points anyway, but, just as much, it shows how inadequate they are to ward off the damage done by his for-sake-of-argument impressionistic-thematic description of the genetic-conclusions side being OVERWHELMINGLY supported by MOUNTAINS OF DATA. The MOUNTAINS does support the characterizable range of viewpoints that take that to be the picture. And he didn't really need to do that to say "for the sake of argument". *sigh*

There are no mountains of data.

This pseudo-science is not real. When you walk into a physics lab you are doing real science.

Any intellectual child in the realm of IQ and Race knows how many corrupt pseudo-researchers have and do work in the field. That is pseudo-researchers tied to racial interests.

Who and why are you apologizing for anyways with this sad explanation of what has transpired.