I’m gonna go ahead and assume a bunch of intentions here, if I’m wrong feel free to correct.
The OP makes a claim that treads close to racism. It was dressed up to lead people into dismissing it based on prior beliefs, as an illustration of their inability to reason. Since its initial iteration, the language used and the actual claim being discussed have shifted.
- Gold chains were removed to clear up the actual claim being made.
- It was agreed that this is more of a hypothesis than a proof
Both these shifts shouldn’t have been necessary if the OP was reasoning honestly to begin with.
It’s worth mentioning that he was in fact very clear about whether he was claiming density to be the entire cause of the statistic. He was not.
None of this is to claim that differences in average body density is the dominant explanation for any and all group differences. Differences in psychological swimming ability also have a significant effect, and they PROBABLY have an effect on the racial drowning differences.
THD responded with a plethora of alternative explanations, and moved to dismiss since any possible effect was so small. This is not unreasonable, but as early as the first response it seems like people are discussing different questions.
Abe asks “Does body density predict drowning chance to any degree? Does this explain disparate drowning rates between races?”
And THD asks “Why out of all the directions you could have gone with this would you go for an actual physical difference as an explanation when there are so many social factors that are already known that would explain this?”
Much of the thread is people falling into line with these positions, so I’ll simplify by referring to people by which camp they fell into.
The two ‘stances’ as I see them immediately leap to conclusions:
Team Abe thinks team THD is unwilling to even think about the notion that there might be more than a ‘white-shame’ explanation to the issue, while team THD assumes that team Abe is deliberately trying to overthrow a typically accepted narrative of white privilege, thus implicitly blaming blacks for their comparative performance. Despite the conversation seemingly being coherent, both sides are already arguing past each other due to the inferred content of opposing motive.
It’s also worth mentioning that Abe has a history here on the forum of presenting arguments that favour scientific racism and other controversial beliefs he dubs
ugly truths. So any inference from THD that Abe is pursuing data in service to a conclusion that places blame for the position of blacks in society on an inherent trait of the blacks themselves is not at all far afield. To my own eyes it seems pretty certain that Abe has ignored other explanations because they do not serve his beliefs.
The argument then becomes whether it’s okay to pursue specific conclusions in science, and my answer to that is that there is a lot of precedent for it considering the largely capitalistic nature of the scientific process. If this were actually a hypothesis that Abe was invested in testing, he’d need to justify it relative to the budget required and potential results. Lives saved is a good one, but how many lives would this save compared to just flat out funding swimming program, or putting the same money into cancer research etc.?
So while it may seem like dismissal of the hypothesis is unjustified, which would indicate that team THD and by extension the direction of science is biased towards a conclusion that blacks and whites are in all ways equal always, there are other factors at play here. All research costs money, and thus it’s not enough for a hypothesis to be in some way supported. It’s a cost/benefit equation and by virtue of this many otherwise viable hypotheses are disregarded. A bunch of old dodgy data, overtly racist overtones, and an oddly specific focus on a trait inherent in the physiology of blacks do not make for a solid start, not when there are so many other factors that fit the bill.
Team Abe basically argue for this hypothesis in a vacuum where any question that is of any worth at all is worth pursuing (pure logic). Team THD argue within a context of questions requiring more justification, because the answering of them has a cost (applied logic). I think that a large part of this scuffle could have been avoided if the determinants behind Team THD’s judgement was made clearer. Bront for example, was actually arguing against the argument as presented, where no reason not to pursue a hypothesis was given past there being other ones available. More research as a requirement was mentioned, but if Abe is right in claiming that this area is unexplored, then the response as given begs the question of whether this would ever be genuinely researched even if the effect was both real and large, which I think was his intention. To my knowledge Team Abe have also failed to communicate their ‘proof’ by not reducing the problem down to ‘there is absolutely no reason to not ask this question other than fear of racism’.
