The ugliness of reality

And the logical gibberish of the anti-intelligent:

“No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.”

And they wonder why they’re so reliably wrong. You can certainly fight science, reason, and observation with “ethical principle” if you like, but it’s not going to work very well. Nor is it going to convince anyone with the intellectual ability to penetrate your rhetoric and understand the irrelevance of your ethical principles.

The idea that Chinese people are not smarter on average than Africans because the idea is ugly is like a programmer insisting that his code works correctly, despite the constant crashing of the program, because it is more elegantly written than the code that actually functions. Sometimes, indeed, very often, reality is ugly, or at least falls well short of what our aesthetic preferences would wish it to be.