cupholder comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: cupholder 14 April 2010 09:39:40PM 0 points [-]

The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person's IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent).

Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:

the correlation between lightness of skin and IQ, averaged over a large number of studies reviewed by Shuey (1966), is in the vicinity of .10.

Assuming that correlation's not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.

Comment author: Jack 15 April 2010 02:16:35AM 1 point [-]

At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say "zero net evidence" but I honestly don't remember what my reasoning was.

We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn't mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.

Comment author: cupholder 15 April 2010 11:14:51AM -1 points [-]

At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say "zero net evidence" but I honestly don't remember what my reasoning was.

That's reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett's claim against conflicting evidence hadn't occurred to me.

We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn't mean some of the IQ gap is genetic.

Wholly agreed.

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