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wedrifid comments on [SEQ RERUN] Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Comments (119)
That's a powerful one. Several of the Rationalist Bootcampers had similar reactions.
Was this part of a "lets try to kill the minds of the bootcampers and see how they handle it" or did the subject just come up?
Subject came up.
How did the subject come up? I have never ever heard this subject discussed outside of two contexts:
The question under discussion is "What can't we say?"; or
One of the interlocutors feels it's important to take civil rights away from people.
EDIT: To be absolutely clear, I'm certain the second thing is not true of any of the bootcampers, and I'm almost certain that racial IQ differences came up in conversation only as an example of something people don't consider rationally, not as a subject of interest in its own right.
Group differences in average IQ are relevant in discussions regarding whether or not policies and institutions that were successful in some jurisdictions should be recommended in other jurisdictions where the people have different genetic backgrounds. They can also legitimately arise in discussions about the evolution of intelligence.
How well the relevant groups in those discussions match folk notions of race, is another question. Some aspects of our folk racial categories seem obviously silly in this regard-- like how children of one white parent and one black parent are considered black.
I have never seen that happen ever.
It comes up for people considering adopting kids.
Well, since this is the first reference in this thread to "What can't we say?", which of the commenters would you say "feels it's important to take civil rights away from people"?
But seriously, you should get out of the habit of assuming sinister motives of people who disagree with you.
I feel like I've been misunderstood somehow.
Ummm, Eliezer Yudkowsky's post, on which this discussion is based, is about "What can't we say?" ie. why can't we say there are racial differences in IQ.
So this thread doesn't seem to be evidence against Nisan's statement.
Was anyone's mind destroyed, or did people get over it?
Might want to do an intro to statistics at the end if day one, where the mass of each soda bottle ever produced by Pepsi and Coke is calculated. Then find the average bottle mass for each company.
Then wait.
I don't see what you're getting at with the Pepsi and Coke bottle thing - could you explain a bit?
It's a test of the universal law that two random different things are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason. This applies even when there is a spectacularly good reason to think that they would be roughly equal, and also when summing and taking averages.
As a close analogy, consider the mass of each bottle to be the IQ of each person in a group, and the bottle types produced by each company to each comprise a group.
That's not a universal law. A random partition of a large set of objects may well produce two sets in which the distribution of all properties is the same as in the original set. The same is true if the set is partitioned according to some property that doesn't correlate with anything else.
The controversies on this issue are about whether certain properties that can be used to partition human populations do have correlations with various other relevant properties, what is the reason for these correlations if they do exist, and what should be their wider implications.
What I believe you meant to say is that the results of two different processes "are never miraculously equal and never equal unless there is a spectacularly good reason."