Emile comments on [SEQ RERUN] Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong

11 Post author: MinibearRex 09 October 2011 03:07AM

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Comment author: lessdazed 09 October 2011 05:50:25PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Emile 10 October 2011 03:21:08PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see what you're getting at with the Pepsi and Coke bottle thing - could you explain a bit?

Comment author: lessdazed 10 October 2011 05:37:50PM -1 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 October 2011 06:02:43PM *  5 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 October 2011 06:06:33PM 1 point [-]

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."