CCC comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: CCC 02 December 2012 08:48:22AM 0 points [-]

Intelligence

I'd be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.

There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.

criminality

Citation?

Again, I suspect - though I'm not certain - that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 10:06:35PM 4 points [-]

I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.

Comment author: satt 02 December 2012 10:02:43AM *  0 points [-]

It sounds like you're using the word "correlation" to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; "correlation" just refers to certain kinds of association.

It's trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you're getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:

The hereditarian model of Black–White IQ differences proposed in Section 2 (50% genetic and 50% environmental), far from precluding environmental factors, requires they be found. Although evidence in Sections 3 to 11 provided strong support for the genetic component of the model, evidence from Section 12 was unable to identify the environmental component. On the basis of the present evidence, perhaps the genetic component must be given greater weight and the environmental component correspondingly reduced.

As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you're asking for.

Comment author: CCC 09 December 2012 10:46:29AM 2 points [-]

Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.