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bramflakes comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Frankly, he has my sympathies, and I say this speaking as one who is now officially and technically a fucking scientific racist, and is hating every minute of it. The increase in knowledge doesn't even seem worth the sacrifice; we're talking about differences in average IQ between 95, 105, 110, 115. For one such as I, who's got an IQ of 168, this degree of difference seems unimpressive, and, frankly, worth ignoring/not worth knowing.
"You're telling me all these massive groups of people have these slight differences in average between them? About one standard deviation? Of what use could this information possibly be?" "Let's forbid entrance to my particular country to immigrants from the inferior races, namely, people of 'african' and 'hispanic' ancestry; it's cheaper than giving everyone an IQ test. Is this not a clever idea that advances my nation's interest and saves taxpayer money?"
And then I sigh at the stupidity of people with high IQ's, myself included.
Nevertheless, pianoforte, you're definitely overreacting. Do give your friend Arthur some references on Ethical Injunctions and remind him of our Litanies. Even if you did nothing, I do not expect Arthur, or any lesswronger for that matter, to present a level of threat worth having actual cold sweats over.
Here's another argument you can give him; social justice seeks to achieve just ends, and to do so requires just means, an image of justice as well as a just system. To seek social justice is to seek righteousness, and to seek to be right; it demands that you be scrupulously rational. Since You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, you should not, cannot allow yourself to employ the methods of evil, of which irrationality, stupidity and incoherence are the very essence. Throughout my life, I have been in contact with all kinds of people who invested huge amounts of effort in struggling for the betterment of mankind, and, whenever they started thinking in martial terms, of Us Versus Them (see Robbers-Cave experiment), of a struggle where one allows oneself all dirty tricks because so does "the other side", Arguments Are Soldiers, and they lose themselves and their ability to identify the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative. And that's a huge handicap.
Keeping a clear mind and remaining open to the truth, no matter how inconvenient, is, I think, the only way to live through one's life, and remain sane to the very end. Once you forfeit your sanity, no matter your successes, you have lost.
Come now, you know how normal distributions work. Small differences in means cause over-representation at the extreme ends of the scale. From your IQ I can predict a ~30-40% chance of you being Ashkenazi, despite them being a global minority, just because of a "slightly" higher mean of 110. This is an important thing.
(EDIT: This calculation uses sd=15, which may or may not be a baseless assumption)
Plus, maybe there's a reverse-"Level above mine" effect going on here. The difference between someone at 90 and someone at 110 might not seem big to you, but it might just be your provincialism talking.
(Agreed about the immigration rationalization though)
I think we have to be careful with our mathematics here.
By definition IQ is distributed normally. But if we use this definition of IQ then we don't know how IQ is distributed within each population. In particular even if we assume each population is normal, we don't know they all have the same variance. So I think there's little we can say without looking at the data themselves (which I haven't done).
In this instance it might be better to try to measure intelligence on an absolute scale, and do your comparisons with that scale. I don't know how well that would go.
(I'm using the anonymous account (Username and password are "Username" and "password") since I just want to make a statistical point and not associate myself with scientific racism.)
Oh. I always assumed that was a pseudonymous account of one specific individual.
About 75% of the posts on this account from the past year are from one user (me). I can't decide on a good moniker for a username so I've been putting off creating a main account.
But yes, feel free to use it as a throwaway.
One of the comments it made early on describes it as a "community throwaway account". Plus it has a super-stupid password.
Yeah that's the tricky part that I forgot to add, we don't know the variance. I used sd=15 but for all I know it could be smaller or larger. Edited to amend.
As it turns out, I'm a green-eyed, pale-skinned but tan-capable Arab from North Africa. I've got several uncles that look downright East Asian (round face, slanted eyes, pale-skinned), and another side of my family looks south-asian, and another looks downright black, and we have blue-eys blondes, an the traits skip generations and branches, and I find the whole notion of "race" to be laughably vague.
If, like in the US, you put a bunch of Scandinavians, Southwest Africans, and East Asians right next to each other, without miscegenation between their descendants, and with a very distinct social stratification between them, I can see how words like "Hispanic" might sound like they might be meaningful, but in lands like Brazil or Morocco where everyone got mixed with everyone and you got a kaleidoscope of phenotypes popping up in the most unexpected places, the "lines" start looking decidedly more blurry, and, in particular, no-one expects phenotype to be in any way correlated with personality traits, or intelligence, or competence.
And let us not get started on the whole notion of "Ashkenazi" from a genetic standpoint; in fact, the very result that they get the highest IQ results makes me place my bet on a nurture rather than nature cause for the discrepancy. I'm willing to bet actual money on this outcome.
Fair enough. I would still contest that the "nurture" component of these outcomes is smaller than is commonly suggested (Ashkenazim in particular) and that I too would bet money on it.
(Also I'm sorry if I came off as rude before)
You didn't, as far as I am concerned.
(How would we go about making such bets official?)
I don't know how exactly to translate two difference subjective probabilities to a bet structure, but before that we ought to agree on what exactly we're disagreeing over and what the correct answer would look like to determine who wins.
I think that this would necessarily have to be a long-term thing - maybe the scientific consensus X years from now?
Um, as far as immigration. You may have noticed that some countries are much nicer places to live then others, i.e., some have low crime and highly functioning economies and others are poor crime filled hell-holes. Why is that? Is it that something about being north of the Rio Grande magically makes people more productive and less prone to commit violent crimes? <\sarcasm>
The main reason is the people and culture of those countries. Thus if you import too many people from a different country, the pleasantness of the country to live will depend on the the nature of the new people. Notice that this argument assumes nothing about the role of nature versus nurture.
Both Koreas are ethnically and culturally the same. What makes one a SF near-utopia and the other a starving disgrace is the accident of having fallen within opposite spheres of influence during the Cold War and the subsequent development of radically different political systems. One could argue something similar happened with pre-unification Germany. I've read somewhere that the relative poverty in rural Southern Italy and wealth in industrial Northern Italy mirror the North-South dynamics of Reconstruction USA.
You seem to not know what culture means
In fairness to your criticism, I must say: That downvote did not come from me.
Yep, and I totally agree. The point I'm making is that with immigration we can afford to have more finely-grained selection criteria. Instead of a blanket ban on immigrants from third-world hellholes, we can at least choose the best ones.
Again, provided we are comfortable with disparate impact and all.
I would support such a policy, provided the criteria aren't easily gamable.
Well, if productivity and proneness to commit violent crimes depended only of nurture, the children of those people would resemble people from the country where they're growing up, rather than their parents, so the problem would only exist for first-generation immigrants.
This is only true if we enforce strict integration of immigrant families, but where there are large populations of immigrants they tend to form enclaves where their social circles consist of other immigrants. Hence little tokyo, chinatowns, and whatnot.
Most people are raised largely by their parents, so the parents would have a large effect on how the children are nurtured.
I took “nurture” to refer to socialization, and it turns out that parents are much less important than same-age peers (e.g. people who grow up in a different place than their parents did end up with the accent of the former), but I had forgotten that of course literal nurture also matters.
One reason why small differences in average IQ might matter are social amplifier models. The discussion in this paper talks about it a bit.