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Username comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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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.