Username comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (454)
For a more complete explanation of the theory, see Half Sigma here (warning: post is more racist and sarcastic than I would personally endorse) and Bryan Caplan's response here.
Not sure what you're saying here, but it seems sufficiently sarcastic that I should reply.
Suppose scientific racism is true. Presumably, smart people will figure this out. Some will have the social skills to stay quiet about it. What do you expect to happen to the rest of them?
I will signal the overabundance of sources I could use for this fact by limiting myself to only ones with "Times" in the title. Here's New York Times, here's The Times of Higher Education, and here's the Los Angeles Times which adds the fact, previously unknown to me, that bomb squads had to open his mail.
Sorry, typo. He found support for some aspects of it, nonsupport for other aspects of it, but was generally classified as a supporter.
I wasn't claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
The crime wave where probably all kinds of crime increased five to ten times from 1880 to 1980. Both More Right and Slate Star Codex have blogged about this recently. Low IQ is indeed a strong risk factor for crime.
It isn't directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
Race is, like all categories, a set of artificial discontinuous labels being forced upon natural continuous variation. On the other hand, the same sort of lossy-but-nonuseless generalizing ability that allows me to say "Black people are more likely to have so-called 'nappy' hair than white people" allows scientific racists to say "black people are more likely to have certain mental characteristics than white people". We could certainly improve accuracy further from there by better subdividing groups ("black people" becomes "Bantu", "San", et cetera; "white people" becomes "Scandinavian", "Mediterranean", etc) but we will lose accuracy by refusing to even make that first subdivision at all.
ITYM “most atheist groups in the US”; I wouldn't assume the same to be true in northern Eurasia, for example.