In this sense, God has screwed over each and every one of us- in three billion bases of DNA, there's bound to be alleles which we really don't like.
Clearly, however, some have been 'screwed over' less than others at the very least- there are large numbers of people for whom the dislikable alleles aren't even noticed.
What I find amazing is that no article I read actually quotes Watson as saying Africans have lower IQs. What he said was that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”
His claim was ONLY that Africans' intelligence is different than "ours."
Is there much doubt as to his meaning? Perhaps not, but I should think on this blog we would not commit the sin of assuming too much.
IQ tests are culturally biased.
If IQ tests are 'culturally biased', then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers. The highest scoring group does not share the same culture as the test writers (for instance, East Asians score higher than White Americans). This seems to be strong evidence that IQ tests are not 'culturally biased'.
If I'm not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven's Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:
If I'm not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven's Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:
I wouldn't rule out the possibility. There is an environmental influence on even more fundamental visual perception and so could well be related differences here. Further, past exposure to tests in general and tests of the 'complete the pattern' variety is going to bring up a cache of typical things that a test designer is likely to include. It is more or less a habit for me when looking at such a problem to test if it is simple rotation (by either a constant amount or an amount that increases by a constant amount, depending on the level of the test).
I seem to recall that the Ponzo illusion doesn't work among cultures not accustomed to visual art using perspective.
(Edited to replace ASCII art with a link to Wikipedia.)
That's a pet peeve of mine: that illusion belongs to class of illusions of the form, "If you saw this in real life, your perception would be right. But it's a 2D picture, so you're wrong."
It's exactly the same as taking this standard optical illusion, and instead of claiming the A/B squares are the same color, saying "This image has no squares. Verify it for yourself!" (i.e. in the plane of the image, nothing makes a square, but it's understood to represent a perspective image of squares)
Nothing wrong with exploring these -- they're very informative about how our perceptual system works -- but please understand what's going on.
I can see, then, how a culture not expecting perspective images, can interpret them as flat and not fall prey to these illusions.
We both underestimated how inaccurate cultural differences can make an IQ score, I think.
I have two rebuttals specific to your assertion that knowing English shouldn't affect your ability to solve IQ test puzzles, but I also thought about this more and realized that even a culture fair test probably cannot compensate for the differences between the three groups of people we're discussing, so I gave a couple examples for that, too.
First: How are you supposed to understand the question that goes with the puzzle if you don't know how to read English well? Without that question "Which shape goes in the white box?" there is little hope of interpreting the puzzle correctly, let alone filling it out. This is an IQ test, and the questions are sometimes written in a way that makes them tricky to understand completely. IQ tests may demand a high reading level. If all you've got is broken English, reading and comprehending questions like these might feel like you're doing something as hard as applying Bayesian probability to statistics.
IQ tests are also frequently written by people who don't consider all possible ways of interpreting the question. If you were not constantly exp...
My measured Ravens IQ jumped a good ten points after the experience of taking a few IQ tests, because I got a sense for the thought patterns of the test makers. This indicates that you can learn how to do better on these tests, which further suggests that cultural knowledge might help you learn it faster.
A westerner customarily reads from left to right, and then goes down one line. Note how the incomplete square is also the last square that the Westerner's eye would consider...only after seeing all the relevant information would the Westerner consider the empty square.
A westerner also frequently uses the concept of clockwise and anticlockwise. The black square progresses in a neatly clockwise fashion for each shape as it is viewed by the western gaze. Thanks to the bottom third line breaking the top left/top right/bottom left pattern, one must use clockwise/anticlockwise notions to complete the pattern.
A westerner has also been taught about division using pie charts, and each of these shapes are divided neatly into fourths. Add to this a passing familiarity with grids, the idea that tests are important in the first place...you get the picture.
To get some sense of how difficult this task would be for, say, an illiterate hunter gatherer, try rotating the image 45 degrees counterclockwise and refrain from using your prior knowledge of the correct reading frame to complete the pattern. Suddenly, it is a lot harder, isn't it?
East Asians in America or East Asians in East Asia?
Average IQ
Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence (2006) refers to a study with n = ~2000 for whites in US getting IQ 103 and a study with n = ~1000 (plus several with n = ~500) for Japanese in Japan getting IQ 105.
If IQ tests are 'culturally biased', then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers.
This assumes that if a test is culture biased, it must be biased in favor of the culture as a whole. A test can be culture biased by hyper-valuing a set of skills prominent in one culture, even if that skill set is stronger in some other culture. If IQ is biased, say, toward "academic culture," even though this is a feature of "white U.S. culture" it may be even more a part of East Asian culture.
What I think your argument shows is that the tests aren't intentionally biased in favor of one culture specifically. In fact, the studies of early IQ testing shows there was intentional bias (not so much today), but rather than being in favor of the dominant culture, it was against the cultures of particular immigrants. (I'm speaking of the Army Alpha tests.)
More intelligent people more likely to survive hard circumstances, aren't they? Maybe it depends which circumstances. But my thought is that a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection, so that there are way more bright people.
Why would you think this? Intelligence is metabolically expensive, and pays off only in the long run (consider how much of a life you can 'waste' getting an education). Putting people into a resource-pressured poor quality environment would seem to select for more immediately useful traits like aggression or growing up very quickly (and hence, investing in poorer quality body parts or less of them, like being shorter).
If there were a lot of resources on average but the environment fluctuated a lot, then there might be evolutionary pressure for intelligence: but this does not describe Africa too well and better describes very northern countries like Scandinavia where you can freeze to death but agriculture or fishing etc still yield lots of food. The book does discuss this theory and run some regressions in its favor. (I've always been a little dubious: it seems to me that it largely depends on European countries for most of its value...)
All of your points may be true, but are not especially relevant. Philippe Rushton makes much hay in his lifecycle theory of how black kids grow up faster than white kids and much faster than East Asian kids, but that doesn't mean they're destined for genius any more than chimp infants growing up much faster than human infants means anything.
What are these "resources" you keep mentioning?
Fats, protein, calories, time-investment, sleep. Feel free to look through http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics for those (the sleep one IIRC is from Ericsson).
It's not like gifted children eat two elephants a week. They eat normal food.
How do you know how much they eat? Have you weighed out their every meal and snack? Just a few hundred calories made the difference between life and death in Nazi concentration camps; how much more so in famines or droughts? Your intuitions from a fat Western First World environment are not very useful in this discussion.
I've met several bright people that require only three hours a night. That's five extra hours every day. Imagine that all your days are 1/3 longer, and how much of an advantage it would be.
I have, actually, with modafinil. It'...
There's a possible explanation that is totally in support of the Africans, EVEN if the claim was true. Here it is:
IQ tests are culturally biased.
Where did this explanation come from? The way you present it, it's as if you looked for this explanation in order to save a belief about the intelligence of Africans.
If the test asks "How do you use a teacup?"
I have seen a few IQ tests, and none of them contain questions remotely like this. This imaginary IQ test question seems to have been invented as fictional evidence to support the explanation.
IQ tests these days are typically "culture-fair", by which is meant that the questions are non-verbal and non-pictorial. At least, that is what is usually meant, although on googling for "culture-fair", I did notice the occasional assumption that a test that gives different average scores to people from different cultures is ispo facto not culture-fair, making equality of IQ between cultures an axiom instead of an observation.
Reasoning that Takes Relevant Data Into Account: "The IQ test(s) said African's IQs are lower than those of whites. However, there are known flaws with IQ tests such as cultural bias, so that figure might be wrong. Most published research findings are false (PLOS Medicine), so I should apply healthy skepticism to all the research I read. This is not likely to be an accurate piece of data to use as a Bayesian prior.
This reads like a classic case of motivated cognition. You don't want to believe the conclusion; therefore, you selectively look for potential flaws then declare that there's still a chance. The reason I believe the connection between race and intelligence is not just because of the tests but because more or less every relevant aspect of reality (e.g., the statistic on race and crime, the nearly complete lack of blacks in intelligence intensive fields, e.g., math, programing, the state of majority black countries) looks the way one would expect it to look if the connection existed.
Once I've decided on a prior to use, I should then adjust for other relevant data (things I know about the specific individual).
Who is claiming otherwise?
...A. ...the fact my prior
Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:
1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in the law, seem extremely high.
2) It is interesting that LW sees so many rational arguments for policies that would give more resources to whites or Asians, especially white or Asian males with high test scores who may not have gone to college. While these arguments are phrased as both logical and obvious, LW rarely (ever?) entertains the easily constructed, similarly phrased arguments that would push resources away from LW's typical membership. For example: "It's been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a ...
Assumptions:
Some conclusions that follow from these assumptions:
Sharper, if the divisions are truly arbitrary and on a basis uncorrelated with individual intelligence then the difference in population average will be (crudely speaking) on the order of 1/sqrt(N) where N is the size of each population. N is so large here that the sorts of interracial "differences" that are inevitable on the grounds you give are also clearly negligible, and no one who claims that races do, or don't, differ in intelligence is talking about such tiny differences.
Eliezer, leaving aside the bit about God, I think there's at least on...
As I tried to make clear a while ago, humans are very particular about the kinds of inequality that bother them. Race tied inequalities are among the ones they care most about.
IME most people only think individual IQ differences are ok because they believe other qualities compensate the difference. If they say that some person has a higher IQ, they usually (at least implicitly) question their social skills, financial success, physical prowess, etc.. Also they always talk about much smarter people, not about the 50% under the average, conveying the idea that difference is due to the genius' unusually high IQ not because most people are stupid in comparison. OTOH group comparisons usually imply that one group is smarter and the ot...
IME most people only think individual IQ differences are ok because they believe other qualities compensate the difference. If they say that some person has a higher IQ, they usually (at least implicitly) question their social skills, financial success, physical prowess, etc.. Also they always talk about much smarter people, not about the 50% under the average, conveying the idea that difference is due to the genius' unusually high IQ not because most people are stupid in comparison. OTOH group comparisons usually imply that one group is smarter and the ot...
About the commenting program:
I browse with javascript disabled (security reasons) and usually can post in most blogs. I also write software for a living, so I know that any of those aren't required. Please consider improving your blog software to something simpler and less restrictive.
Sharper, dividing humanity into the subpopulations "male" and "female" does not result in average IQ differences, though brain-volume does differ, as does the visuo-spatial vs verbal component of intelligence, and the standard deviations for them differ as well. It is usually an assumption of statistics that large enough groups with arbitrary divisions (say, by a "natural experiment") will not differ on average.
In which geographic region were you thinking of where darker skin indicates higher intelligence?
Daniel Yokozimo, nobo...
Group differences are distressing because the more of a difference there is, the more grounds there are for discriminating on the basis of race or sex, and it is incredibly frustrating to find oneself continually judged not for one's own manifested abilities, but for the average abilities manifested by other people who who share one's race or sex.
Yes, if there is an average group difference, then race or sex alone would count as Bayesian evidence of a particular level of ability. A perfect Bayesian, looking at all the evidence, would be justified in statistically discriminating. But there aren't any perfect Bayesians; that's why this blog exists. One needn't contend that all groups have identical average capacities in order to be worried about discrimination. The problem is not discrimination itself, considered abstractly in some toy domain; the problem with discrimination is that in the real world, people are going to do it wrong, and do it wrong in all sorts of harmful and oppressive ways.
In "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning," Eliezer writes that people don't pay enough attention to priors, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case when the task is evaluating people whose race and sex are known.
Who has suggested not looking at each individual with love and respect?
Could you be more specific about the insights you find in the book of Job that are relevant here? (It doesn't seem to me to say anything about individuals versus groups, or about the implications of varying intelligence or other unequally distributed benefits; and what it says on the question of whether God is just amounts to "how dare you question his justice? he's bigger than you". But no doubt I'm missing something.)
U can't possibly say what I want about this and keep it short, but I"ll try anyway. I'll sketch the bare outlines and if you want you can fill in the details.
The US race problem comes entirely from insufficient miscegenation. If we mixed things up sufficiently we'd have no separate races in 2 generations. But we haven't, yet.
Consider Gause's Law. Populations that don't mix are like separate species, they won't stably fill the same niches. The alternative to one population going away is a caste system -- guarantee that each race has niches that are the...
TGGP: Eliezer referenced the book (the wikipedia url on the "real" link, lookup for the phrase "Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?"). I thought everybody followed the links before commenting ;). Anyway I assume that if something is referenced its discussion is on topic.
Regarding their data, we can't just remove the data they fudged, we need to redo the analysis with the original data. We can't just discard data because it doesn't fit our conclusions. Using their raw data without fudging we are left ...
Skin color is a function of the latitude at which ones ancestors lived.
This is obvious through observation: ancestors lived on the equator - brown skin. ancestors lived at extreme north/south latitude - white skin.
Gareth, I don't believe I specified a quantitive amount by which they would differ, just that they would differ. You're right, normally (pun intended), the groups wouldn't differ by much. That's part of the point, isn't it. Why care that they differ at all? There isn't a useful reason to care that group X has a different average IQ than group Y. Does a particular group of dark skin people have a lower intelligence due to their skin color? Not likely. Other factors are much more significant. There's no causual relationship between the two factors. The only ...
TGGP,
Sorry, forgot to answer your additional question in my reply. Whenever Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams get together in a small group (as they do occasionally), within that small geographical region darker skin color is a great indicator of higher intelligence. Makes all these divisions seem just a little more arbitrary, doesn't it?
On a more serious note, Queens, NYC, NY has a higher than normal proportion of black West Indies immigrants. In that geographic region, blacks have an average IQ higher than those with lighter skin. Other US locations incl...
g- Nobody has suggested treating people other than with respect and love. It seems to be a fairly common thread in the things I'm reading here. Instead of asking "what group has a lower or higher IQ?", why not ask, "How do we raise an indiviual's IQ?" I may be misreading Job, I see more like- "don't forget the beauty that surrounds you"
Sharper -- Pembroke Pines? Holy schmoley, that's a pretty small neighborhood. I'ts more known in my mind for Canadian snowbirds than high IQ dark skinned people. Do you have a reference for your assertion? I'm personally intererested because it's about 5 miles down the road from where my sailboat is right now. Plus it's where a friend of mine lived when she was in the escort business.
Douglas, I don't see why we can't ask both questions, but in any case the question this post was about wasn't "what group has a higher or lower IQ?" but "why do people think that group IQ differences matter more than individual ones?" -- decrying group-over-individual emphasis just as much as you are.
All the stuff about natural beauty in Job is there to make the point "God is bigger and cleverer than you are, so who are you to question him?". (Hence the constant refrain of "Do you know ...?, Have you seen ...?, Were you t...
Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity.
You can thank the Nazis for making race so political that it won't be touchable for generations. You can also thank the segregationists for irritating that political gland and making race untouchable for more time.
Francis Galton brought a lot of ideas to the world, but the one that was amplified to the point where it will take centuries for the con...
People care about race because race is about who your blood relatives are, and who, to some extent, your descendants will be.
A racial group can best be defined as an extended family that has more coherence and cohesiveness than a typical extended family because it is partly-inbred.
So, that's why people care so much.
Also, please, can we stop equating "race" and "skin color"? Haven't you ever seen an African albino? Being white in skin color doesn't make him white racially.
Or consider the famous golfer Vijay Singh, who of South Asian origin and was born on Fiji. He is darker than the average African-American (but has Caucasian features). He is never, ever considered to be racially black or African-American in America. Never. You can make up a list of other dark-skinned people who aren't considered black in America, such as pundits Dinesh D'Souza and...
I thought the actual point of this article was nifty, but I thought this was stupid:
If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period.
As much as you open/close this, there isn't nearly enough in this article to justify the claim. I am not asking you to justify it. I am just curious why you include something like this in an otherwise focused article. What is the point of having this and saying it the way you did? To me, it just sounds like "Boo God!"
I had a hard tim...
I think Eliezer is missing the main cause of the uproar in cases like this. The stance of the uproarers is not that "If this was true, it would be horrible, so let's not believe it." It's more like, "believing this is true would cause people to act horribly, so let's not believe it."
Claims of innate racial and sexual differences in intelligence have historically been baseless rationalizations that attempt to justify oppressing the group in question. So now when anyone raises the question, they are shouted down because they are tarred wi...
because while individual differences clearly exist, group differences probably don't
Just not true. And obviously not true at that. Was this presented as "one of the crazy beliefs that some insane people have" or as your own position? Hard to keep track in there.
Group differences not existing would be such an overwhelmingly improbable occurrence that it would prompt me to second guess my atheism. The universe isn't fair. Things just don't go around being equal to each other without good reason.
Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:
^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.
^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.
^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an...
Living people with 220+ IQs do exist - you say the words "modern IQ tests" as if the ratio tests were invented in the dark ages. This only changed in recent decades.
Very well then, let us discuss the cases of people recorded to be hundreds of years old by less than modern documentation, like Methuselah as verified by the Book of Genesis. Wait, you don't think people actually live to thousands of years? But you just said we can use datapoints from any kind of test we please!
Whatever cutoff you choose to exclude things like Genesis or scientific results from hundreds of years ago while still including largely obsolete ratio tests, I will shift it slightly to include only better IQ tests. I think this is perfectly legitimate, as one should strive to use the best available data, and regard your 'but old obsolete scores!' as quibbling.
Which is perfectly consistent with them having IQs over 220, if you think about it...
And it's also consistent with IQs over 9000!!!
Occam's razor. Use it, love it. The base rate of IQs like 140 are by definition higher than >220.
There are differences that they have that I have not encountered in anyone else. Things stood out.
"B...
My personal reaction seems to be traceable to a potential vs achievement view of status.
Imagine a 10 year old who introduces himself and says he's been tested and found to be gifted/~150 IQ. My intuitive reaction is to be a little happy for the kid and maybe talk to him.
Imagine a 40 year old who introduces himself to the group and says he's been tested at 150; same IQ, same introduction, but my reaction is instantly negative - because why did he introduce himself based on his IQ? At age 40, shouldn't he have something to show for it, some personal identity beyond 'a smart person'? Be a doctor, a researcher somewhere, an entrepreneur, etc. His failure to mention anything more substantive seems like decent evidence that there is nothing better to mention, and he's simply failed at life - yet he still seems to think a lot of himself. An arrogant failure is not someone I wish to know or think highly of, and so I don't.
The nerd subculture certainly exists (with local variations) in Europe and East Asia, but the impression I get is that it's coupled less to childhood intelligence and more to that subculture's various touchstones: you're about as likely to identify as a nerd if you like, say, literary sci-fi, but being smarter than the average bear isn't as good a predictor of liking SF.
I don't know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with the American educational system. It's pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form. Still, I'm looking at this through American eyes, and people that've actually been through those systems might have a more accurate take on it.
I've also been reading some stuff lately that suggests the association was much weaker as late as the Fifties and early Sixties, even in the US, but I'm not sure how much I trust it.
One of the more distinctive features of the US system is the the connection to youth sports. Other countries play sports, obviously, but the US model tends to locate competitive sports programs inside schools, from middle school on up through college.
That started in the mid-1800's, in the northeast, and it spread from there, both laterally to other colleges and vertically, down to high schools. But it took a long time for it to become as effort-intensive as it is now, and there was a pretty significant spike in intensity after World War II, when colleges grew quickly and families bought more televisions and radios and schools could afford to field more teams.
Pretty slim connection, obviously. But if you're looking for an effect that could plausibly rearrange social groups in age-segregated communities, sports fits the bill. And if you're looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits (NOT giftedness--but earnest, obsessive pursuits like we tend to identify with nerd subculture), you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.
I'm pretty sure individual IQ differences aren't OK (in that sense) in certain contexts. There's a stereotype that (except in clinically pathological cases) if your son doesn't perform well at school, his teacher is expected to tell you that he doesn't put enough effort in it, not that he's stupid.
The uproar associated with racial differences in IQ has two main reasons to me.
The first one is historical : black slavery and all its consequences still running in the modern world, the nazis and their racial theories, ... those horrors of history justify, from a political point of view, an uproar against attempts to classify people in races and "rank" the races. We know where that path leaded often enough in history, and we don't want to ever walk it again. Since most people don't really understand statistics or bayesian reasoning, spreading th...
You talk of the injustice of treating a trueborn prince like a peasant, or a baby swan like an ugly duckling.
Eliezer talks about the injustice of different people being born princes or peasants in the first place, of there being swans and ducks.
It's clear which is the deeper injustice, and which is the superficial one.
Fluid intelligence measures like Ravens have proven valuable for predicting success in mathematics--and little else.
Cite please. This is a completely novel claim to me, one I routinely see problems with (eg. a few days ago reading a SMPY review mentioning a 13-fold gender imbalance in extremely high SAT math scores while tests of fluid intelligence show little or no such asymmetry). I find it very hard to believe that matrix tests predict mathematics success and little else.
If you are trying to express some reasonable position like "IQ tests (which include subtests covering a variety of crystallized materials as well as fluid intelligence measures) will have some incremental predictive validity for various activities or life outcomes over an IQ test (which is just a measure of fluid intelligence)", then perhaps one could agree. But your current absolutist statements seem to be endorsing some other position...
Why not cite a study favoring your claim directly rather than challenging me to? What does fluid intelligence predict besides math success? If it predicts more, there should be studies on point.
Are you challenging me to find a single study using a matrix test which predicts to any degree some metric other than math success, such as income or employment or highest attained degree, and that's it? Are you sure? Because your following restatement agrees that matrix scores can be predictive outside math.
...I'm not saying matrix tests don't predict anything bu
If your first sentence you claim that the tests are well designed.
In your second sentence you explain what is wrong about their design.
Considering this, I have trouble understanding your third sentence.
With individual differences, people are being judged as individuals, and on the basis of their individual capabilities.
With racial differences, people are being judged as members of a race, and not on the basis of their individual capabilities.
At least, that's the fear.
You seem angry that there is variation across humans in intelligence.
Are you proportionately a magnitude even more incensed that dogs get screwed with lower intelligence, no thumbs, and an inability to talk?
You happily group humans together as your "team" it seems. In the past, and probably even currently, there are people who group together "males of my nationality" as their team or even "my relatively immediate family" as my team, and don't worry much about "fairness" outside their team boundaries.
Is your ch...
It's a problem, and I agree... Rich people tend to get and stay smart (and rich) by being brought up in enriched environments (lots of conversation with adults, and lots of books) and then working in enriched environments (competitive socially- and technically-demanding professional jobs that require constant learning). Many poor people get and stay poor by working repetitive minimum-wage jobs to help their families while also being harassed more than rich people are, and don't have enough time to invest in reading/education to advance themselves because t...
Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?
In short, because the rich use individual IQ differences to justify their superiority.
(e.g. "I'm just smart and worked hard! It's not polite for me to talk about my two decades of very expensive private schooling.")
The problem with racism is the confusion of correlation and causation. To state that "blacks score lower in IQ" is to imply that being in the Venn Diagram circle "black" automatically lines you up with a "lower IQ circle." But, besides the sheer difficulty of defining racial categories in the first place, this ignores that there are other factors in which you can group people which will cause those circles to line-up far more accurately. Particularly ones based on environmental pressure of a person's ancestors. If a group is p...
A self-identified "black person," has a highly unpredictable amount of actually African genes, and the common results of certain traits will depend on genes that may not cause self-reporting, so your conclusions will all be corrupted.
Are you seriously going to argue that self-reported black people are no less likely to have blue eyes and blond hair than the general world population?
Including the fact that genetic-causation of traits is a hopelessly flawed concept in the first place.
What? Do you deny that eye color, hair color, lactase persistence and blood type are genetically caused?
They are self-reported "black people" with significantly different DNA, including in their skin color, which is supposed to be a defining trait in terms of self-reporting.
I think you are referring to these two segments: Charles Barkley DNA Test, Snoop Dogg's DNA Test.
First, you somehow forget to mention that Charles Barkley also has more European DNA than Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg has more Native American DNA. Is the fact that Charles Barkley has lighter skin than Snoop Dogg so surprising given these data?
Second, I think you are attacking a strawman: nobody here is claiming ...
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.