Assumptions:

1. Intelligence describes some quality that individuals have.
2. Individuals have different aamounts of or ability in that quality.
3. Larger groups of can be created by grouping these same varying individuals and this group can be said to have a group average in terms of intelligence.

Some conclusions that follow from these assumptions:

1. Any group of people, divided by almost any arbitrary measurement into a large enough sample will differ in the average amount of intelligence each particular subgroup has.
2. Arbitrarily dividing the worlds population

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

About the commenting program:

1. Why require both javascript and a captcha to prevent spamming? Both are very bad for accessibility.
2. Moving to another URL is quite bizarre. Additional negative points if after submitting doesn't show any results at all.
3. Combining 1 & 2 in a javascript requirement for two (seemingly) unrelated URLs makes the whole process much more complicated than it needs to be.

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.

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

"in his humble opinion": Jim Watson? Humble? There's a first for everything.

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... (read more)

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.