Ok, that's interesting, but it does nothing to rule out nurture factors that would impact both IQ and income.
It's not clear to me why you would be interested in nurture factors. There are two things going on here: the ability of IQ to measure intelligence, and the historical causes of intelligence.
With the exception of disorders that prevent people from testing well without significantly impacting life outcomes, the historical causes of intelligence don't appear to have much to do with the ability of IQ to measure intelligence. A nurture factor (like, for example, being breastfed as a child or being struck on the head) actually alters someone's intelligence, and their intelligence influences both their test scores and their income.
What I am saying is that, specifically when it comes to black people, there are other factors that are definitely influencing performance and IQ scores. Therefore I reject claims about IQ and race that haven't controlled for known factors.
Again, this looks like it's mixing up the historical causes and the predictive ability. If the predictive ability is the same independent of race (it is), then it doesn't matter why the racial IQ averages are the way they are. What we would need to show to discount IQ measurements is that the IQ measurements are not as predictive for members of one race than another.
As an example of a real bias like this, girls tend to get better grades than standardized test scores alone would predict. In order to get an accurate estimate of what a girl's grades would be from her standardized test scores, you need to adjust upwards because she's a girl. Symmetrically, boys score better than one would expect from their grades, and so when predicting scores one needs to adjust upwards. When moving in the opposite direction, one would need to adjust downwards; a girl's grades overestimate her standardized test scores. But note that this doesn't mean we throw out the data- it's still predictive! We just adjust it the correct quantitative amount.
Now, do we know the historical causes of that effect? I'm not familiar with that field, but it seems like there are lots of plausible theories that probably have support. Even without knowing the causes, though, we can use our estimates of the size of the effect in order to predict more accurately.
virtually all psychologists (not scientists)
What would you call a scientist who studies intelligence? (I suppose I should also make clear that by "serious" I mean a scientist speaking confidently in their field of expertise.)
Then, without qualifying these statements with anything along the lines of "most x believe", he states
One does not say "most scientists believe that hydrogen has one proton," one says "hydrogen has one proton."
If you have a credible source for that claim, I'll be curious about it. No more Politico articles please.
Here's the APA report he references. The group means section starts on page 16.
In general, though, asking for citations like this is really frustrating, because it doesn't seem like the true rejection. The linked Richwine article referenced more serious sources that you could find if interested, and even if you didn't notice that Googling "racial IQ averages" leads to this as the fourth hit, and if sufficiently motivated you could find the paper that journalist was writing about, and so on.
But if you're not curious enough to seek out this information, and you don't seem to have updated on the other information I've provided, what reason do I have to expect that the difference between my position and your position is that I have citations, and as soon as I share them you'll adopt my position?
Whether the figure is 50% or 25%, it is still true that a significant proportion of people will have an IQ above average and therefore it would be hasty generalization to assume that a person of a certain group was an idiot.
Sure. When you think in distributions, an estimate generally comes with both a mode and a precision (or, relatedly, the standard deviation). Knowing someone is African American gives you an estimate with a mode of 85 and standard deviation of 15, which has a non-trivial but small chance of being over 120. Knowing someone got a 120 on a recent IQ test gives you an estimate with a mode slightly south of 120 and a standard deviation of probably 2-5, depending on the precision of the test.
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.