Both of the citations I was given by you guys said clearly that they were uncertain about the connection between race and IQ. That is the reason I don't agree - because even your citations do not agree.
I don't think you're correctly distinguishing between multiple related claims.
Claim A is that IQ distributions vary by race. This is supported by mountains of evidence. This alone is sufficient to justify using race as a factor when predicting IQ. This is the original point under discussion, as you argued against using race as a factor when predicting IQ both here and here.
Claim B is that differences in measured IQs overestimate the actual differences in intelligence or life outcomes between races. There is substantial evidence against this claim, and it is only weakly related to the original point under discussion. (Were it true, it would suggest that estimating IQ is not as important when doing between-race comparisons as other estimations, but does not impact IQ estimation.)
Claim C is that X% of difference in racial average IQ is due to genetic factors. It is currently not clear what X is for any particular between-race comparison, which the citations reflect. This is unrelated to the original point under discussion.
Also, by arguing that the reason I don't agree is because I am statistically innumerate and that the reason I don't agree is because I'm too inept to understand, you have made an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the person does zilch to support your argument.
Not quite. The arguments you've made recently are mostly social arguments- "you say Y, but your citation says Z, how do you account for that!"- rather than technical arguments.
The arguments seem vacuous to a technical expert, because Y and Z turn out to be totally compatible, but may still seem impressive to a non-expert who is unfamiliar with the relationship between Y and Z. Similarly, a non-expert doesn't know what sort of claims do and don't need citations, and so may see a virtuous skeptic against credulous believers, rather than a crank who defends their perpetual motion machine by insisting on a citation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. (This is not to say that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is taken on faith; what it means is that there are some issues where ignorance, confusion, or denial is solid evidence against being a curious and open-minded scholar.)
An effective social response is to poke at the technical content of your claims at a much more basic level (i.e. charges of innumeracy). If you aren't familiar with means and medians, and disengage when someone presses you on a basic statistical point, then anyone who is familiar with statistics can use that to gauge your level of technical ability. (And if you aren't familiar with stats 101, why have a confident opinion on an inherently statistical topic?)
why have a confident opinion on an inherently statistical topic?
Because for Epiphany it's not a statistical topic, it's an issue of fairness and equality -- she fights for Great Justice!
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.