Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or

has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or

has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve

One and two, yes, but I haven't seen data that would indicate some population has a significant skew in its IQ distribution.

it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s.

Why don't you do the numbers? The purely-black IQ mean is about 85, I believe. A great deal of American blacks have some admixture of whte genes, so I think the IQ average for US blacks is in high 80s, maybe 90. There are about 42m of them. So lets' try three standard deviations above the mean, IQ > 130-135, more or less. That would be about 0.13% of the population, so about 56,700 individuals. You'd actually expect a bit more because many people with a lot of white genes (which would push their expected IQ up) identify as black.

How many do you observe? :-/

You can also look at IQ proxies, like SAT. Here are 2015 scores by race -- LW sucks at formatting tables, but basically scores of whites (average ~530) are consistently about 100 points above the scores of blacks (average ~430). Asians score the highest.

First, 42 million includes children for who I doubt there is a public criteria we can agree on as proxy for intelligence. Second, I'm not sure IQ > 130 is .13%. Wikipedia suggests 1%.

Since those cut in opposite directions, let's pretend they wash out. I am comfortable asserting there are more than 60k black folks in the set of:

senior military officers (colonel or greater)
highly successful national public intellectuals (eg Powell, Coates, Rice)
highly successful lawyers (Clarence Thomas is top 1% of lawyers)
highly successful MDs & resea

... (read more)

2Vaniver10y

African American mean IQ is typically measured at 85 to 90. Sub-Saharan African IQs are difficult to estimate because of a number of factors, but 85 is much higher than typical estimates.