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Martin-2 comments on Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct - Less Wrong Discussion
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This seems extremely implausible. Would a group with intelligence as low as an average IQ of 70 connotes be able to maintain language at the same level as most human groups?
I think you don't have a clear picture of how highly functional low IQ people can be. This is in sense natural, since I mean how many people with an IQ of 70 do you know? Its silly but I sometimes have to remind myself they are by definition as common as people with an IQ of 130. They hold jobs and they manage to reproduce just fine, so they aren't exactly the helpless drooling passives that popular imagination paints them as.
Also I think its often underestimated how different low IQ people of different types can be from each other.
Can a 13 year old learn to drive a car safely? Yes. Can he work in a factory? Yes. Can he run a farm? Yes. Can he be a soldier? Yes. Can a group of 13 year old children use lanugage at basically the same level as most human groups? Yes.
But how well would a 13 year old do compared to 18 year old on a IQ test? Not that well I suspect.
If the test got mislabelled as that of a 18 year old, what would be his estimated IQ? In abstract thinking he may not be that better than a 18 year old with a 70ish IQ but in many many other regards the test wouldn't do him justice by putting him in the same category.
Black job performance is slightly better than what would be expected going just by their IQs. And Blacks with IQs in the 70s are generally on average more functional than Whites or East Asians with the same IQ. This has been the basis of some speculation that low IQ Whites and East Asians do worse on average because the sample contains not only people who are plain dumb, but a greater fraction people who suffer from other disabilities and more general brain damage (and/or underdevelopment) too, than is found in the group of IQ 70 Blacks.
Funnily enough, I recently posted some comments on exactly the IQ 70 Africa claim against the usual view that that is impossible, quoting a LWer's blog post about working in Haiti:
You're right. I was posting from a position of considerable ignorance about what low IQs might mean in practice.
What would you expect to see from a civilization with an average IQ of 70?
Farming, simple irrigation systems, pottery and other crafts (with objects of great beauty made for the upper class), walled cities, some siege engines, long distance trade, domestication of animals, iron working, sailing, class divisions, chariots and writing.
This they could all eventually develop with no input from the outside in favourable climactic conditions.
Exposed to outside influence I think they can pick up things like clockwork, ocean worthy ships, machine tools, the internal combustion engine, radio and television (and improve it on their own as well). Even basic nuclear technology, computers and some complex medical equipment isn't completely out of the picture, though don't expect any refinements. As a society they can probably get clean water, electrification, good roads, decent hospitals, reasonable safety from crime and quality primary school education.
This is what I'd expect of a civilization with an average IQ of 70. But please remember this civilization requires some adaptation, what I wrote goes for a "civilized" people (or at least a people that practised farming for some time) with an IQ of 70. Not all hunter gatherer populations with that IQ would be able to make this work. Self-domestication in humans isn't really primarily about raising IQ as some people assume it is.
I read this interesting quote today, and I couldn't help but remember your car example:
--Howard 2001 Searching the Real World for Signs of Rising Population Intelligence
(This leads to a provocative thesis which I find amusing just to contemplate.)
But how highly functional are low-IQ people on average? Looking at only the most functional low-IQ people wouldn't give a good idea of what to expect in general.
The 13-year-old's raw score would generally be lower, but their IQ should be about the same as the 18-year-old's; IQ tests are age-normed nowadays.
My point was that different groups of people that might score low on IQ tests sometimes differ systematically from each other. In my last paragraph I suggest quite directly IQ 70 Black people are different from IQ 70 Whites and East Asians.
Well aware of this. Hence:
Fair enough. I misread the bolded part of your post as just amplifying a more general point about younger people scoring lower on IQ tests.