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Transfuturist comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The biggest problem I have with racists claiming racial realism is this.
The racists claim that this is irrelevant because of research that corrects for socioeconomic status and still finds IQ differences. Of course, researchers have found plenty of evidence of important environmental influences on IQ not measured by SES. It seems especially bad for the racial realist hypothesis that people who, for example, identify as "black" in America have the the same IQ disadvantage compared to whites whether their ancestory is 4% European or 40% European; how much African vs. European ancestry someone has seems to matter only indirectly to the IQ effects, which seem to directly follow whichever artificial simplified category someone is identified as belonging to.
Not completely serious, just wondering about possible implications, for sake of munchkinism:
Would it be possible to invent some new color, for example "purple", so that identifying with that color would increase someone's IQ?
I guess it would first require the rest of the society accepting the superiority (at least in intelligence) of the purple people, and their purpleness being easy to identify and difficult for others to fake. (Possible to achieve with some genetic manipulation.)
Also, could this mechanism possibly explain the higher intelligence of Jews? I mean, if we stopped suspecting them from making international conspiracies and secretly ruling the world (which obviously requires a lot of intelligence), would their IQs consequently drop to the average level?
Also... what about Asians? It is the popularity of anime than increases their IQ, or what?
Unfortunately, while we know there are lots of environmental factors that affect IQ, we mostly don't know the details well enough to be sure of very much, or to have much idea how to manipulate it. However, as I understand it, some research has suggested that there are interesting cultural similarities between Jews in most of the world and Chinese who don't live in China, and that the IQ advantage of Chinese is primarily among Chinese who don't live in China, so something in common between how the Chinese and Jewish cultures deal with being minority outsiders may explain part of why both show unusually high IQs when they are minority outsiders (and could explain a lot of East Asians generally; considering how enormous the cultural influence of China has been in the region, it would not be terribly surprising if many other East Asian groups had acquired whatever the relevant factor is).
This paper by Ogbu and Simons discusses some of the theories about groups that do poorly (the "involuntary" or "caste-like" minorities). Unfortunately I couldn't find a citation for any discussion of differences between voluntary minorities which would explain why some voluntary minorities outperform rather than merely equalling the majority, apart from Ned Block's passing reference to a culture of "self-respect" in his review of The Bell Curve.
It's been done - many people do in fact self-identify as 'Indigo children', 'Indigos' or even 'Brights'. The label tends to come with a broadly humanistic and strongly irreligious worldview, but many of them are in fact highly committed to some form of spirituality and mysticism: indeed, they credit these perhaps unusual convictions for their increased intelligence and, more broadly, their highly developed intuition.
Ah, "Brights" is Dawkins and Dennett's terrible word for atheists; "Indigos" is completely insane and incoherent new-age nonsense about allegedly superpowered children. How did you conflate the two?
I've seen mixed reports on this. Human Varieties, for example, has a series of posts on colorism which finds a relationship between skin color and intelligence in the population of African Americans, as predicted by both the hereditarian and "colorist" (i.e. discrimination) theories, but does not find a relationship between skin color and intelligence within families (as predicted by the hereditarian but not the colorist theory), and I know there were studies using blood type which didn't support the hereditarian theory but appear to have been too weakly designed to do that even if hereditarianism were true. Are you aware of any studies that actually look at genetic ancestry and compare it to IQ? (Self-reported ancestry would still be informative, but not as accurate.)
It's because Europeans are 4% Neanderthal and partake of the Neanderthals' larger brains, and Africans aren't. </completelyspuriousjustsostory>
There is large enough variance in Neanderthal ancestry among Europeans that we might actually be able to see differences within the European population (and then extrapolate those to guess how much of the European-African gap that explains). I seem to recall seeing some preliminary reports on this, but I can't find them right now so I'm not confident they were evidence-driven instead of theory-driven.
The really interesting thing is that you see results from all over the world showing this. Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s measuring 15 points lower than Protestants. Burakumin in Japan measuring 15 points lower than non-Burakumin. SAME GENE POOL. This strongly suggests you get at least 15 points really easily just from social factors, and these studies may (because a study isn't solid science yet, not even a string of studies from the same group) point to one reason.
Could be interesting to know how much of that is the status directly, and how much is better nutrition and medical care.
That's not obvious. Remember, there were strong taboos against interbreeding with Burakumin in Japan.
They separated only a few hundred years ago.