Eugine_Nier comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong

32 Post author: katydee 07 March 2013 02:11AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 March 2013 05:46:57AM 4 points [-]

In general, there is wide variation in intelligence among people within any particular ethnic group.

I keep hearing people say that and always wanted to ask which statistics are being compared.

Comment author: bojangles 19 March 2013 02:53:39PM -1 points [-]

Not about intelligence specifically, but I believe this was the first (well-known) paper making the claim: http://www.philbio.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Lewontin-The-Apportionment-of-Human-Diversity.pdf

The point is that even if the heritable component of (say) intelligence among white people formed a bell curve, and the heritable component of intelligence among black people formed a bell curve, a priori you'd expect the two curves to be pretty much the same.

(Lewontin's other conclusion, that "race" is "biologically meaningless", is separate and doesn't work because what small racial differences there are are statistically clustered: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstract;jsessionid=831B49767DB713DADCD9A1199D7ADC49.d02t02)