That's why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.

Why would we have to assume the IQs for groups, when we could just go out and give people tests?

• 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.

Got a link?

It's in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there ("biological hypothesis" is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):

I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way. I will mention that it leaves a lot unexplained ... For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article. I will add that I am extremely interested in comprehensive takedowns of that article (preferably a full fisking) and that if you have any counterevidence to it at all you should post it in the comments and I will be eternally grateful.

Getting to The Bell Curve,

Whose reliability is pretty controversial.

Since we're quoting Yvain, let's continue:

Meanwhile, The Bell Curve was lambasted in the popular press and by many academics. But it also got fifty of the top researchers in its field to sign a consensus statement saying it was pretty much right about everything and the people attacking it were biased and confused. Three years later, they re-issued their statement saying nothing had changed and more recent findings had only confirmed their opinion. The American Psychological Association launched a task force to settle the issue which stopped short of complete agreement but which given the circumstances was pretty darned supportive. There are certainly a lot of smart people with very strong negative opinions, but each one is still usually met by an equally ardent and credentialed proponent.

As to

Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.

I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)

Is that a bad thing?

Let me add another:

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything” ― Albert Einstein

I don't believe you're evil for rule-lawyering and depriving people of good quotes. I believe there are stressors in your life that pressure you into acting that way, unaware of the social consequences in their enumeration. I hope those who appreciate the quotes will make their position clear with karma, and those who do not assert the counterpoint.

Yup, that sounds very plausible. Would your unwillingness to give a number be changed if your client said -- as I think the OP here would -- something like this? "I understand that any probability you give me may be wrong in ways it's prohibitively hard to prevent, and I promise that I am not looking for perfection or anything like it. I understand that providing a probability may mean extra work, and I am happy to pay for that extra work. And I assure you that my own understanding of probability is extremely good and I will not do silly things like assuming that if you say something's unlikely and it happens then you're incompetent."

That's one reason I'm here, but in the limited time the mortality tables give me I'd like to find a way to present myself favorably to almost any crowd.

In the past, very few have cheered me on and a more vocal few have fervently hoped I'd fail.

Ugh ugh ugh. That's awful for you and I wish you well in recovering from it.

I am not a medical professional or anything like one; I would just like to give further emphasis to the following things others have already said:

• waveman says: base rate is 1/200 to 1/60, probability given a history of stillbirths is 1/40.
  • I remark (but maybe this is already taken into account somehow) that a couple with a history of stillbirths, just like a couple with a history of live births, is statistically going to be older than average; if, as I guess, older means more stillbirth risk, then this may mean that the difference between the "base" and "history of stillbirths" condition is really less than these figures suggest.
• Elo says: the most obvious causes, including ones giving obvious reason to expect higher risk in a future pregnancy, seem improbable given what your doctors have found. It looks like you're in that "Undetermined" category.

Most likely you will never know what the problem was. It seems like Pr(next child stillborn) is probably no worse than about 2%, and in particular not drastically worse than the probabilities anyone else faces.

I repeat that I am not offering any new analysis (aside from the remark about ages), just picking out what look to me like the key points of other people's.

If you (very understandably) want a probability estimate from an actual obstetrician, you might try explicitly looking for an obstetrician willing to give probability estimates. That is, contact some local obstetricians and ask not "Can I consult you about this?" but "Are you willing to give me your best estimate of probabilities?". You may of course find that they all say no, or that they have no actual understanding of probability.

What are the dynamics that produce a fad rather than growth into the mainstream? It might be worth CFAR thinking about that.

One cannot help but be aware, in 1958, that there is far less suspicion and misgiving among intellectuals concerning general semantics and general semanticists than prevailed ten and twenty years ago. Indeed, a certain receptivity is noticeable. The term 'semantics' itself is now frequently heard on the radio, TV and the public speaking platform and it appears almost as frequently in the public print.

Not everything that has 'semantics' written on it is 'general semantics'. The academic seminars on semantics rather see themselves in the tradition of linguistics.

Chesterton himself intended to use it in the situation where people are saying, "I don't see any reason for this fence to be here." That implies that people do not see a problem at all, and therefore they do not see an alternative solution. But if there is actually a problem, although people aren't noticing it, there may or may not be an alternative solution (and usually there will be at least a few alternatives.)