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 For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article.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 :-)
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One and two, yes, but I haven't seen data that would indicate some population has a significant skew in its IQ distribution.
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 & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
- highly successful media/entertainment personalities (Sean "Diddy" Combs, Oprah, etc).
- highly successful technocrats (mayors / police chiefs / school superintendent in large metro areas)