>But there’s a much more fundamental problem: it turns out that, even if you don’t think that IQ measures intelligence at all, you should still think that there will be an intelligence gap between the races.
Just as a general principle you should expect there to be inequities in all areas between any groups you pick out whatsoever. I don't think there's any grounds for supposing complete equality between groups rather than radical divergence from it. Even apparent truths about morphology like "All groups of humans have two arms" will diverge pretty quickly if factors like military-participation, availability of surgery, genetic defects, etc aren't accounted for.
If you pick two groups at random, as the size of the group gets larger, the averages of different properties will equalize. If you take two extremely large groups of humans at random, you would expect average IQs to be the same. If it wasn't, that would be a mathematical anomaly. You would only find inequities if the group member selection was not random or if the groups were small - for instance, one group is designated 'black,' and members of that group have faced oppression for centuries.
Ashkenazi Jews have "faced oppression for centuries" and have the highest mean IQ of any group. It turns out "being opppressed" is an extremely poor causal explanation for intelligence differences.
They will equalize toward a mean for that group in particular. Varying any property between two groups practically necessitates that they will have dissimilar averages. Idk of any work in criminology, sociology, psychology, etc that selects for two groups based on different traits and arrives at the conclusion that there are no statistically discernible differences between the two.
Yes, if you select a random sample of human beings and another random sample, the statistic for both groups will converge to a point that's within both statistics' margin of error. But clearly if you can label the groups in question with anything besides "Group A" and "Group B", like "black" and "white" for example, the groups will not be chosen at random.
By "the averages will equalize," I specifically meant inter-group random samples. If you take one random sample, and another random sample, you would expect similar statistics for each group, as you said to within the margin of error. Like I said, you will of course find differences if the groups are non-random, or if they're small.
As for "black" and "white," these groups aren't random, but group membership selection is random wrt cognitive ability. So, any essentialist interpretation of inter-group deltas with intelligence is rather implausible a priori.
Group member selection ISN'T random wrt to cognitive ability, any more than it is random with respect to height. It's highly not random. It's based on ancestry - literally where your ancestors evolved.
Self-identified racial group correlates extremely strongly with genetic clusters, and these genetic differences mean that group phenotype differences are not simply possible, but that they almost certainly exist.
People in Indonesia are significantly shorter on average than people from south sudan. This difference is almost certainly due entirely to genetic differences (unless you think people in south sudan somehow have an especially nourishing childhood environment compared with indonesians - hint: they don't).
"And it seems that there’s some scientific dispute about whether the gap is entirely environmental ..... Sorry, but you can’t just declare a heated scientific dispute to be decided because one way that it could be resolved isn’t PC"
This is absolutely wrong. There is no heated scientific debate. There has been a scientific consensus for decades, going across many fields. For pretty obvious reasons - race has no genetic definition. "Black" is a social group. So, it's ludicrous to suggest "black" people are genetically less intelligent. You don't have to go deep into the science to understand this.
Also, saying IQ measures important things that correlate well with educational and health outcomes, which no one really denies, is very different from saying it's a direct measure of intelligence, which no serious scientist believes. It's quite a leap to say "IQ roughly tracks intelligence." Saying black people are dumb because they have lower average IQ is taking an extremely simplistic view of what intelligence is.
>For pretty obvious reasons - race has no genetic definition. "Black" is a social group. So, it's ludicrous to suggest "black" people are genetically less intelligent. You don't have to go deep into the science to understand this.
It doesn't matter if there is some perfect definition of who is black or not - most people who identify as black have majority African ancestry. Most people who idenitfy as white have majority european ancestry. We can very accurately predict a person's slef-identified race based on their genetics alone, and where there's a genetic difference there can be phenotype difference.
Also, there doesn't need to be some grand, cosmologically significant difference between two groups for there to be heritable differences between them!
We can take two groups of white people at random, and as long as the genetic distributions of both groups is not literally identical, there can be a heritable difference in a given trait.
There can be a heritable difference in IQ between white californians and white texans, even though these groups aren't treated as separate races.
>Also, saying IQ measures important things that correlate well with educational and health outcomes, which no one really denies, is very different from saying it's a direct measure of intelligence, which no serious scientist believes.
It's just as "direct" a measure of intelligence as a person's grip strength and powerlifting totals are a "direct" measure of strength. The difference between "direct" and "not direct" here is irrelevant for all practical purposes. Either you make correct predictions about the world with your measure or you don't. With IQ, you absolutely do.
If somebody's grip strength and maxiumum squat weight allows us to accurately predict who will win at tug of war, be able to carry buckets of water the farthest distance, and push a large rock to the end of a field the fastest, then for all intents and purposes, a person's grip strength and max squat IS how strong they are. There's no practical difference between this strength and their "real" strength. Measuring what you think is their "real" strength is a purely academic exercise unless if meaningfully improves your prediction of who will do best at the feats of strength listed.
Intelligence is no difference, especially because of the general intelligence factor, which demonstrates that performance on ALL cognitive tasks is correlated, which is why a unidimensional value can be used to describe a person's intelligence.
>Saying black people are dumb because they have lower average IQ is taking an extremely simplistic view of what intelligence is.
There's literally no empirical measure that makes correct predictions in which black people don't have a lower mean intelligence. There's tests you can devise that blacks and whites do equally well at, but they make no valid predictions of the world.
Do you actually know what the general intelligence factor is? Because it demonstrates that IQ is no more or less simplistic a measure of intelligence than it should be.
It's amazing you think that survery demonstrates a scientific consensus. That's obviously a small sample size. I also don't see what made them experts. Another survey of 'experts' done a few years ago on international racial differences was, iirc, 80% psychologists. I view that as a major issue, but maybe you have a much higher opinion of psychologists than I do.
It absolutely matters that there is no biological definition of race. It means any race-based IQ studies are flawed from the start. Someone can have 80% european ancestry and be considered black, just like someone can have 80% african ancestry and be considered black. Inter and intra-group genetic variation is equivalent, as you would a priori expect. Even among very tiny secluded populations, the most genetically similar populations, 85% of human genetic variation still happens within those populations. And African Americans are the most genetically diverse group on earth. And like I said, and cited, there are thousands of genetic variants broadly distributed across the genome related to intelligence. To think that skin pigmentation, with genetic variation clustered around a few spots, happens to be significantly linked to something as genetically broad as intelligence, is pure nonsense. It betrays any understanding of not just genetics, but also statistics and math.
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with intra-group variation. That's doesn't help your case, that helps my case. But this seems confused "We can take two groups of white people at random, and as long as the genetic distributions of both groups is not literally identical, there can be a heritable difference in a given trait." If you take a random sample of humans, and then another random sample of humans, of similar size, then the statistics will be similar. If these sample sizes go to infinity, the statistics will be identical. You also seem to be confusing heritability of intelligence with group deltas. Very different things.
As for IQ being a measure of intelligence, you're making a bizarre logical leap. You can't go from 'this correlates positively with certain things I associate with intelligence' to 'this is a measure of intelligence.' You can predict certain useful things with IQ, which in an ideal world would be useful. The initial motivation for IQ testing was to give struggling students extra help. That would be great. Instead, it led to things like eugenics, and today justification for systemic racism. But the fact that it predicts useful things does not mean it is a complete measure of intelligence. There are many aspects of intelligence that IQ tests do not measure. For instance, it doesn't measure dysrationalia, a very important aspect of intelligence. It also doesn't measure creativity, also very important. For example, a recent study found it correlates strongly with the ability to discern whether news was fake or not.
Not when we're talking about scientific experts in a relatively small field
>I view that as a major issue, but maybe you have a much higher opinion of psychologists than I do.
Intelligence research is primarily a field of psychology. And if somebody doesn't specialize in intelligence (e.g. just a general biologist or neuroscientist) then their opinion is not very relevant.
>It absolutely matters that there is no biological definition of race. It means any race-based IQ studies are flawed from the start. Someone can have 80% european ancestry and be considered black, just like someone can have 80% african ancestry and be considered black.
"can" is doing a lot of work here.
If this described a majority of people, there would be little to no correlation between self-identified race and genetic clustering. This is not the case. That means that most black people are majority black ancestry.
Additionally, it's established that african-americans average 25% European ancestry, and white americans average a few % african ancestry, so we can say that the average white american has almost four times as much european ancestry than african-americans, and the average african american has around 25x as much african ancestry.
>Inter and intra-group genetic variation is equivalent, as you would a priori expect.
This is neither empirically true nor would we expect it a priori
People whose ancestors mostly came from Africa have ancestors exposed to different selection pressures than those in Europe or Asia. The idea that these vastly different environments would select equally for intelligence is absurd. People of African ancestry and people of European ancestry have differences in the skin, hair, eyes, bones, muscles, blood and brain morphology on average (not to mention every other part of the body). There's no reason at all to think cognition wouldn't be affected by the selection pressures that affected every other aspect of people.
>Even among very tiny secluded populations, the most genetically similar populations, 85% of human genetic variation still happens within those populations.
> To think that skin pigmentation, with genetic variation clustered around a few spots, happens to be significantly linked to something as genetically broad as intelligence, is pure nonsense. It betrays any understanding of not just genetics, but also statistics and math.
>I'm not sure what point you think you're making with intra-group variation. That's doesn't help your case, that helps my case.
The within-group heritability of IQ is 50-80%. The onus is on you to show that this general principle doesn't apply to the entire US population.
Declaring that environment can affect IQ isn't going to cut it.
>If you take a random sample of humans, and then another random sample of humans, of similar size, then the statistics will be similar.
It doesn't matter. There will be a difference, and that difference will be partially heritable despite the two groups not being different races or anything so grand.
And if you compare white californians to white floridians, there will be mean difference, and this difference will be partially heritable, despite all the people being involved having the same race. Which shows you don't need some grand categorical difference between groups for a trait difference to be heritable.
>As for IQ being a measure of intelligence, you're making a bizarre logical leap. You can't go from 'this correlates positively with certain things I associate with intelligence' to 'this is a measure of intelligence.'
ALL cognitive abilities are correlated. IQ correlates with them more strongly than anything else, therefore we can use it as a proxy for intelligence.
How well people perform on cognitively demanding tasks is all that matters, so any other definition of intelligence you invent is irrelevant.
Would you say "The amount of weight you can bench press, deadlift, squat and [insert a dozen other lifts here] isn't your strength, it just correlates with your strength"?
I hope not. It's not functionally different to a person's strength, so there's no need for anything else. But I imagine you would come along and say "the true definition of strength is *something something* muscle fibres *something something* neurons firing".
No, strength is a measure of how you you are at msucular contraction against a resisting force, and knowing how much weight you can lift in the 12 main lifts tells you how good somebody is at contracting their muscles against a resisting force compared to other people. Therefore it is functionally equivalent to strength, because knowing their "true" strength wouldn't change your evaluation of how good they are at being strong.
IQ is the weighlifting totals of cognition, especially because of the general intelligence factor which you are obviously ignorant about.
Having some "direct" measure of intelligence through e.g. neural measurements would either correlate very closely with IQ (in which case such a measure would be redundant - just use IQ), or it would be very different to IQ but would not correlate well with cognitive tasks (which makes it a useless measure of intelligence that does not explain the world).
If your "direct" measurement of intelligence said that low IQ people are actually highly intelligent, but they still struggled with basic literacyand doing arithmetic in their head and determining the meaning from a passage of text and solving sudokus and SATs and disassembling and then reassembling a small mechanical device and had ppor job performance and any of the million other cognitively-demanding tasks that correlate with IQ, then this "direct" measure is worthless because it doesn't tell us anything about how good people are at cognition.
IQ DOES tell us these things, so it is functionally equivalent to intelligence. There's absolutely no need for any other measure other than for ideological reasons because you don't like the idea of some groups being smarter than others.
And what we're mostly interested in when we talk about IQ differences is explaining why people vary in their abilities and behaviors, so if IQ is heritable and correlates with these things, that's all that matters. A "direct" measure of intelligence wouldn't explain the world any better.
>The initial motivation for IQ testing was to give struggling students extra help.
No, it was to identify if struggling students were struggling due to their intelligence or due to e.g. cultural factors (after moving to the city from farms.
>That would be great. Instead, it led to things like eugenics,
The nazis rejected IQ, because like you IQ was not distributed between racial populations the way they wish it were. So it turns out that people like yourself have more in common with eugenicists than people like me.
>and today justification for systemic racism.
Nobody is "justifying" systemic[sic] racism. We're saying it doesn't exist, and people who think it does are basing this on the unscientific and anti-empirical belief that there aren't heritable intelligence differences between racial groups.
Race realism is explaining these differences to defend against people on the left blaming white people for something they did not cause.
>There are many aspects of intelligence that IQ tests do not measure. For instance, it doesn't measure dysrationalia, a very important aspect of intelligence.
No, it is not an "aspect of intelligence". It is independent of intelligence.
>It also doesn't measure creativity, also very important.
Creativity is not an aspect of intelligence, and it explains very, very little of life outcome differences between groups and individuals. And to the extent it does explain differences (e.g. inventiveness), this DOES correlate strongly with intelligence.
>For example, a recent study found it correlates strongly with the ability to discern whether news was fake or not.
Given that there's not a reliable psychometric test for creativity such that it can even be quantified, this is likely incorrect.
"Intelligence research is primarily a field of psychology. " Which is a great reason to take every study with a grain of salt. Geneticists and anthropologists are the scientists I would be more likely to view as 'experts' on race as a biological group.
"Like I already linked, this is fallacious:" No, it's not, and that's not what a fallacy is. Edward's is clearly wrong, as most geneticists will tell you. But even if he was right, he didn't dispute the 85% figure, he made a taxonomic argument. You don't even understand your own talking points. This is embarrassing.
"there will be mean difference, and this difference will be partially heritable," There is no way to know that. Any variance could be 100% environmental. I have no clue why you would think otherwise.
I'm getting the very strong impression you have no understanding of what the technical scientific term 'heritability' even means. You're obviously very confused, about everything, but I suspect you're confusing heritability with with genetic determinism. That confusion would explain a lot of the nonsense that you're writing and the papers that you're citing. Wearing ear-rings is a highly heritable trait.
Your definition of intelligence is ridiculously arbitrary, idk how you can say this stuff pretending to be serious.
Anyway, I'm getting extremely bored with this. Not going to bother with the rest. I might as well be arguing with someone about skull sizes. I've explained ad nauseam how ludicrous race realism, how it makes no genetic or statistical sense. And you can read almost any geneticist explaining the same thing. It's uncontroversial. I've said what I have to say, you can learn the science or not. As a scientist it definitely bothers how scientifically illiterate people can be, but I can't do anything about this.
You might find this ideology comforting. But it's all nonsense.
Race, as a social construct, was largely developed based on pigmentation. Obviously, any physical trait will have some association with some genes. But there is no correlation between these genes and intelligence.
"Research in the 20th century found that the crude categorisations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did not perfectly match the traditional racial terms. The conclusion drawn from this observation is that race is therefore a socially constructed system, where we effectively agree on these terms, rather than their existing as essential or objective biological categories."
"Moreover, since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation. These very different patterns for these two traits mean that the genes responsible for determining skin pigmentation cannot be meaningfully associated with the genes currently known to be linked to IQ ... it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence."
You can read the post for a full explanation and the relevant science.
Of course it's possible for a socially constructed group to have some genetic similarities. It would just be pure coincidence, but it can happen. Sickle cell anemia is a coincidence, and that is also a bit of a special case, normally you're dealing with probabilities based on thousands of genome positions : "Unlike in more straightforward cases like Sickle Cell Anaemia, where you’d find a big spike of statistical significance in one particular gene (the beta-globin gene, whose variation is the primary cause of the disease), GWAS results typically implicate many thousands of positions in the genome that, in aggregate, build towards the probability of having a disease or some level of a particular trait"
But in the case of intelligence, you're talking about thousands of genetic variants. Given that the group designation - skin pigmentation - has no correlation with these, it would be ludicrous to suppose you could make any broad claims about deltas between said groups wrt cognitive ability. Group membership selection in this case is random wrt cognitive ability. We're also dealing with large groups. So, it would be statistically implausible that averages would diverge. You would a priori expect culturally constructed groups to have equivalent inter and intra genetic variation. This is, of course, what we empirically find to be the case. It would be very surprising if it wasn't the case. Overall genetic variation might not be relevant if we were dealing with a trait that is determined by a single gene, but that isn't the case with intelligence.
So, we have extremely good reasons to believe racial IQ gaps are not based in genetics. We also have overwhelming evidence of environmental factors of IQ gaps. The most probable explanation is clear.
Also, from a public policy standpoint, it shouldn't really matter whether there was any genetic explanation for group differences. This should just be a rather esoteric scientific point. Unfortunately, the vast majority of 'race realists' and supporters of pseudoscientific bell curve-ish ideas almost always use it to push horrible policy positions.
It’s not coincidence that people with ancestors from that part of Africa would have sickle cell anemia. It was selection. Do you disagree?
Your statistics argument only works if groups are random samples across the traits you’re considering. This assumes the conclusion you want to demonstrate.
To clarify, let me ask. Do you think that there was no selection for other polygenic traits like height and that Pygmies and Danes have the same frequency of genes associated with height?
You can disavow nasty and unethical policies while accepting that gene frequencies could differ by group.
It was selection, for protection from malaria. Which, btw, can't be predicted based on race. Only certain regions of africa have had historically rampant malaria. And other regions as well, like some parts of asia. You can't predict sick cell anemia based on skin pigmentation genes. But anyway, we didn't divide them into groups based on that, we created the groups on skin pigmentation. Any other differences in the groups is coincidence. If it was the case that the genes for skin pigmentation and the genes for cognitive ability were related, then that would be a coincidence. But that isn't the case, "it is virtually inconceivable," as above.
My statistics argument is based on the claim that racial group membership was largely determined by skin pigmentation, which is random wrt cognitive ability. Again, there are thousands of genetic variants broadly distributed across the genome related to intelligence, very unlike the genes responsible for skin pigmentation. This is why a connection is viewed as 'inconceivable.' It's statistically not possible.
Again, this wouldn't be the case if intelligence was determined by one gene. A coincidence in that case is far more likely.
>Given that the group designation - skin pigmentation - has no correlation with these
This is totally false. There was literalyl research published last year showing differences in the distribution of genes that affect intelligence between races. So if intelligence genes correlate with race, and race correlates with skin color, then yes, intelligence genes correlate with skin color (and the genes causing it).
Already debunked this. Intelligence is determined by thousands genetic variants that broadly distributed across the genome. Skin pigmentation is clustered around a few spots. It's nonsense to suggest a connection.
You can't be serious. I didn't cite that, but the consensus that race isn't biological is beyond overwhelming. Ever since the The Race Question was published, research has only served to confirm their revised statements. It was the consensus in the 1950s, and it's only gotten stronger since. It is the position of the NIH, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Anthropological Association. It is backed by all the modern genetic and anthropological research up to this day, as some examples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Anthropologist Robert Sussman put it: "Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun."
I think you might be overestimating the extent to which people care about what's true in relation to socially sensitive/taboo claims. Cf. Scott Alexander: "Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time."
I don't know how you get past the (very ignorant) contention that one race is inherently less intelligent than another. Environmental factors - between races and genders - are simply overwhelming. E.g. https://www.mattball.org/2019/01/equality.html
Also, Damore NEVER said no women are interested in coding. He literally worked with women, so he would never believe this is to be true.
What he actually said was that women are *less* interested in things like coding than men, which is what explains the greater number of male engineers and computer scientists. You may think this is incorrect, but saying he claimed that no women are interested in coding is a lie.
They're not overhwhelming. The difference in environment between poor and rich Americans whites is many times greater than the mean difference in environment between black and white americans, and yet the heritability of IQ within race is between 0.5 and 0.8. This means that environmental difference CANNOT possibly explain the majority of the black/white IQ gap.
And males and females have approximately equal mean IQ, so if you're saying there's "overwhelming" environmental differences between males and females, you're saying these differences are resulting in no mean difference and you are therefore refuting your own argument.
And it's absolutely bizarre to call this "ignorant" when A) The majority of people who disagree with race differences in intelligence literally know nothing about intelligence research and B) the mean view of intelligence experts is a heritability of 0.5 for the black white IQ gap:So, we have extremely good reasons to believe racial IQ gaps are not based in genetics. We also have overwhelming evidence of environmental factors of IQ gaps. The most probable explanation is clear.
And there's nothing "bewildering" about talking about race and IQ. Race is THE biggest issue of the present day, and racial inequality is blamed on white people being "racist", discriminatory and/or privileged. But intelligence research shows that blacks have a much lower mean intelligence than whites, and that this gap is significantly heritable.
If you're going to blame white people for something, they have the right to fight back with science to vindicate themselves. Nobody would be talking about this if whites weren't being falsely blamed for inequality. If white people are legitimately smarter than black people, then the "status quo" of white people occupying more cognitively demanding jobs in society is a GOOD thing. The social inquality exists due to genetic inequality, regardless of how upsetting to your ideology this is.
>But there’s a much more fundamental problem: it turns out that, even if you don’t think that IQ measures intelligence at all, you should still think that there will be an intelligence gap between the races.
Just as a general principle you should expect there to be inequities in all areas between any groups you pick out whatsoever. I don't think there's any grounds for supposing complete equality between groups rather than radical divergence from it. Even apparent truths about morphology like "All groups of humans have two arms" will diverge pretty quickly if factors like military-participation, availability of surgery, genetic defects, etc aren't accounted for.
If you pick two groups at random, as the size of the group gets larger, the averages of different properties will equalize. If you take two extremely large groups of humans at random, you would expect average IQs to be the same. If it wasn't, that would be a mathematical anomaly. You would only find inequities if the group member selection was not random or if the groups were small - for instance, one group is designated 'black,' and members of that group have faced oppression for centuries.
Ashkenazi Jews have "faced oppression for centuries" and have the highest mean IQ of any group. It turns out "being opppressed" is an extremely poor causal explanation for intelligence differences.
They will equalize toward a mean for that group in particular. Varying any property between two groups practically necessitates that they will have dissimilar averages. Idk of any work in criminology, sociology, psychology, etc that selects for two groups based on different traits and arrives at the conclusion that there are no statistically discernible differences between the two.
Yes, if you select a random sample of human beings and another random sample, the statistic for both groups will converge to a point that's within both statistics' margin of error. But clearly if you can label the groups in question with anything besides "Group A" and "Group B", like "black" and "white" for example, the groups will not be chosen at random.
By "the averages will equalize," I specifically meant inter-group random samples. If you take one random sample, and another random sample, you would expect similar statistics for each group, as you said to within the margin of error. Like I said, you will of course find differences if the groups are non-random, or if they're small.
As for "black" and "white," these groups aren't random, but group membership selection is random wrt cognitive ability. So, any essentialist interpretation of inter-group deltas with intelligence is rather implausible a priori.
Group member selection ISN'T random wrt to cognitive ability, any more than it is random with respect to height. It's highly not random. It's based on ancestry - literally where your ancestors evolved.
Self-identified racial group correlates extremely strongly with genetic clusters, and these genetic differences mean that group phenotype differences are not simply possible, but that they almost certainly exist.
People in Indonesia are significantly shorter on average than people from south sudan. This difference is almost certainly due entirely to genetic differences (unless you think people in south sudan somehow have an especially nourishing childhood environment compared with indonesians - hint: they don't).
"And it seems that there’s some scientific dispute about whether the gap is entirely environmental ..... Sorry, but you can’t just declare a heated scientific dispute to be decided because one way that it could be resolved isn’t PC"
This is absolutely wrong. There is no heated scientific debate. There has been a scientific consensus for decades, going across many fields. For pretty obvious reasons - race has no genetic definition. "Black" is a social group. So, it's ludicrous to suggest "black" people are genetically less intelligent. You don't have to go deep into the science to understand this.
Also, saying IQ measures important things that correlate well with educational and health outcomes, which no one really denies, is very different from saying it's a direct measure of intelligence, which no serious scientist believes. It's quite a leap to say "IQ roughly tracks intelligence." Saying black people are dumb because they have lower average IQ is taking an extremely simplistic view of what intelligence is.
>This is absolutely wrong. There is no heated scientific debate. There has been a scientific consensus for decades, going across many fields.
The consensus of intelligence researchers is that the black white IQ gap has a heritability of around 0.5: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-01954-001
>For pretty obvious reasons - race has no genetic definition. "Black" is a social group. So, it's ludicrous to suggest "black" people are genetically less intelligent. You don't have to go deep into the science to understand this.
It doesn't matter if there is some perfect definition of who is black or not - most people who identify as black have majority African ancestry. Most people who idenitfy as white have majority european ancestry. We can very accurately predict a person's slef-identified race based on their genetics alone, and where there's a genetic difference there can be phenotype difference.
Also, there doesn't need to be some grand, cosmologically significant difference between two groups for there to be heritable differences between them!
We can take two groups of white people at random, and as long as the genetic distributions of both groups is not literally identical, there can be a heritable difference in a given trait.
There can be a heritable difference in IQ between white californians and white texans, even though these groups aren't treated as separate races.
>Also, saying IQ measures important things that correlate well with educational and health outcomes, which no one really denies, is very different from saying it's a direct measure of intelligence, which no serious scientist believes.
It's just as "direct" a measure of intelligence as a person's grip strength and powerlifting totals are a "direct" measure of strength. The difference between "direct" and "not direct" here is irrelevant for all practical purposes. Either you make correct predictions about the world with your measure or you don't. With IQ, you absolutely do.
If somebody's grip strength and maxiumum squat weight allows us to accurately predict who will win at tug of war, be able to carry buckets of water the farthest distance, and push a large rock to the end of a field the fastest, then for all intents and purposes, a person's grip strength and max squat IS how strong they are. There's no practical difference between this strength and their "real" strength. Measuring what you think is their "real" strength is a purely academic exercise unless if meaningfully improves your prediction of who will do best at the feats of strength listed.
Intelligence is no difference, especially because of the general intelligence factor, which demonstrates that performance on ALL cognitive tasks is correlated, which is why a unidimensional value can be used to describe a person's intelligence.
>Saying black people are dumb because they have lower average IQ is taking an extremely simplistic view of what intelligence is.
There's literally no empirical measure that makes correct predictions in which black people don't have a lower mean intelligence. There's tests you can devise that blacks and whites do equally well at, but they make no valid predictions of the world.
Do you actually know what the general intelligence factor is? Because it demonstrates that IQ is no more or less simplistic a measure of intelligence than it should be.
It's amazing you think that survery demonstrates a scientific consensus. That's obviously a small sample size. I also don't see what made them experts. Another survey of 'experts' done a few years ago on international racial differences was, iirc, 80% psychologists. I view that as a major issue, but maybe you have a much higher opinion of psychologists than I do.
It absolutely matters that there is no biological definition of race. It means any race-based IQ studies are flawed from the start. Someone can have 80% european ancestry and be considered black, just like someone can have 80% african ancestry and be considered black. Inter and intra-group genetic variation is equivalent, as you would a priori expect. Even among very tiny secluded populations, the most genetically similar populations, 85% of human genetic variation still happens within those populations. And African Americans are the most genetically diverse group on earth. And like I said, and cited, there are thousands of genetic variants broadly distributed across the genome related to intelligence. To think that skin pigmentation, with genetic variation clustered around a few spots, happens to be significantly linked to something as genetically broad as intelligence, is pure nonsense. It betrays any understanding of not just genetics, but also statistics and math.
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with intra-group variation. That's doesn't help your case, that helps my case. But this seems confused "We can take two groups of white people at random, and as long as the genetic distributions of both groups is not literally identical, there can be a heritable difference in a given trait." If you take a random sample of humans, and then another random sample of humans, of similar size, then the statistics will be similar. If these sample sizes go to infinity, the statistics will be identical. You also seem to be confusing heritability of intelligence with group deltas. Very different things.
As for IQ being a measure of intelligence, you're making a bizarre logical leap. You can't go from 'this correlates positively with certain things I associate with intelligence' to 'this is a measure of intelligence.' You can predict certain useful things with IQ, which in an ideal world would be useful. The initial motivation for IQ testing was to give struggling students extra help. That would be great. Instead, it led to things like eugenics, and today justification for systemic racism. But the fact that it predicts useful things does not mean it is a complete measure of intelligence. There are many aspects of intelligence that IQ tests do not measure. For instance, it doesn't measure dysrationalia, a very important aspect of intelligence. It also doesn't measure creativity, also very important. For example, a recent study found it correlates strongly with the ability to discern whether news was fake or not.
>That's obviously a small sample size.
Not when we're talking about scientific experts in a relatively small field
>I view that as a major issue, but maybe you have a much higher opinion of psychologists than I do.
Intelligence research is primarily a field of psychology. And if somebody doesn't specialize in intelligence (e.g. just a general biologist or neuroscientist) then their opinion is not very relevant.
>It absolutely matters that there is no biological definition of race. It means any race-based IQ studies are flawed from the start. Someone can have 80% european ancestry and be considered black, just like someone can have 80% african ancestry and be considered black.
"can" is doing a lot of work here.
If this described a majority of people, there would be little to no correlation between self-identified race and genetic clustering. This is not the case. That means that most black people are majority black ancestry.
Additionally, it's established that african-americans average 25% European ancestry, and white americans average a few % african ancestry, so we can say that the average white american has almost four times as much european ancestry than african-americans, and the average african american has around 25x as much african ancestry.
>Inter and intra-group genetic variation is equivalent, as you would a priori expect.
This is neither empirically true nor would we expect it a priori
People whose ancestors mostly came from Africa have ancestors exposed to different selection pressures than those in Europe or Asia. The idea that these vastly different environments would select equally for intelligence is absurd. People of African ancestry and people of European ancestry have differences in the skin, hair, eyes, bones, muscles, blood and brain morphology on average (not to mention every other part of the body). There's no reason at all to think cognition wouldn't be affected by the selection pressures that affected every other aspect of people.
>Even among very tiny secluded populations, the most genetically similar populations, 85% of human genetic variation still happens within those populations.
Like I already linked, this is fallacious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy#:~:text=This%20argument%20has%20been%20cited,not%20caused%20by%20genetic%20differences.
> To think that skin pigmentation, with genetic variation clustered around a few spots, happens to be significantly linked to something as genetically broad as intelligence, is pure nonsense. It betrays any understanding of not just genetics, but also statistics and math.
Sigh, you're just making stuff up.
Alleles associated with intelligence are not uniformally distributed amongst racial populations: https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/htm
>I'm not sure what point you think you're making with intra-group variation. That's doesn't help your case, that helps my case.
The within-group heritability of IQ is 50-80%. The onus is on you to show that this general principle doesn't apply to the entire US population.
Declaring that environment can affect IQ isn't going to cut it.
>If you take a random sample of humans, and then another random sample of humans, of similar size, then the statistics will be similar.
It doesn't matter. There will be a difference, and that difference will be partially heritable despite the two groups not being different races or anything so grand.
And if you compare white californians to white floridians, there will be mean difference, and this difference will be partially heritable, despite all the people being involved having the same race. Which shows you don't need some grand categorical difference between groups for a trait difference to be heritable.
>As for IQ being a measure of intelligence, you're making a bizarre logical leap. You can't go from 'this correlates positively with certain things I associate with intelligence' to 'this is a measure of intelligence.'
ALL cognitive abilities are correlated. IQ correlates with them more strongly than anything else, therefore we can use it as a proxy for intelligence.
How well people perform on cognitively demanding tasks is all that matters, so any other definition of intelligence you invent is irrelevant.
Would you say "The amount of weight you can bench press, deadlift, squat and [insert a dozen other lifts here] isn't your strength, it just correlates with your strength"?
I hope not. It's not functionally different to a person's strength, so there's no need for anything else. But I imagine you would come along and say "the true definition of strength is *something something* muscle fibres *something something* neurons firing".
No, strength is a measure of how you you are at msucular contraction against a resisting force, and knowing how much weight you can lift in the 12 main lifts tells you how good somebody is at contracting their muscles against a resisting force compared to other people. Therefore it is functionally equivalent to strength, because knowing their "true" strength wouldn't change your evaluation of how good they are at being strong.
IQ is the weighlifting totals of cognition, especially because of the general intelligence factor which you are obviously ignorant about.
Having some "direct" measure of intelligence through e.g. neural measurements would either correlate very closely with IQ (in which case such a measure would be redundant - just use IQ), or it would be very different to IQ but would not correlate well with cognitive tasks (which makes it a useless measure of intelligence that does not explain the world).
If your "direct" measurement of intelligence said that low IQ people are actually highly intelligent, but they still struggled with basic literacyand doing arithmetic in their head and determining the meaning from a passage of text and solving sudokus and SATs and disassembling and then reassembling a small mechanical device and had ppor job performance and any of the million other cognitively-demanding tasks that correlate with IQ, then this "direct" measure is worthless because it doesn't tell us anything about how good people are at cognition.
IQ DOES tell us these things, so it is functionally equivalent to intelligence. There's absolutely no need for any other measure other than for ideological reasons because you don't like the idea of some groups being smarter than others.
And what we're mostly interested in when we talk about IQ differences is explaining why people vary in their abilities and behaviors, so if IQ is heritable and correlates with these things, that's all that matters. A "direct" measure of intelligence wouldn't explain the world any better.
>The initial motivation for IQ testing was to give struggling students extra help.
No, it was to identify if struggling students were struggling due to their intelligence or due to e.g. cultural factors (after moving to the city from farms.
>That would be great. Instead, it led to things like eugenics,
The nazis rejected IQ, because like you IQ was not distributed between racial populations the way they wish it were. So it turns out that people like yourself have more in common with eugenicists than people like me.
>and today justification for systemic racism.
Nobody is "justifying" systemic[sic] racism. We're saying it doesn't exist, and people who think it does are basing this on the unscientific and anti-empirical belief that there aren't heritable intelligence differences between racial groups.
Race realism is explaining these differences to defend against people on the left blaming white people for something they did not cause.
>There are many aspects of intelligence that IQ tests do not measure. For instance, it doesn't measure dysrationalia, a very important aspect of intelligence.
No, it is not an "aspect of intelligence". It is independent of intelligence.
>It also doesn't measure creativity, also very important.
Creativity is not an aspect of intelligence, and it explains very, very little of life outcome differences between groups and individuals. And to the extent it does explain differences (e.g. inventiveness), this DOES correlate strongly with intelligence.
>For example, a recent study found it correlates strongly with the ability to discern whether news was fake or not.
Given that there's not a reliable psychometric test for creativity such that it can even be quantified, this is likely incorrect.
"Intelligence research is primarily a field of psychology. " Which is a great reason to take every study with a grain of salt. Geneticists and anthropologists are the scientists I would be more likely to view as 'experts' on race as a biological group.
"Like I already linked, this is fallacious:" No, it's not, and that's not what a fallacy is. Edward's is clearly wrong, as most geneticists will tell you. But even if he was right, he didn't dispute the 85% figure, he made a taxonomic argument. You don't even understand your own talking points. This is embarrassing.
"there will be mean difference, and this difference will be partially heritable," There is no way to know that. Any variance could be 100% environmental. I have no clue why you would think otherwise.
"you're just making stuff up"
No, I'm not. Learn the science.
http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-an-explainer.html
"The in-group heritability..."
I'm getting the very strong impression you have no understanding of what the technical scientific term 'heritability' even means. You're obviously very confused, about everything, but I suspect you're confusing heritability with with genetic determinism. That confusion would explain a lot of the nonsense that you're writing and the papers that you're citing. Wearing ear-rings is a highly heritable trait.
Your definition of intelligence is ridiculously arbitrary, idk how you can say this stuff pretending to be serious.
Anyway, I'm getting extremely bored with this. Not going to bother with the rest. I might as well be arguing with someone about skull sizes. I've explained ad nauseam how ludicrous race realism, how it makes no genetic or statistical sense. And you can read almost any geneticist explaining the same thing. It's uncontroversial. I've said what I have to say, you can learn the science or not. As a scientist it definitely bothers how scientifically illiterate people can be, but I can't do anything about this.
You might find this ideology comforting. But it's all nonsense.
Blacks tend to have more gene variants associated with darkly pigmented skin than whites. Is this ludicrous to say because black is a social group?
Race, as a social construct, was largely developed based on pigmentation. Obviously, any physical trait will have some association with some genes. But there is no correlation between these genes and intelligence.
You can read this, from an expert scientist:
http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-an-explainer.html
Some relevant quotes:
"Research in the 20th century found that the crude categorisations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did not perfectly match the traditional racial terms. The conclusion drawn from this observation is that race is therefore a socially constructed system, where we effectively agree on these terms, rather than their existing as essential or objective biological categories."
"Moreover, since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation. These very different patterns for these two traits mean that the genes responsible for determining skin pigmentation cannot be meaningfully associated with the genes currently known to be linked to IQ ... it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence."
You can read the post for a full explanation and the relevant science.
I don’t suspect that the genes for pigment drive differences in cognitive ability.
What I am saying is that even a social group can have differences in allele frequencies. That’s not a ludicrous idea.
For example, blacks are more likely to get sickle cell anemia for genetic reasons even though it’s a social group.
Of course it's possible for a socially constructed group to have some genetic similarities. It would just be pure coincidence, but it can happen. Sickle cell anemia is a coincidence, and that is also a bit of a special case, normally you're dealing with probabilities based on thousands of genome positions : "Unlike in more straightforward cases like Sickle Cell Anaemia, where you’d find a big spike of statistical significance in one particular gene (the beta-globin gene, whose variation is the primary cause of the disease), GWAS results typically implicate many thousands of positions in the genome that, in aggregate, build towards the probability of having a disease or some level of a particular trait"
But in the case of intelligence, you're talking about thousands of genetic variants. Given that the group designation - skin pigmentation - has no correlation with these, it would be ludicrous to suppose you could make any broad claims about deltas between said groups wrt cognitive ability. Group membership selection in this case is random wrt cognitive ability. We're also dealing with large groups. So, it would be statistically implausible that averages would diverge. You would a priori expect culturally constructed groups to have equivalent inter and intra genetic variation. This is, of course, what we empirically find to be the case. It would be very surprising if it wasn't the case. Overall genetic variation might not be relevant if we were dealing with a trait that is determined by a single gene, but that isn't the case with intelligence.
So, we have extremely good reasons to believe racial IQ gaps are not based in genetics. We also have overwhelming evidence of environmental factors of IQ gaps. The most probable explanation is clear.
Also, from a public policy standpoint, it shouldn't really matter whether there was any genetic explanation for group differences. This should just be a rather esoteric scientific point. Unfortunately, the vast majority of 'race realists' and supporters of pseudoscientific bell curve-ish ideas almost always use it to push horrible policy positions.
It’s not coincidence that people with ancestors from that part of Africa would have sickle cell anemia. It was selection. Do you disagree?
Your statistics argument only works if groups are random samples across the traits you’re considering. This assumes the conclusion you want to demonstrate.
To clarify, let me ask. Do you think that there was no selection for other polygenic traits like height and that Pygmies and Danes have the same frequency of genes associated with height?
You can disavow nasty and unethical policies while accepting that gene frequencies could differ by group.
It was selection, for protection from malaria. Which, btw, can't be predicted based on race. Only certain regions of africa have had historically rampant malaria. And other regions as well, like some parts of asia. You can't predict sick cell anemia based on skin pigmentation genes. But anyway, we didn't divide them into groups based on that, we created the groups on skin pigmentation. Any other differences in the groups is coincidence. If it was the case that the genes for skin pigmentation and the genes for cognitive ability were related, then that would be a coincidence. But that isn't the case, "it is virtually inconceivable," as above.
My statistics argument is based on the claim that racial group membership was largely determined by skin pigmentation, which is random wrt cognitive ability. Again, there are thousands of genetic variants broadly distributed across the genome related to intelligence, very unlike the genes responsible for skin pigmentation. This is why a connection is viewed as 'inconceivable.' It's statistically not possible.
Again, this wouldn't be the case if intelligence was determined by one gene. A coincidence in that case is far more likely.
>Given that the group designation - skin pigmentation - has no correlation with these
This is totally false. There was literalyl research published last year showing differences in the distribution of genes that affect intelligence between races. So if intelligence genes correlate with race, and race correlates with skin color, then yes, intelligence genes correlate with skin color (and the genes causing it).
Already debunked this. Intelligence is determined by thousands genetic variants that broadly distributed across the genome. Skin pigmentation is clustered around a few spots. It's nonsense to suggest a connection.
They're reciting a long debunked talking point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy#:~:text=This%20argument%20has%20been%20cited,not%20caused%20by%20genetic%20differences.
You can't be serious. I didn't cite that, but the consensus that race isn't biological is beyond overwhelming. Ever since the The Race Question was published, research has only served to confirm their revised statements. It was the consensus in the 1950s, and it's only gotten stronger since. It is the position of the NIH, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Anthropological Association. It is backed by all the modern genetic and anthropological research up to this day, as some examples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1435
Anthropologist Robert Sussman put it: "Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Among those who study the subject, who use and accept modern scientific techniques and logic, this scientific fact is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun."
Why don't you have a blog?
You sent that comment literally the same moment I was checking whether Jason did, in fact, have a blog.
it's not exactly a good thing if there are more white supremacist and pseudoscientific race realist bloggers.
Nobody would read it and I'm not a very good writer. I'll leave it to smarter folks like yourselves.
I think you might be overestimating the extent to which people care about what's true in relation to socially sensitive/taboo claims. Cf. Scott Alexander: "Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
And I'd broadly agree with the point. What Bostrom said was foolish, because it was a "THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING."
Something they'd definitely get in trouble saying *now*. Not so in the 90s.
I don't know how you get past the (very ignorant) contention that one race is inherently less intelligent than another. Environmental factors - between races and genders - are simply overwhelming. E.g. https://www.mattball.org/2019/01/equality.html
As I've said, I haven't looked into the issue. But at no point was the claim inherently used.
Also, Damore NEVER said no women are interested in coding. He literally worked with women, so he would never believe this is to be true.
What he actually said was that women are *less* interested in things like coding than men, which is what explains the greater number of male engineers and computer scientists. You may think this is incorrect, but saying he claimed that no women are interested in coding is a lie.
They're not overhwhelming. The difference in environment between poor and rich Americans whites is many times greater than the mean difference in environment between black and white americans, and yet the heritability of IQ within race is between 0.5 and 0.8. This means that environmental difference CANNOT possibly explain the majority of the black/white IQ gap.
And males and females have approximately equal mean IQ, so if you're saying there's "overwhelming" environmental differences between males and females, you're saying these differences are resulting in no mean difference and you are therefore refuting your own argument.
And it's absolutely bizarre to call this "ignorant" when A) The majority of people who disagree with race differences in intelligence literally know nothing about intelligence research and B) the mean view of intelligence experts is a heritability of 0.5 for the black white IQ gap:So, we have extremely good reasons to believe racial IQ gaps are not based in genetics. We also have overwhelming evidence of environmental factors of IQ gaps. The most probable explanation is clear.
And there's nothing "bewildering" about talking about race and IQ. Race is THE biggest issue of the present day, and racial inequality is blamed on white people being "racist", discriminatory and/or privileged. But intelligence research shows that blacks have a much lower mean intelligence than whites, and that this gap is significantly heritable.
If you're going to blame white people for something, they have the right to fight back with science to vindicate themselves. Nobody would be talking about this if whites weren't being falsely blamed for inequality. If white people are legitimately smarter than black people, then the "status quo" of white people occupying more cognitively demanding jobs in society is a GOOD thing. The social inquality exists due to genetic inequality, regardless of how upsetting to your ideology this is.
I really wasn't expecting to encounter so much 'scientific' racism from commenters on this blog.