Moderator Action: Belatedly split this into its own thread. Original modtext rules in what is now the OP still apply, and I made it an RD thread.
[RD] Discussion on IQ (split from effect of white people on America)
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I'm reading the study that @yung.carl.jung linked to now, and will post later if I think it poses a significant challenge to the g-factor paradigm or not.
One thing I believe might be helpful is to briefly explain how g is estimated using several different IQ tests. There's a good wiki article on g and its estimation, but just a basic summary would probably be helpful. I'm not familiar enough with it to provide one myself, but you and @Mark1031 both know a lot more about it than I do.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
1. I named many, much more pressing environmental factors aside from malnourishment, like for example noise pollution (which is worse in worse neighborhoods), diet (which is, generally speaking, worse with poorer people), peer group, out of school pressure and so on. I have to keep repeating myself because you ignore these factors
2. Yes, you simply assumed something and you were wrong on that. I don't see racism as a driving factor in IQ tests at all, those factors I mentioned earlier are much more pressing.
3. But there is a kind of rationalism which is nothing more than sentimentalism disguised, as is shown only too well by the passion with which its champions uphold it, and by the hatred which they evince for whatever goes against their inclinations or passes their comprehension.
Since rationalism corresponds to a lessening of intellectuality, its development goes hand in hand with that of sentimentalism
Besides, since rationalism -in any case- corresponds to a lessening of intellectuality, it is natural that its development should go hand in hand with that of sentimentalism, but either one of these two tendencies may be more particularly represented by certain individualities or by certain currents of thought, and, by reason of the more or less exclusive and systematic terms in which they have come to be clothed, there may even be apparent conflicts between them, which hide their fundamental fellowship from the eyes of superficial onlookers.
Indeed, one of the great clevernesses of those who ‘control’ the modern mentality seems to consist -as it were- in brewing a potion for the public, now of rationalism, now of sentimentalism, and now of both together, as occasion demands, and their trick of holding a balance between the two shows that they are much more concerned with their own political interests than with the intellectuality of their patient.
You hide behind supposed rationalism, but really you're clearly arguing from an emotional standpoint. I was never getting emotional, rather I always am emotional when arguing. It is my modus operandi. There has not been one great debate without pathos.
4. That is not targeting what I said however. You chose to ignore his comments on intelligence, and in return asked him to prove his standpoint. You dodge the important part of the conversation and force others to invest a lot of time for their reply, which is a well known alt-right strategy, like for example posting walls of sources which you then ask others to "debunk". CivMan (I think his name was) tried that here a few times. He had over 100 different news articles and pew research center statistics about muslims, an amount no single person could ever deal with unless they devoted hours upon hours.
Well, to give you a brief summary, g is like the raw horsepower that a brain has. When scientists studied the results people got in different IQ subtests, they found out that they were all correlated. How well a person does in one test predicts how well they will do in another test. This lead to the hypothesis that there is an underlying factor, general intelligence, that helps people in all the subtests, as opposed to the idea that all these categories of intelligence are completely separate. Or, to put it in another way, a person who tends to be gifted in one way, tends to be gifted in other ways as well.
I believe that if we had a good way of measuring g directly, it would be a better measure of intelligence than IQ is. I should also note that the existence of g does not dispute the idea that there are several different components to intelligence; it merely posits that there is a general intelligence that contributes to all of them.
Ok, great. You do understand that those factors in and of themselves do not pose a challenge to the hereditarian view? You'd need to show not only that they exist, but that they can account for the IQ gap. Starvation *can* lower a person's IQ by 10 points, but that doesn't mean that it is actually a relevant factor. I'll do some back of the envelope maths for you here: for the sake of the argument, let's say that starvation lowers IQ by 10 points. Let's say that 10% of sub-Saharan Africans are starving. On a population wide level, this effect lowers the average IQ by 1 point. I assure you, if it were the case that environmental factors could account for the gap, they'd be touted all over the place. But they can't. Also, while we're at it, please, by all means, do provide citations for your claims about noise pollution, peer group and out of school pressure.
And none of this is in a vacuum; we have a massive amount of studies on heritability and genetics, all of which you're conveniently ignoring. Oh yeah, and on top of that, we have the IQ gaps which seem to be impossible to close.
I've cited all of my claims, and quoted all the relevant parts here. Is it too much to ask that you or Kyriakos do the same?
Carl, lemme ask you this: is there any amount of evidence that would get you to change your mind? Is there any data that could, even in theory, in your mind, disprove your egalitarian notions? Or are you a blind zealot, who will continue to religiously believe what you believe despite all evidence to the contrary?
Yeah, I know that all the different IQ subtests correlate pretty strongly with each other, and that's the basis for the estimation of g. My understanding is that some kind of regression analysis is done on all of these correlated test results to extract a single factor, producing a set of g-loadings for each test. Then to approximate g for a single individual who has taken a bunch of IQ subtests, you take the subtest results and create a weighted average, where the weights are the g-loadings? Is this "approximate g" what is reported as IQ, after normalizing to a mean of 100 and SD of 15?
The paper linked above appears to claim that it is more appropriate to extract two or three factors, which are variables approximating short-term memory, a narrower form of abstract reasoning, and (in their three-component model) verbal reasoning. They also say this makes considerably more sense neurologically - different networks are involved in short-term memory and abstract reasoning; all their subjects in the fMRI part of the study required at least two variables in the PCA used to model the data on which parts of the brain were used for which IQ subtests.
Is there any reason to prefer a one-variable model to a two- or three-variable one? The fact that IQ subtests correlate strongly with one another means the one-variable g model is still pretty useful, but two or three variables would communicate more information.
What do we know about the effects of more mild malnutrition, including deficiencies of specific micronutrients (e.g. iodine)? My impression is that any one of several deficiencies, with iodine deficiency being the most obvious, can cause large (10-15 points) reductions in IQ. If that's the case, then the effect of starvation should exceed 10 points by quite a lot.
Also, what do you make of the Flynn effect? If IQ scores increased by an average of 2 points/decade through the 20th century, even after malnutrition became rare even in the poor, it would seem to suggest a pretty strong environmental effect - large enough that American whites in 1900 would be outscored by American blacks in 2000. IIRC, Flynn speculated that this has something to do with the fact that the importance of abstract reasoning increased at all levels of society throughout the century; specific educational interventions almost never have much long-term effect on IQ, but society-wide changes in thinking patterns actually can cause sustained IQ increase. I don't know how much evidence there is for that specific speculation, but we do at least have good evidence that modernization somehow increased IQ by a large amount society-wide.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
1. I more or less agree with this (I am aware that you weren't replying to me, but sometimes you gotta point out where you agree to ease discussion)
2. I've already spent a long time digging up sources, and you know as well as I do that no proof exists that the IQ gap can be explained solely by environmental factors. I don't even necessarily believe that it can be solely explained by environmental factors, I am arguing that they are much more important than you give them credit for, and that they can easily make up a difference of 10 points or more.
And that is very easy to argue. In fact many developing countries have significantly improved their average IQ in the last 50 years. Sub-saharan Africans now have an IQ similiar to the Dutch just 50 years ago. General IQ has risen by about 20 worldwide, even more in China or India. This is obviously massively affected by environmental factors and cannot just be sufficiently explained by smart people breeding smart children, because it's definitely not the intellectual elite that has the most children in China or India. Flynn has also written on environmental factors affecting intelligence over generations, and admits himself that the Flynn effect is not sufficient to explain this rise:
If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.
This is a puzzle not just for the US, but for all countries demonstrating the Flynn Effect. "Does it make sense," Flynn wrote in one paper, "to assume that at one time almost 40% of Dutch men lacked the capacity to understand soccer, their most favoured national sport?"
No, it does not. Another explanation makes a lot more sense: One explanation (proposed by Jensen, who you are surely familiar with) is that people's ability to take tests, "test wiseness", increases as education gets significantly better. Flynn himself also suggests another explanation:
Flynn puts this continued progress down to profound shifts in society as well as education over the last century, which have led people to think in a more abstract, scientific way - the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests. In 1900 only 3% of Americans performed "cognitively demanding" jobs - now the figure is 35%, and the work itself is far more intellectually demanding than it was a century ago. Families are also smaller, so children are exposed to more adult conversation at the dinner table than in the past. "Hothouse parenting" - pushing your kids to achieve goals from an early age - may also be a factor. And when it comes to older people, a lower disease burden may have an effect on their performance in tests.(So, not hereditary at all, another environmental explanation, or rather, a multitude). Furthermore: Such effects have diminishing returns after countries become fully industrialised, Flynn says, which may explain why in some North European countries, including France and Scandinavia, IQs have flatlined or diminished slightly. He admits that the pattern in Europe is a little baffling, but he has an idea why IQ scores continue to rise in the US. "I think America is a society where economic and environmental differences are much greater than they are in Scandinavia. And for example black Americans have terrible schools, and they have had terrible conditions to live under." (dispelling the notion that it is only due to genetics that African Americans tend to do worse in IQ testing)
The article features dozens of other possible explanations, which are all environmental and not hereditary in nature. Read it yourself if you care.
My sources:
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en...es(f224833e-bdb3-4e45-8abf-0a75770e6969).html
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-97887-002
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/79/3/343.short
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31556802
4. What is it exactly that I believe zealously? What are my egalitarian notions? I think I sufficiently explained that I do not believe all people are born the same, so explain yourself. What do you mean by that?
I argued something similiar in my post. There is little evidence, mostly because this is something nearly impossible to prove. First off you would have to prove that there has been a societal shift towards rational and/or abstract thinking, which is almost impossible to prove "objectively", then you would also have to connect that with IQ testing and conduct a large enough metastudy to compare between societies. It is a Herculean task, and what for? Bigots will continue to ignore it while open minded people already realized that Flynn was onto something.
I appreciate your neutrality and civil discussion, we should all strive to be a little more like you (though maybe without the life-threatening experiments..)
On a tangetially related note: I recently got some H2O2 on my hand, I use it to sprout seeds and disinfect them, and I didn't pay enough attention and my skin turned completely white. I freaked out for a minute, but luckily was able to just wash it off and my skin is fine. Scary stuff.
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Naskra
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Sociologists are heavily invested in their IQ data; they have masses of it and it goes back a long way. They also consider it methodologically untainted. Hence they avoid the simplest interpretation of the Flynn anomaly - which is that they were just dealing with crappy data, and instead they are invoking some sort of cultural or environmental Dark Matter to explain IQ rises. The intelligence tests just don't "measure" what they believe and want them to. There are lots of smart people in the world, but you don't see them out in the wild administering IQ tests.
Equatorial Guinea with a mean IQ of 60? Really? Did they eat the tests or the tester?
Equatorial Guinea with a mean IQ of 60? Really? Did they eat the tests or the tester?
If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today's tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 - the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.
This is a puzzle not just for the US, but for all countries demonstrating the Flynn Effect. "Does it make sense," Flynn wrote in one paper, "to assume that at one time almost 40% of Dutch men lacked the capacity to understand soccer, their most favoured national sport?"
What I find especially interesting about that is that scores increased much faster on Raven's Progressive Matrices - entirely a test of abstract reasoning with a high g-loading - compared to the "information, arithmetic, and vocabulary" category, which is what formal education is supposed to teach.
My impression from studies I've seen in the past is that educational interventions have very little long-term impact on eventual adult IQ for the most part. Is there anywhere with evidence to the contrary, perhaps where education was instituted or improved in one place but not in a demographically similar area, leading to substantial IQ increase rather than the small to nonexistent effect that usually happens? That would help provide some evidence for the hypothesis that poor schools are part of the explanation for the IQ gap. It would also be interesting to compare black and white Americans whose entire childhoods were spent in the upper middle class and see how much the gap narrows. This source claims that there was no statistically significant IQ difference between mixed-race children born to German mothers and black American fathers who were stationed in Germany in 1945-55. Then again, the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study finds the IQ of adopted black children in white families are fairly high at age 7 but fall quite a bit by age 17.
One thing I'm finding as I look through papers on this topic is that there are a bunch of papers on the IQ of a variety of ages of children as well as adults. I believe that child IQ is affected considerably more by their environment than the IQ of adults, so that better education might speed up children's cognitive development but the IQ they eventually have as adults isn't substantially higher. Is this mostly correct?
Yeah, that's true - many possible explanations are extremely difficult or impossible to study scientifically. It would still be interesting and useful to find out as much as we can about what factors might really be behind this, though, so we know what kinds of interventions might be of lasting benefit.
Aww, thanks.
Spoiler irrelevant stuff about H2O2 :
I think the discussion about race and intelligence is a canard, but for a different reason. My (somewhat unscientific) suspicion that the marginal value of intelligence beyond a fairly low point is almost zero, ie the ability to not be dumb enough to hurt yourself or scammed is very useful but anything beyond that isn't. In almost any situation outside of academic settings, a person's success is based on your ability to get people to like them, either through social persuasion/schmoozing, looks (there are lots of studies showing that people rate good-looking people more positively in all sorts of ways), or connections.
I think that the entirety of racial disparities in the US then stems from the attitudes of a subset of people who don't like people of different races, leading internal bias to cause real negative outcomes while also reinforcing said biases. And the sad thing is even if most people aren't this way we rely on the goodwill of so many people in our day to day lives that a small percentage of the population being racist can be enough to create those disparities.
I think that the entirety of racial disparities in the US then stems from the attitudes of a subset of people who don't like people of different races, leading internal bias to cause real negative outcomes while also reinforcing said biases. And the sad thing is even if most people aren't this way we rely on the goodwill of so many people in our day to day lives that a small percentage of the population being racist can be enough to create those disparities.
Archon_Wing
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Hmm, with that in mind, I wonder what the correlation between racism and low IQ is. My baseless theory is that people are stupid and can't handle it, and thus try to associate with groups that they associate with intelligence to make themselves feel more intelligent. As that is the point of racism; to create an underclass of people beneath oneself.This is why you get many race realists trying so hard to prove that they're genetically superior. And also why definitions of intelligence sounds like an idiot's version of what an intelligent person is. I feel like it makes it very hard to study the matter because people that are legitimately curious about these things have been "drowned out"
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caketastydelish
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One problem I have with the "nurture is important more than nature which is why Africa has such low IQs" is that the country of South Africa doesn't have those problems and there the IQs are still lower. IQ tests actually do compensate for what your highest level education is (or isn't). South Africa is a developed country and apartheid is over. At some point, you've run out of excuses.
edit: Let me point out, though that I don't think a non-black marrying a black would result in the children having a lower IQ overall than the non-black parent.
Specifically, because race mixing, in general, tends to lead to higher IQs than either of the parents (this much has been proven). Makes people taller, smarter, and healthier overall.
edit: Let me point out, though that I don't think a non-black marrying a black would result in the children having a lower IQ overall than the non-black parent.
Specifically, because race mixing, in general, tends to lead to higher IQs than either of the parents (this much has been proven). Makes people taller, smarter, and healthier overall.
No, actually, they don't. A standard I.Q. test assumes a basic knowledge of how a pencil and paper works and that is about it. If they were to compensate for education, then you would have no baseline of comparison between scores. Much worse, you would have highly skewed scores at the low end, where in some cases, the education of the test subject is nil.
As anecdotal evidence, I took an I.Q. test as part of my undergraduate psychology courses in nursing school and I got my score. After I completed my doctorate, I took the test again, thinking that I must surely be smarter now. Surprise! I had the same score. Education of the test subject is irrelevant. I.Q. tests do not test your education level, they test intelligence. SATs on the other hand, test education (and aptitude), and so does almost every other test you write while at school.
I think you're referring to muscle memory, a.k.a. motor learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_learning
However, this is not usually thought of as "intelligence", as is demonstrated by the fact that neither article even mentions this word.
Of course, to star in e.g. basketball requires more than just well-learned motor movements.
Shooting itself may be down to muscle memory, but a good player must also decide whether to shoot, dribble or pass...
Ryika
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Sounds to me like you're just widening the definition of intelligence so far that it's about to become meaningless. A basketball player isn't able to shoot the ball with high precision because their brain has become really good at calculating the amount of power they have to use, but rather because the player has been in the same situation a ton of times, and "remembers" how much power they have to use. Being able to access learned behavior is not in itself a sign of intelligence.
If a person is able to pick up a basketball for the first time and then become good at shooting it much faster than most people, then that certainly qualifies as a form of "intelligence" under most definitions (because clearly they have some inherent advantage over people who have to train more to get the same result), but we usually just call that "talent" instead. But talent doesn't make you become a pro, practicing for thousands of hours does.
If sport are anything like art - and it might not be - then most of the people at the top are not the people who are the most naturally talented, but rather those who had supreme diligence and endurance.
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(I may be wrong in this, but) I think that you do not really believe what you said - going from other posts of yours. I think that it certainly is far more important how "talented" one is, for the same reason that some person who is gifted at math will in almost all cases do far better than an average person regarding math skill, regardless if the latter person studies FAR more.
Re "calculating the amount of power they have to use", that is actually not all, and itself is semi-automatized (much like, say, breathing is a semi-automatized procedure). Most great basketballplayers, when asked if they think while they are shooting, reply that they do not. The unconscious takes over the procedure. Even people who never played pro b-ball can tell you much the same (i certainly can).
Also, if you watch 3-point shooting contests (in the NBA) you will identify that the players just shoot, the best shooters shoot one ball/second, and most go in too.
Like it or not, it is really not to be contested that intelligence is almost entirely not down to the conscious person, but to their unconscious part; ie they certainly use it, and may expand the processes in their consciousness, but the degree in which they will be able to present greatness anywhere is not something attributed to them, but to some genetic chance. Much like being born into money would be, regarding your financial start in life (only in the case of intelligence no one will actually identify more than a very small fraction of the processes they are able to become conscious off; and that is regardless of what field they will utilize those in; be it math, art, sport, whatever).
Ryika
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Well, it depends on the skill and the level that we're talking about. Math might be one of the exceptions because it's such a native thing to the minds of some people, but for most skills, to be "the top of the top", you do need to be talented and a hard worker. A person who has talent and works hard will go further than a person who works hard but was not born with talent (assuming they have access to the same resources).
But being "talented" is certainly not a free pass for anything that needs to be learned and trained, it is just something that makes the path easier to manage. In many ways, it is an advantage, but in others, it can be a disadvantage, too. When it comes to art, many the people who start off being talented stagnate somewhere along the way, simply because they have reached a point where their talent alone suddenly doesn't carry them anymore and unlike the hard workers, they have not learned how to overcome that stagnation. That's where people often get frustrated and lose interest. Or people just stagnate and don't even realize it because becoming better was never a conscious process for them. For the hard worker on the other hand, every step of the path is like the last one, a steady improvement that hardly every ends in frustration (at least not in the big picture). There is no dead end for the hard worker.
That's why, according to the people in the industry, the jobs of artists and illustrators for well-known companies for example are mostly filled with people of mediocre talent who have put an exceptionally high amount of effort into becoming better. Some people with high talent sprinkled in, and when natural talent and hard work combine, you get someone like Kim Jung Gi.
The brain still calculates all of that stuff in the background based on experience though. The way "skill" works is that first you have to put active thought into something to get a somewhat decent result, then that process becomes "automated" (which means that our brain does the stuff without requiring input from the "consciousness"), and then that automation becomes better over time as our brain continues to build the connections needed to do the thing more efficiently. A natural aptitude can again be a great shortcut here, but in itself it will not make you become good at hitting the basket (<- Or whatever the actual thing is called in English).Re "calculating the amount of power they have to use", that is actually not all, and itself is semi-automatized (much like, say, breathing is a semi-automatized procedure). Most great basketplayers, when asked if they think while they are shooting, reply that they do not. The unconscious take over the procedure. Even people who never played pro b-ball can tell you much the same (i certainly can).
Also, if you watch 3-point shooting contests (in the NBA) you will identify that the players just shoot, the best shooters shoot one ball/second, and most go in too.
When it comes to something as exclusive as being an NBA player, you probably deal with people who all have both, the natural aptitude and the thirst for improvement because you're looking at the top of the tops.
But when it's one or the other, then I "value" the ability to put hard work into whatever a person wants to achieve much higher than just having an aptitude towards a certain skill (although, having the mind of a hard worker is also a natural aptitude in itself). Natural aptitude only has value if it's combined with the will to continuously improve on it.
caketastydelish
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Timsup2nothin told me otherwise in a previous thread. But I'll take your word for it, I stand corrected.
As far as the Flynn effect goes, I'm going to address all of that right here, without replying to each individual who brought it up.
So first of all, if we accept that the Flynn effect is real, it still does not refute the heriditarian view. The hereditarian view maintains that intelligence is a result of both the environment and genes. That there might be environmental change in IQ scores does not refute that. It is very much possible that factors, such as starvation, can somewhat lower IQs in developing countries. As starvation becomes more and more rare, one might see small increases in g. It can very well be argued that conditions in developing countries are different, so much so that meaningful comparisons between developed and developing countries are rendered questionable. This is why, when examining controversial data, such as race gaps in IQ, it is preferable to look at developed countries.
As Carl Yung's link shows, it seems like there has been little to no increase in g in developed countries. In fact, it seems that all of the IQ gains we've seen in developed countries have been hollow for g. In fact, even Flynn himself doesn't seem to think that Flynn effect can explain away the race gaps in IQ.
The answer to that is, we apply the scientific method. We form a hypothesis. We use the hypothesis to make predictions. We test said predictions. For example: hypothesis: black people's IQs are depressed by poor environmental conditions. What if we took a bunch of black people, and raised them in an environment where these poor environmental conditions did not exist? Would the IQ gap disappear? Is that something that we can test? Why yes, yes we can. In the seventies, some researchers set out to test exactly this. It was supposed to be a killshot against the evil racists. If you can prove that fixing environmental conditions will completely nullify the IQ gap, then the whole discussion becomes moot. The result was the now infamous Minnesota transracial adoption study.
It's been what, 50 years, and still all environmental interventions to fix these racial disparities have failed. Meanwhile, everything hereditarian models have predicted has more or less happened. Luckily, we're quickly reaching a point where we can finally settle this debate once and for all. The study of genetics has advanced to the point where all of this discussion becomes moot. We're identifying the gene variants that code for intelligence as we speak. All we have to do is check to see if the beneficial variants are evenly distributed. So far, the results do not seem very promising to egalitarians.
Ugh. I'm tired. I think I've addressed the main points for now. I'll scan the thread later to see if I missed anything.
So first of all, if we accept that the Flynn effect is real, it still does not refute the heriditarian view. The hereditarian view maintains that intelligence is a result of both the environment and genes. That there might be environmental change in IQ scores does not refute that. It is very much possible that factors, such as starvation, can somewhat lower IQs in developing countries. As starvation becomes more and more rare, one might see small increases in g. It can very well be argued that conditions in developing countries are different, so much so that meaningful comparisons between developed and developing countries are rendered questionable. This is why, when examining controversial data, such as race gaps in IQ, it is preferable to look at developed countries.
As Carl Yung's link shows, it seems like there has been little to no increase in g in developed countries. In fact, it seems that all of the IQ gains we've seen in developed countries have been hollow for g. In fact, even Flynn himself doesn't seem to think that Flynn effect can explain away the race gaps in IQ.
James Flynn said:
The problem here is that IQ is not a single number, not really. There are different tests for different purposes. IQ tests in and of themselves only produce data (you got 47 out of 68 questions right!) which is then fitted on a normal distribution. As far as g-factor goes, I haven't seen IQ tests measuring individual person's g directly. There are, however, tests which are highly g-loaded. Usually if scientists want to measure g, they simply use IQ scores from tests which are heavily g loaded.
I suppose it would be interesting to see what kind of predictive validity these subcomponents of intelligence have separate of each other. But absent of such research, we're stuck with regular old IQ.
Getting one's head bashed in with a rock can lower one's IQ by 10-50 points, depending on the severity of the bashing. That alone could explain away any gap. Just because it can lower one's IQ by 50 points, doesn't mean that it actually happens. And we have a way of measuring this (I'll explain it below)
I suppose we were kinda talking past each other, and a large part of that is my fault. I did a poor job of explaining heritability to you. You raised an extremely valid concern. There are all these environmental factors. How do we know they don't account for the entire gap? In fact, intelligence researchers have been wrestling with this exact issue for 50 years now.
The answer to that is, we apply the scientific method. We form a hypothesis. We use the hypothesis to make predictions. We test said predictions. For example: hypothesis: black people's IQs are depressed by poor environmental conditions. What if we took a bunch of black people, and raised them in an environment where these poor environmental conditions did not exist? Would the IQ gap disappear? Is that something that we can test? Why yes, yes we can. In the seventies, some researchers set out to test exactly this. It was supposed to be a killshot against the evil racists. If you can prove that fixing environmental conditions will completely nullify the IQ gap, then the whole discussion becomes moot. The result was the now infamous Minnesota transracial adoption study.
So it seemed like factors such as wealth or education really did not make that much of a difference (nowadays, there is a whole host of literature on all kinds of different things, ranging from socioeconomic status to schooling, and the impact they have on IQ). In any case, since the obvious environmental factors could not explain the difference, many researchers were kind of at a loss to explain this phenomena. And so, they decided that growing up as a middle class black person is not the same as growing up as a middle class white person. Surely, then, it must be that black people are subjected to much worse experiences than their white peers from similar backgrounds? And this is how the unverifiable theories about white privilege, systemic racism, microaggressions, etc. were born.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study said:
It's been what, 50 years, and still all environmental interventions to fix these racial disparities have failed. Meanwhile, everything hereditarian models have predicted has more or less happened. Luckily, we're quickly reaching a point where we can finally settle this debate once and for all. The study of genetics has advanced to the point where all of this discussion becomes moot. We're identifying the gene variants that code for intelligence as we speak. All we have to do is check to see if the beneficial variants are evenly distributed. So far, the results do not seem very promising to egalitarians.
It seems to me that you believe that these racial IQ gaps have no genetic component. Am I wrong on that?
Look, if you want to prove that environmental factor, such as, say, lead poisoning for example, accounts for (a part of) the IQ gap, all you need is a controlled test. Show that, absent of lead exposure, the IQ gaps disappear. Scientists have been researching this stuff for decades, and it would seem like such factors don't make much of an impact.
You're mostly correct, environmental interventions don't seem to have much of an impact. One thing I would like to touch on here is the Eyferth study. The data seems to be somewhat in line with hereditarian predictions. The US army had an elite sample of blacks, since low IQ blacks did not make the selection process. Not only that, but Eyferth data seems to be kind of all over the place (why was there such a big difference in the IQs of white boys and white girls?)
The heritability of IQ increases as children age. This is called the Wilson effect. Why this happens is a matter of speculation. All we know for sure is that it happens.
Ugh. I'm tired. I think I've addressed the main points for now. I'll scan the thread later to see if I missed anything.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
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We'll have that when we have the artificial intelligence androinds and the flying cars everywhere. Just around the corner, sure...
Those matter as well, but you shouldn't underestimate the factor of intelligence in success. If you are intelligent, you don't need people to like you, as long as they respect your work. If you look at unemployment ratio vs education level, you will find that almost everywhere there is a strong anti-correlation: People with high-level education have the lowest chance of being unemployed. High IQ does correlate with academic success, so I would be very surprised if it doesn't anti-correlate with unemployment.
In other words: Being smart enough to get a university degree does help your chances on the job market.
