What if your race is the dumbest of them all?

[warpus]

It would be if I was applying for a job as an exotic dancer.

 

[Perfection]

Warpus is bringing sexy back.

 

[Berzerker]

the 'stupid' people are watching the 'intelligent' ones destroy the planet...

 

[Gori the Grey]

if ?

 

[bernie14]

.....Even worse, it turns out the people you share a race with are the stupidest people around. You are part of the group that has by far the lowest inherent intellectual potential, some would even as far as to say that your people are just plain stupid on average, and suddenly everybody knows it.....

if it were that obvious, the test results would not be very surprising

How do you feel?

lucky that I am an exception within my group but I guess I would have already known that

Does it mean anything for you personally?

confirmation of something that I already knew

Do you consider yourself part of that group?

sure

Do you think people will treat members of your race differently because of it?

probably

Do you think it will have consequences for you as an individual?

i would probably benefit from people either underestimating me or some sort of quota systems

And was it irresponsible to make that information available?

nah

Life is not an RPG where everybody has the same amount of atrribute points. Mike Tyson and Stephen Hawking prove nothing.
I've know smart people who also have high strength, constitution and charisma, and I've seen people with low stats across the board.

referencing another thread, is there some added "intrinsic value" to those individuals with much higher attribute points?

 

[Zkribbler]

.... It doesn't affect me at all because I understand that averages don't say anything about individuals

That's what I, in my bumbling way, was trying to say.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sounds like 19th century german racial theory. Ie not good

Anyone who has lived a few years in a different country, would readily identify that people are of VERY different intelligence level, in any 'racial' or ethnic group. There is some gap between Bertrand Russell and some cab-driving racist in Essex Not all greek people are Caratheodory either.

 

[FriendlyFire]

That already happens. People assume Asians are good at math, white people can't jump, and black people are good at running marathons. Or whatever stereotypes you want to go with.
So sure, I can answer this question with a stereotype about white people that already exists. White people can't dance. Who cares, I dance anyway. I got rhythm.

Poland Cannot into SPACE ! But is good at plumbing
On a more serious note: As third world start developing and catch up on modern education more of their population are now producing more highly educated people so it less race base, but more economical, cultural based when it comes to IQ

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

That's because they need to do physical labour to survive and they die if they are in bad health, not because of some trade-off in "stat points"
In fact, modern-day humans are considerably taller and stronger than medieval ones (because of better diet and less inbreeding).

Lol. You seriously want to argue that the subsaharan negro, native american indian or the herdsman and nomads of asia have less vitality and health then the civilized westerners? Precisely becouse they have(had) to develop their physical skills and labor for survival and have been in the open nature their health is overall superior to that of a civilized man shielded from many natural forces and relying constantly on drugs and technology and not on natural health.
Btw non of these type of less civilized man and especialy the blacks of africa could be said to have a bodily frame of medieval europeans. Obviously there are other factors in the play but my claim stands that by an increase of mans mental activity the physical and vital capacities get diminished.

 

[Hehehe]

I guess it would depend on how this plays out. Finnish people are not a race but we are an ethnicity. Would all white people be stupid or just us? If it were just us then I fear we would feel isolated in our stupidity. Would our society still be as rich as it is today or would we see a drop in life quality, either in absolute or relative terms?

Does it mean anything for you personally?

Well I suppose I would be a little bummed out, but reality is what it is.

Do you consider yourself part of that group?

Well of course I will still be a member of that group

Do you think people will treat members of your race differently because of it?

It depends. Would members of "my race" act differently because of it?

Do you think it will have consequences for you as an individual?

For me, as an individual, assuming I am an exception to the rule, it would make my comparative advantage that much greater. But if this had any implications on my society, then it might lower the quality of life overall for everybody.

And was it irresponsible to make that information available?

Well, the effects of this supposed stupidity would be true regardless of whether or not we'd be aware of what the cause is. Knowing the cause would at least give us the option of maybe doing something about it, or at worst we'd be no worse off than before. So no.

Also, there seems to be a great deal of confusion about modern intelligence research in this thread. Straightening those out would be a huge effort that would take a separate thread and weeks of preparation on my part.

 

[Bugfatty300]

I would change my race to the most intelligent one.

 

[Akka]

Lol. You seriously want to argue that the subsaharan negro, native american indian or the herdsman and nomads of asia have less vitality and health then the civilized westerners?

You might want to adequately read what you quote.

 

[Angst]

Danes are masterrace so does not compute.

Although seriously I would probably feel different than I do now. I don't know how it is to be considered inferior because I'm a native Dane. This would obviously teach me how it felt, and I cannot grasp how it feels until I've tried it.

So my answer is: I don't know, but it would most probably make a (big) difference, making my life less fun.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

I would change my race to the most intelligent one.

Most of the time I feel aracesual...

 

[Archon_Wing]

Potential is greatly overrated.

So is intelligence.

And more so for an arbitary competition that my team consisting of 2 billion people "lost"

 

[caketastydelish]

There are no races. There are haplo groups. But I'd be lying to tell you I've researched which on average is the most intelligent.

 

[Lexicus]

There are no races. There are haplo groups. But I'd be lying to tell you I've researched which on average is the most intelligent.

Intelligence is a false concept and a product of white supremacy

 

[caketastydelish]

Wrong.

 

[Bootstoots]

I hate moderating threads like this, so I'm going to post in order to recuse myself of all mod duties. Not that I'd have done it anyway.

We're going to need to set a few things straight. IQ is a real thing - it is a narrow measure of an ability to think in certain abstract ways that correlate fairly strongly with "success" as it is currently defined in Western society. It does not measure any type of creative thinking or really anything the mind other than its abstract-concept CPU power, and only even then for the abstract concept(s) being tested. It is actually true that IQ is highly heritable (~0.7 or so) and that racial and country averages are significantly and persistently different.

But it's also true that it is strongly affected by a huge number of environmental factors that cannot be disentangled from each other, and it is true that the Flynn effect is real: average IQ scores have been going up by about 2-3 points a decade, forcing them to renormalize the test every so often. Flynn speculates that it has something to do with how our societies have come to prize abstract thinking that was useless to, say, peasant farmers. An early IQ test was conducted among Russian peasants around the turn of the 20th century, and a lot of the peasants had unscorably low IQs. They couldn't even answer questions like this: "All polar bears are white. You see a polar bear. What color is it?". They would answer "brown" because that's the color of every bear they've ever seen or had to deal with, and the whole concept that bears elsewhere could be different colors had no meaning or value to them. Meanwhile, they had lots of intricate knowledge about their villages and fields, the microclimates in the area, how to pland and harvest in an area with a short growing season, how to kill bears (all of them brown) that are attacking you, and so on.

And then it's very strongly affected by a variety of environmental factors. Too much lead exposure as a kid - say, because you grew up in a densely-populated area when gasoline was chock full of an organic lead compound? Minus 10 or more points, and an increase in aggression and irritability. Didn't get enough iodine? Lose another 10 points and get a big unsightly goiter. Just ended up being born at the lowest run of a stratified society? Hard to guess and studies vary widely, but probably a pretty large effect without even malnutrition or toxicity. A variety of groups, e.g. Ashkenazi Jews, have moved from having average IQs of ~90 to more like the 105-110 ballpark. Modern US blacks still have an average IQ of about 85, but if you throw in all the adjustments made over the past century due to the Flynn effect, you realize that this corresponds to an IQ of 105+ in 1920. Of course "African-Americans" are a mix of a bunch of West African groups plus some white admixture, and Africa is the most genetically diverse continent in the world by far, so there should be a huge range of IQ distributions found across different ethnic groups; it tells us less to talk of Africans and their descendents as a single group than it does to talk about literally everyone else in the world as a single group.

So it's complicated. But even if it were true that some races had markedly lower IQs than others? Then I'd expect to see them underrepresented in Nobel Prizes and the like and wouldn't presume racism, but virtually everything else stays the same. I want all people who have an IQ of 85 to be treated like human beings and afforded decent care and respect just for being human, and I want there to be a place in the world for them. That goes for all races; if there is a race with some fundamental "underlying IQ" like this, then they'll be disproportionately represented among those people. They deserve dignity just the same. I'm a humanist even if I have no faith that humanism will eventually win.

Something similar bothers me about Silicon Valley-style "meritocracy", too. I do at least grant that they're actually making things and trying to improve the world in certain ways, unlike some leeches on Wall Street, but I think a world where only a specific type of intelligentsia have any shot of power and everyone else is given a meager minimum income and told to fend for themselves in the "gig economy", with most of the satisfying tasks done by robots (owned by capital), is a type of dystopia even if it does some things better than today.

 

[civver_764]

How do you feel?

Does it mean anything for you personally?

I'd feel pretty damn lucky and blessed to be one of the more intelligent ones.

Do you consider yourself part of that group?

Naturally.

Do you think people will treat members of your race differently because of it?

That's hard to say, depends on the person. Most people probably already have an intuitive understanding of this fact so not really.

Do you think it will have consequences for you as an individual?

My life would probably be easier since I would exceed people's expectations.

And was it irresponsible to make that information available?

No, quite the opposite. It's rarely responsible to keep such information hidden from the public. The more information is out there, the better off everyone will be. More than likely, it will decrease the amount of racial resentment in society.