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There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowled

There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Obviously this is an excellent source of ammo for racists and likewise those fighting racism see it as a threat. By extension, anyone who speaks of this science must also be racist and the science itself must be wrong because it is racist. And even if it's not wrong, it must be locked in a box, hidden deep in the archives, and never spoken of again. If you're a social scientist and your results come back supporting this, should you publish them, twist them, or burn them? So it's three powerful forces (racism, equality, and truth) all converging on one extremely hot button topic. It's seems Taleb here is trying to pull out the rug from underneath this perfect quaternity of shit show.

trextrex 8y ago
> There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Care to point to actual data supporting that statement?
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported. Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not allowed to study this!" despite plenty of scholarly work on human genetic diversity. It's not literally titled 'black people are human garbage', so I can see why they might have trouble finding it. There's also a lot of cherry-picking, agonizing over particular sub-populations that happen to fit their narrative and acting as though that's case closed. The reality is that most of the population diversity is in Africa and a bunch of isolated islands. Yet even in these extreme outliers we don't see much in by way of large effects (intra > inter, generally). But the race realist narrative, somehow and miraculously, comes to the conclusion that white people are super duper great, the somewhat less white people are somewhat less great, and black people are genetically .. unfortunate. Who knew?! They just got so damn lucky and happened to hate just the right people! Plenty of detailed refutation for anyone interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4vx/gathering_some_old_refutations_of_the_typical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4... https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx7w/welcome_to_ahs/cs2bzsr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx... https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex/argument_the_case_against_race_realism/ https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex...
- pl1234 8y ago
  Comically wrong. Defining ancestry is not that hard, sub-saharan africans will cluster together regardless of the diversity in Africa. This is what the experts actually think regarding black-white differences in IQ: "Asked: What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ? 0% of differences due to genes: (17% of our experts) 0-40% of differences due to genes: 42% of our experts [i.e., 42% = 17% said "0%" and 25% said "1% to 40%") 50% of differences due to genes: 18% of our experts 60-100% of differences due to genes: 39% of our experts [i.e., 39% = 34% said "60% to 99%" and 5% said "100%"] 100% of differences due to genes: (5% of our experts) M=47% of differences due to genes (SD=31%)" http://www.unz.com/isteve/taleb-iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/taleb-iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscient...
stuntkite 8y ago
It turns out growing up below the poverty line also has an effect on IQ. There have been studies on how many words children hear before the age of 2 at income levels. Turns out poor people in my country are largely ethnic, but you get the same results for any race. A systematic policy of imprisoning a whole communities young men seems to destabilize as well. Genetically, what people think of race is almost an illusion. You are spouting some dangerous half cocked bs.
cm2187 8y ago
I think it's not even racism vs anti-racism. Which ever way you cut the population (gender, skin color, etc), you are most likely going to get different IQ distributions. But the variance within a segment of the population is far greater than the difference in average between these segments. I.e. there is a far greater difference between the bottom 10% of population A by IQ and top 10% of population B than there is between the average of population A and population B. So it makes no sense whatsoever to treat an individual from population A based on population A average (or percentile). So acknowledging these differences in distribution doesn't justify in any way discriminating individuals based on race, gender or any other parameter (which is my definition of racism). But these differences may explain why for certain professions you will not find a distribution that matches exactly the distribution of the wider population (I would expect scientists for instance to mostly come from the top 5 or 10% of the IQ distribution). What you refer to as "anti-racists" though are more often than not identity politics militants, which ideology is based on the tabula rasa theory, which dictates that there cannot be any difference in IQ distribution. And that therefore any deviation in socioeconomic status is fully explained by discrimination and oppression. So I don't disagree that racists will also use these studies, even if I think they can only do so by misunderstanding basic statistics. But supressing these studies by labelling them as racist mostly serves another agenda that has little to do with anti-racism.

trextrex 8y ago

> There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Care to point to actual data supporting that statement?

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago

IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported. Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not allowed to study this!" despite plenty of scholarly work on human genetic diversity. It's not literally titled 'black people are human garbage', so I can see why they might have trouble finding it. There's also a lot of cherry-picking, agonizing over particular sub-populations that happen to fit their narrative and acting as though that's case closed. The reality is that most of the population diversity is in Africa and a bunch of isolated islands. Yet even in these extreme outliers we don't see much in by way of large effects (intra > inter, generally). But the race realist narrative, somehow and miraculously, comes to the conclusion that white people are super duper great, the somewhat less white people are somewhat less great, and black people are genetically .. unfortunate. Who knew?! They just got so damn lucky and happened to hate just the right people! Plenty of detailed refutation for anyone interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4vx/gathering_some_old_refutations_of_the_typical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4... https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx7w/welcome_to_ahs/cs2bzsr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx... https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex/argument_the_case_against_race_realism/ https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex...

pl1234 8y ago
Comically wrong. Defining ancestry is not that hard, sub-saharan africans will cluster together regardless of the diversity in Africa. This is what the experts actually think regarding black-white differences in IQ: "Asked: What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ? 0% of differences due to genes: (17% of our experts) 0-40% of differences due to genes: 42% of our experts [i.e., 42% = 17% said "0%" and 25% said "1% to 40%") 50% of differences due to genes: 18% of our experts 60-100% of differences due to genes: 39% of our experts [i.e., 39% = 34% said "60% to 99%" and 5% said "100%"] 100% of differences due to genes: (5% of our experts) M=47% of differences due to genes (SD=31%)" http://www.unz.com/isteve/taleb-iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/taleb-iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscient...

stuntkite 8y ago

It turns out growing up below the poverty line also has an effect on IQ. There have been studies on how many words children hear before the age of 2 at income levels. Turns out poor people in my country are largely ethnic, but you get the same results for any race. A systematic policy of imprisoning a whole communities young men seems to destabilize as well. Genetically, what people think of race is almost an illusion. You are spouting some dangerous half cocked bs.

cm2187 8y ago

I think it's not even racism vs anti-racism. Which ever way you cut the population (gender, skin color, etc), you are most likely going to get different IQ distributions. But the variance within a segment of the population is far greater than the difference in average between these segments. I.e. there is a far greater difference between the bottom 10% of population A by IQ and top 10% of population B than there is between the average of population A and population B. So it makes no sense whatsoever to treat an individual from population A based on population A average (or percentile). So acknowledging these differences in distribution doesn't justify in any way discriminating individuals based on race, gender or any other parameter (which is my definition of racism). But these differences may explain why for certain professions you will not find a distribution that matches exactly the distribution of the wider population (I would expect scientists for instance to mostly come from the top 5 or 10% of the IQ distribution). What you refer to as "anti-racists" though are more often than not identity politics militants, which ideology is based on the tabula rasa theory, which dictates that there cannot be any difference in IQ distribution. And that therefore any deviation in socioeconomic status is fully explained by discrimination and oppression. So I don't disagree that racists will also use these studies, even if I think they can only do so by misunderstanding basic statistics. But supressing these studies by labelling them as racist mostly serves another agenda that has little to do with anti-racism.