5 ms·

It absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by ge

by tpush 5y ago

It absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by genetics is a long debunked theory; just look at the scientific discourse around something like "The Bell Curve".

cinntaile 5y ago
It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?
- tpush 5y ago
  > It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. The science is clear on this question, and has been for decades; there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities. > One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities? The position isn't even that there are no differences in IQ between populations; the well-supported scientific consensus is a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and b) IQ differences between populations are largely not caused by genetics. Note that neither of these statements contradict the heritability of IQ, which a statistical effect.
  - jevgeni 5y ago
    So some variation in IQ is caused by genetics, but to a very small degree compared to other factors. Am I interpreting (a) and (b) correctly?
    - wdroz 5y ago
      Apparently yes, sound like the wage gap - differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place - differences between populations are largely not caused by *sexism*
    - soundnote 5y ago
      Intelligence is very highly heritable, at least within populations.
  - lilred 5y ago
    "Well-supported scientific consensus" and "scientifically well-supported theory" are doing a lot of work when the loudest enforcers of the "consensus" consistently operate in dishonesty for strategic reasons, see e.g. the 2019 Cofnas paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.16...
  - garbagecoder 5y ago
    And yet a recent study showed at least some is heritable. And this whole “between” populations nonsense doesn’t mean different populations have the same mean.
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    > there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities I feel like this is the key to your argument, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. Theories don't show causes, they attempt to fit data into a mental model that can then be falsified or fail to be falsified. Are you saying we should reject data because a satisfying theory hasn't been found yet? I don't agree with that principle. In my view, that seems analogous to rejecting the idea of gravity because we don't have a good theory of how it works, or that the data leading to the string theory hypothesis should be discarded because we can't test and falsify string theory.
  - wolfgangK 5y ago
    It makes no sense to posit that IQ differences between population have a different cause than IQ differences between individuals. Adoption raises the IQ by at most 5 points ! What environmental difference could have a much more dramatic effect than that (between population IQ difference are up to 15 pts) ?
  - Amezarak 5y ago
    > a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and What does this mean? I assume I am interpreting it wrong, because it just seems like nonsense. The fact that IQ differences between individuals in a population is larger than the alleged IQ differences between populations seems totally obvious. Any given population probably contains some disabled people and also some geniuses, for, let's say, a 50-point spread. But it would be a meaningful population-level difference if the average Finn was 100 but the average Swede was 110. Or are there people out there seriously arguing that there are peoples out there totally consisting of super geniuses or extremely disabled people? If you mean that there’s no evidence of a difference in iq distribution in different populations, I think it’s clearer just to say that.
    - soundnote 5y ago
      One particular (I think well founded) worry about the hereditarian position is that if genetic differences between ethnicities are admitted, people start thinking about stuff like, say, an active "blackness" that drags people down, and that they'd start insisting that every black person has to be dumb or something like that. That people would stop really meeting people as individuals (woke blank slatism, of course, has that exact effect already, which is partly why it sucks). It's somewhat hard to get people to dispassionatedly understand that all the hereditarian position being true would mean that what differed between populations would be the counts of people with a certain levels of ability, and that's it. Dunk a smart black man, a smart white man, a smart East Asian and a smart Ashkenazi in green paint and you have four smart green men unburdened with any mystical force acting on their mental faculties. Another possibility would be fears of things like "eh, they're dumb anyway" to justify giving up on people with a certain skin color because they won't achieve highly anyway, which would be heinous.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Yes hmm I wonder what. I wonder if maybe there have been any events in the last century that would make people touchy about this.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    And therefore we are all the same above the neck.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > any events in the last century Not sure which events specifically that you're referring to, but usually when somebody refers abstractly to "events in the last century", they mean the nazis. It's worth noting that the nazis themselves rejected IQ testing and theories as justifying "Jewish supremacy".
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      Actually I rewrote that comment to not refer to any specific events because I figured whichever one I chose someone would find a way to use it to invalidate the entire concern. Anyway! The world isn't neatly divided into "pure Truth, delivered to us by Science" and "other things, which can be used to do harm." This doesn't make potentially dangerous research subjects verboten or banned! But the people doing that research should have a solid understanding of who has an interest in their work, why, and what it may be used for. Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think.
      - cinntaile 5y ago
        > Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think. You're reading a bit too much between the lines here. I didn't mean any specific side, I assume both sides engage in this so it's meant in a general sense.
  - garbagecoder 5y ago
    As a Jew, I will tell you that the Nazis didn’t care about our IQ. Many Jews proudly used their brains to help Germany in WWI (Fritz Haber comes to mind) and yet arguably Germany lost because of the brain drain which led directly to our atomic bomb, among other things, that might have helped them. They didn’t care about whether we could run a mile or win at athletics. It was ancient ethnic hatred only many centuries earlier based on religion. Saying that different populations have different IQs could surely be a post how justification for that kind of hatred, but it could also be justification for amelioration of the non-genetic effects through social programs.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  > One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities? IQ theory has the following problems: 1. Intelligence is not the same as height, as one of these is low-dimensional and mechanical, and the other is high-dimensional and very complex. 2. There are problems defining what intelligence is. 3. The "intelligence" as measured by IQ is problematic because it's engineered to follow a normal distribution. This then contradicts claims by IQ-ists that IQ predicts things which are very much non-normally distributed. 4. Many of the apparent successes of IQ theory can be explained by saying that low IQ relative to a surrounding population is indicative of a learning disability. This doesn't make higher-than-average IQ useful though. 5. People who score highly in IQ tests are interested in puzzles and seeing patterns in things. This is not necessarily a useful skill in real life, and may even be detrimental sometimes. 6. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but are generally incompetent at the fundamentals of science. For instance, they use measures of statistical association like Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which have been abandoned in all the hard sciences. These old-fashioned methods of statistical association are very brittle, and are easy to misuse. They appear to be ignorant of more modern and robust statistics. When their data has been checked using more modern methodology, their conclusions don't hold up. 7. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but their mistakes have serious consequences for people's lives. It can be used to justify racism and eugenics.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Not disputing any of your other point but this one: > 1. Intelligence is not the same as height, as one of these is low-dimensional and mechanical, and the other is high-dimensional and very complex. Is way off. Height is influenced by a huge number of factors. It’s not just some simple genetic program.
    - vgel 5y ago
      I think you have their point a bit backwards: they're not saying the causes of height are simple, but rather that the output is simple to measure. If you measure 5 groups and one is 20% taller than the rest, that's pretty clear evidence of something. You get one simple number, one dimension. Intelligence is much squishier because IQ is a suspect measure at best. If a group scores 20% higher on some intelligence test, is that because of genetics? Cultural focus on learning the specific skills measured by this test? A biased test? Completely different methods of testing being falsely compared? There's no real meterstick for intelligence like there (literally) is for height, so trying to extract a number you can throw into a statistical analysis is a lot more fraught, if it's possible at all.
jevgeni 5y ago
What exactly is wrong and untrue, E. O. Wilson's work?
garbagecoder 5y ago
Among “races”? I think that’s debunked, but among populations?

by tpush 5y ago

cinntaile 5y ago

It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?

tpush 5y ago
> It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. The science is clear on this question, and has been for decades; there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities. > One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities? The position isn't even that there are no differences in IQ between populations; the well-supported scientific consensus is a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and b) IQ differences between populations are largely not caused by genetics. Note that neither of these statements contradict the heritability of IQ, which a statistical effect.
- jevgeni 5y ago
  So some variation in IQ is caused by genetics, but to a very small degree compared to other factors. Am I interpreting (a) and (b) correctly?
  - wdroz 5y ago
    Apparently yes, sound like the wage gap - differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place - differences between populations are largely not caused by *sexism*
  - soundnote 5y ago
    Intelligence is very highly heritable, at least within populations.
- lilred 5y ago
  "Well-supported scientific consensus" and "scientifically well-supported theory" are doing a lot of work when the loudest enforcers of the "consensus" consistently operate in dishonesty for strategic reasons, see e.g. the 2019 Cofnas paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.16...
- garbagecoder 5y ago
  And yet a recent study showed at least some is heritable. And this whole “between” populations nonsense doesn’t mean different populations have the same mean.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  > there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities I feel like this is the key to your argument, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. Theories don't show causes, they attempt to fit data into a mental model that can then be falsified or fail to be falsified. Are you saying we should reject data because a satisfying theory hasn't been found yet? I don't agree with that principle. In my view, that seems analogous to rejecting the idea of gravity because we don't have a good theory of how it works, or that the data leading to the string theory hypothesis should be discarded because we can't test and falsify string theory.
- wolfgangK 5y ago
  It makes no sense to posit that IQ differences between population have a different cause than IQ differences between individuals. Adoption raises the IQ by at most 5 points ! What environmental difference could have a much more dramatic effect than that (between population IQ difference are up to 15 pts) ?
- Amezarak 5y ago
  > a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and What does this mean? I assume I am interpreting it wrong, because it just seems like nonsense. The fact that IQ differences between individuals in a population is larger than the alleged IQ differences between populations seems totally obvious. Any given population probably contains some disabled people and also some geniuses, for, let's say, a 50-point spread. But it would be a meaningful population-level difference if the average Finn was 100 but the average Swede was 110. Or are there people out there seriously arguing that there are peoples out there totally consisting of super geniuses or extremely disabled people? If you mean that there’s no evidence of a difference in iq distribution in different populations, I think it’s clearer just to say that.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    One particular (I think well founded) worry about the hereditarian position is that if genetic differences between ethnicities are admitted, people start thinking about stuff like, say, an active "blackness" that drags people down, and that they'd start insisting that every black person has to be dumb or something like that. That people would stop really meeting people as individuals (woke blank slatism, of course, has that exact effect already, which is partly why it sucks). It's somewhat hard to get people to dispassionatedly understand that all the hereditarian position being true would mean that what differed between populations would be the counts of people with a certain levels of ability, and that's it. Dunk a smart black man, a smart white man, a smart East Asian and a smart Ashkenazi in green paint and you have four smart green men unburdened with any mystical force acting on their mental faculties. Another possibility would be fears of things like "eh, they're dumb anyway" to justify giving up on people with a certain skin color because they won't achieve highly anyway, which would be heinous.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
Yes hmm I wonder what. I wonder if maybe there have been any events in the last century that would make people touchy about this.
- jevoten 5y ago
  And therefore we are all the same above the neck.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > any events in the last century Not sure which events specifically that you're referring to, but usually when somebody refers abstractly to "events in the last century", they mean the nazis. It's worth noting that the nazis themselves rejected IQ testing and theories as justifying "Jewish supremacy".
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    Actually I rewrote that comment to not refer to any specific events because I figured whichever one I chose someone would find a way to use it to invalidate the entire concern. Anyway! The world isn't neatly divided into "pure Truth, delivered to us by Science" and "other things, which can be used to do harm." This doesn't make potentially dangerous research subjects verboten or banned! But the people doing that research should have a solid understanding of who has an interest in their work, why, and what it may be used for. Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      > Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think. You're reading a bit too much between the lines here. I didn't mean any specific side, I assume both sides engage in this so it's meant in a general sense.
- garbagecoder 5y ago
  As a Jew, I will tell you that the Nazis didn’t care about our IQ. Many Jews proudly used their brains to help Germany in WWI (Fritz Haber comes to mind) and yet arguably Germany lost because of the brain drain which led directly to our atomic bomb, among other things, that might have helped them. They didn’t care about whether we could run a mile or win at athletics. It was ancient ethnic hatred only many centuries earlier based on religion. Saying that different populations have different IQs could surely be a post how justification for that kind of hatred, but it could also be justification for amelioration of the non-genetic effects through social programs.
ogogmad 5y ago
> One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities? IQ theory has the following problems: 1. Intelligence is not the same as height, as one of these is low-dimensional and mechanical, and the other is high-dimensional and very complex. 2. There are problems defining what intelligence is. 3. The "intelligence" as measured by IQ is problematic because it's engineered to follow a normal distribution. This then contradicts claims by IQ-ists that IQ predicts things which are very much non-normally distributed. 4. Many of the apparent successes of IQ theory can be explained by saying that low IQ relative to a surrounding population is indicative of a learning disability. This doesn't make higher-than-average IQ useful though. 5. People who score highly in IQ tests are interested in puzzles and seeing patterns in things. This is not necessarily a useful skill in real life, and may even be detrimental sometimes. 6. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but are generally incompetent at the fundamentals of science. For instance, they use measures of statistical association like Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which have been abandoned in all the hard sciences. These old-fashioned methods of statistical association are very brittle, and are easy to misuse. They appear to be ignorant of more modern and robust statistics. When their data has been checked using more modern methodology, their conclusions don't hold up. 7. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but their mistakes have serious consequences for people's lives. It can be used to justify racism and eugenics.
- zepto 5y ago
  Not disputing any of your other point but this one: > 1. Intelligence is not the same as height, as one of these is low-dimensional and mechanical, and the other is high-dimensional and very complex. Is way off. Height is influenced by a huge number of factors. It’s not just some simple genetic program.
  - vgel 5y ago
    I think you have their point a bit backwards: they're not saying the causes of height are simple, but rather that the output is simple to measure. If you measure 5 groups and one is 20% taller than the rest, that's pretty clear evidence of something. You get one simple number, one dimension. Intelligence is much squishier because IQ is a suspect measure at best. If a group scores 20% higher on some intelligence test, is that because of genetics? Cultural focus on learning the specific skills measured by this test? A biased test? Completely different methods of testing being falsely compared? There's no real meterstick for intelligence like there (literally) is for height, so trying to extract a number you can throw into a statistical analysis is a lot more fraught, if it's possible at all.

jevgeni 5y ago

What exactly is wrong and untrue, E. O. Wilson's work?

garbagecoder 5y ago

Among “races”? I think that’s debunked, but among populations?