8 ms·

Once again Occam's butterknife is spotted in the wild. Richard Lynn, call your office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wik

by moldbug 15y ago

Once again Occam's butterknife is spotted in the wild. Richard Lynn, call your office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

hristov 15y ago
Wow, this thread just became some kind of magnet for racists, didn't it. Since you are apparently very proud of your IQ, perhaps you can read the actual article and try to comment on something related to the article's substance, and not just give us a knee jerk reaction based on the title.
- moldbug 15y ago
  The implicit comment is that the article's substance is of no conceivable relevance, because it fails to mention the most obvious possible cause - human genetic diversity - for the pattern it purports to analyze. It's one thing to refute or qualify the null hypothesis. It's another to ignore it. Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis that genetic diversity is the cause of global inequality? Human beings have been thinking about this subject for a lot more than the last 50 years, you know. All I think is what more or less everyone used to think - since when Jesus was a little boy. If that's not a null hypothesis, what is? So, from my perspective, the OP is like a long, vague explanation of how stress causes ulcers or marsh miasmas cause malaria. It's impossible for any such analysis to be any more cogent than any other - all are equally wrong.
  - hristov 15y ago
    This is the most obvious cause only if you are a racist. Genetic differences between races are very minor as compared to the genetic differences between individuals within a race. Furthermore, it is very doubtful that you can find any statistically significant genetic differences between some of the countries mentioned in the article (e.g., England and Spain).
    - moldbug 15y ago
      Genetic differences between races are very minor as compared to the genetic differences between individuals within a race. In case you're posting from a different dimension, these "minor" differences can change the color of our skin, the shape of our bones, and even (gasp) the size of our brains. If these are minor organs, what are major ones? In case you're posting from the same dimension, your fallacy has a name: https://www.google.com/?q=Lewontins%20fallacy https://www.google.com/?q=Lewontins%20fallacy Furthermore, it is very doubtful that you can find any statistically significant genetic differences between some of the countries mentioned in the article (e.g., England and Spain). You've been keeping up with the latest genomic research, I see! Ha. I jest, of course. Again, your own eyes are a great start - they really never lie. Have you been to England? Spain? Would you be confident in saying: "Englishmen look just like Spaniards?" Or if there's a difference... what's the cause? The weather, perhaps? Personally - call me crazy, I know - I feel I can tell an Englishman from a German with much better than random accuracy. If I note that English weather is pretty similar to German weather, does that make me... oh, noes... a racist?
      - hristov 15y ago
        Thank you for the Google link. There I learned that Lewontin's fallacy is a fallacy because "Richard Lewontin is a Marxist Jew who has dedicated his career to attacking genetics as an explanation for human variation." That explains so much. It is really cute how you think you can tell an Englishman from a German. Do you know, by the way, the genetic make up of the Englishman? Do you know where the word "England" came from? Here is a clue -- it came from the Anglo-Saxons a group of GERMAN tribes that conquered England after the Romans left and later became the people you now call English. So your ability to tell apart the English and Germans based on their look is most likely a figment of your imagination. Anyways lets not get carried away and stick to the topic at hand. Here is another example from the article -- the economic difference between the southern US and the rest of the US. Could you explain that one. Please tell me how the southerners developed a statistically different genetic make up than northerners in the 400 year period since colonization. I would love to hear about the split between the grits and pizza genes.
  - tatsuke95 15y ago
    The situation is bad enough that I'm a little sensitive to agreeing with what you've said here. According to a few posts up, that makes me a racist, I guess. The problem is, I never really understood why it's a stretch to believe that in all of the messy soup of chromosomes and culture (variables of a magnitude beyond what we could ever possibly research) that there are tangible differences between human beings. And once you start acknowledging differences, you have to acknowledge that those differences are going to give rise to advantages and disadvantages to things so random that they might not ever matter. But sometimes they do. Are these differences, this genetic diversity, the root cause of global inequality? Based on my understanding of economics, I don't believe so. But that doesn't mean the conversation should be off the table.
    - moldbug 15y ago
      The 20th-century scientist probably most influential in bringing about this change of perspective: Franz Boas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas You can evaluate Boas' logic yourself, by reading his The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) - free online: http://archive.org/stream/mindofprimitivem031738mbp#page/n10/mode/1up http://archive.org/stream/mindofprimitivem031738mbp#page/n10... Fascinatingly, in the introduction to the 1938 edition (copyright police missed this one), Boas writes: "Still worse is the subjection of science to ignorant prejudices in countries controlled by dictators. Such control has extended particularly to books dealing with the subject matter of race and culture. Since nothing is permitted to be printed that runs counter to the ignorant whims and prejudices of the governing clique, there can be no trustworthy science. When a publisher whose pride used to be the number and value of his scientific books announces in his calendar a book trying to show that race mixture is not harmful, withdraws the same book after a dictator comes into power, when great encyclopedias are rewritten according to prescribed tenets, when scientists either do not dare or are not allowed to publish results contradicting the prescribed doctrines, when others, in order to advance their own material interests, or blinded by uncontrolled emotion, follow blindly the prescribed road, no confidence can be placed in their statements. The suppression of intellectual freedom rings the death knell of science." Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson
    - 15y ago
  - Tangaroa 15y ago
    We've taken kids from the "poor" gene pools to London and they do fine. It's anecdotal but it fairly well quashes the race argument which holds that this should be impossible, and it suggests we look at society and upbringing instead.
  - alan-crowe 15y ago
    If one were finalizing ones political views in the 1980's and settling to write ones book, one would be doing so against a background in which the Chinese, the planet's cleverest race, had suffered a truly wretched century, bringing them to misery and ruin. Do brains make a nation rich? No, brains are what makes a nation take a Great Leap Forward. The plausibility of a link between prosperity and IQ is also going to depend on one's basic assumptions about how nations work. Suppose that national prosperity is basically a battle between the good guys building and the bad guys looting. What happens when both the good guys and the bad guys are smarter? Smarter bad guys makes things worse and the bad guys generally out number the good guys, so it is no surprise that the planet's smartest race lose 30million members to a man made famine. There are rival basic assumptions, around which one could build ones political theorizing. I like "Man versus Nature". So I'm temperamentally inclined to smarter is better. But I can see how some-one who sees the world as "Man versus Man" would dismiss "IQ leads to prosperity" as not worth considering, because there is no underlying mechanism to make it work.
- dudeguy999 15y ago
  Do you have any evidence I can read to refute Moldbug, or are we stopping at name-calling?
  - Confusion 15y ago
    Evidence to refute which assertion and to refute which arguments offered in favor of that assertion?
    - pleasebehonest 15y ago
      Dudeguy9999 is almost certainly referring to the assertion that a nation's average IQ is an excellent indicator of its wealth. It was petty to call moldbug a racist without addressing anything.
guard-of-terra 15y ago
It surely doesn't explain differences between similarly coloured countries. In Europe Italy seems to be the bluest and yet things are not good. Ireland is very pale yet it fared pretty well before the recession. I would argue that in many cases wealth causes IQ and poverty takes it away. E.g. ex-ussr is rather blue for its sorry state, and I guess it would be much bluer if measured 25 years ago. Argentina is pretty blue but yet it fails to monetize that. Mongolia is very blue and it's effectively a placeholder.
colonel_panic 15y ago
I purchased your fancy new razor but the blade snapped off when I tried to slice Korea in two. I want a refund.
- moldbug 15y ago
  Best comment of the thread. Alas, an infinitely thin razor isn't much use...
nhebb 15y ago
The graph on the Wikipedia page looks like it would correlate well with climate. (I've always had a pet theory about climate and the history of academic and economic development.)
- wazoox 15y ago
  I've read several years ago a study from MIT IIRC that actually correlated economic development with climate. Truth is that this is a complex matter with many important and simultaneous factors...
davidw 15y ago
This is why some of us point out that articles like this are "Not Hacker News". They inevitably lead to wildly off-topic, and unproductive discussions.
- Jach 15y ago
  Well, I've learned a lot from the various links that have been thrown around (and expect to learn more when I get around to reading more of them than I have), so I don't think it's entirely unproductive. I agree these posts are "Not Hacker News", but not for their content, or for their "unproductive discussions", but for bringing out the side of HN members for whom disagreement ==> downvote, and disagreement-from-majority-view ==> downvote-to-oblivion. It's unpleasant to witness and I have enough outlets for my unpleasant-reality-seeking desires; HN is nice because it's still not overall unpleasant like for instance Reddit.
olavk 15y ago
Doesn't really explain anything. IQ correlates with nutrition and education level, both correlates with prosperity. So it's just circular reasoning.

by moldbug 15y ago

hristov 15y ago

Wow, this thread just became some kind of magnet for racists, didn't it. Since you are apparently very proud of your IQ, perhaps you can read the actual article and try to comment on something related to the article's substance, and not just give us a knee jerk reaction based on the title.

moldbug 15y ago
The implicit comment is that the article's substance is of no conceivable relevance, because it fails to mention the most obvious possible cause - human genetic diversity - for the pattern it purports to analyze. It's one thing to refute or qualify the null hypothesis. It's another to ignore it. Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis that genetic diversity is the cause of global inequality? Human beings have been thinking about this subject for a lot more than the last 50 years, you know. All I think is what more or less everyone used to think - since when Jesus was a little boy. If that's not a null hypothesis, what is? So, from my perspective, the OP is like a long, vague explanation of how stress causes ulcers or marsh miasmas cause malaria. It's impossible for any such analysis to be any more cogent than any other - all are equally wrong.
- hristov 15y ago
  This is the most obvious cause only if you are a racist. Genetic differences between races are very minor as compared to the genetic differences between individuals within a race. Furthermore, it is very doubtful that you can find any statistically significant genetic differences between some of the countries mentioned in the article (e.g., England and Spain).
  - moldbug 15y ago
    Genetic differences between races are very minor as compared to the genetic differences between individuals within a race. In case you're posting from a different dimension, these "minor" differences can change the color of our skin, the shape of our bones, and even (gasp) the size of our brains. If these are minor organs, what are major ones? In case you're posting from the same dimension, your fallacy has a name: https://www.google.com/?q=Lewontins%20fallacy https://www.google.com/?q=Lewontins%20fallacy Furthermore, it is very doubtful that you can find any statistically significant genetic differences between some of the countries mentioned in the article (e.g., England and Spain). You've been keeping up with the latest genomic research, I see! Ha. I jest, of course. Again, your own eyes are a great start - they really never lie. Have you been to England? Spain? Would you be confident in saying: "Englishmen look just like Spaniards?" Or if there's a difference... what's the cause? The weather, perhaps? Personally - call me crazy, I know - I feel I can tell an Englishman from a German with much better than random accuracy. If I note that English weather is pretty similar to German weather, does that make me... oh, noes... a racist?
    - hristov 15y ago
      Thank you for the Google link. There I learned that Lewontin's fallacy is a fallacy because "Richard Lewontin is a Marxist Jew who has dedicated his career to attacking genetics as an explanation for human variation." That explains so much. It is really cute how you think you can tell an Englishman from a German. Do you know, by the way, the genetic make up of the Englishman? Do you know where the word "England" came from? Here is a clue -- it came from the Anglo-Saxons a group of GERMAN tribes that conquered England after the Romans left and later became the people you now call English. So your ability to tell apart the English and Germans based on their look is most likely a figment of your imagination. Anyways lets not get carried away and stick to the topic at hand. Here is another example from the article -- the economic difference between the southern US and the rest of the US. Could you explain that one. Please tell me how the southerners developed a statistically different genetic make up than northerners in the 400 year period since colonization. I would love to hear about the split between the grits and pizza genes.
- tatsuke95 15y ago
  The situation is bad enough that I'm a little sensitive to agreeing with what you've said here. According to a few posts up, that makes me a racist, I guess. The problem is, I never really understood why it's a stretch to believe that in all of the messy soup of chromosomes and culture (variables of a magnitude beyond what we could ever possibly research) that there are tangible differences between human beings. And once you start acknowledging differences, you have to acknowledge that those differences are going to give rise to advantages and disadvantages to things so random that they might not ever matter. But sometimes they do. Are these differences, this genetic diversity, the root cause of global inequality? Based on my understanding of economics, I don't believe so. But that doesn't mean the conversation should be off the table.
  - moldbug 15y ago
    The 20th-century scientist probably most influential in bringing about this change of perspective: Franz Boas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas You can evaluate Boas' logic yourself, by reading his The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) - free online: http://archive.org/stream/mindofprimitivem031738mbp#page/n10/mode/1up http://archive.org/stream/mindofprimitivem031738mbp#page/n10... Fascinatingly, in the introduction to the 1938 edition (copyright police missed this one), Boas writes: "Still worse is the subjection of science to ignorant prejudices in countries controlled by dictators. Such control has extended particularly to books dealing with the subject matter of race and culture. Since nothing is permitted to be printed that runs counter to the ignorant whims and prejudices of the governing clique, there can be no trustworthy science. When a publisher whose pride used to be the number and value of his scientific books announces in his calendar a book trying to show that race mixture is not harmful, withdraws the same book after a dictator comes into power, when great encyclopedias are rewritten according to prescribed tenets, when scientists either do not dare or are not allowed to publish results contradicting the prescribed doctrines, when others, in order to advance their own material interests, or blinded by uncontrolled emotion, follow blindly the prescribed road, no confidence can be placed in their statements. The suppression of intellectual freedom rings the death knell of science." Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson
  - 15y ago
- Tangaroa 15y ago
  We've taken kids from the "poor" gene pools to London and they do fine. It's anecdotal but it fairly well quashes the race argument which holds that this should be impossible, and it suggests we look at society and upbringing instead.
- alan-crowe 15y ago
  If one were finalizing ones political views in the 1980's and settling to write ones book, one would be doing so against a background in which the Chinese, the planet's cleverest race, had suffered a truly wretched century, bringing them to misery and ruin. Do brains make a nation rich? No, brains are what makes a nation take a Great Leap Forward. The plausibility of a link between prosperity and IQ is also going to depend on one's basic assumptions about how nations work. Suppose that national prosperity is basically a battle between the good guys building and the bad guys looting. What happens when both the good guys and the bad guys are smarter? Smarter bad guys makes things worse and the bad guys generally out number the good guys, so it is no surprise that the planet's smartest race lose 30million members to a man made famine. There are rival basic assumptions, around which one could build ones political theorizing. I like "Man versus Nature". So I'm temperamentally inclined to smarter is better. But I can see how some-one who sees the world as "Man versus Man" would dismiss "IQ leads to prosperity" as not worth considering, because there is no underlying mechanism to make it work.
dudeguy999 15y ago
Do you have any evidence I can read to refute Moldbug, or are we stopping at name-calling?
- Confusion 15y ago
  Evidence to refute which assertion and to refute which arguments offered in favor of that assertion?
  - pleasebehonest 15y ago
    Dudeguy9999 is almost certainly referring to the assertion that a nation's average IQ is an excellent indicator of its wealth. It was petty to call moldbug a racist without addressing anything.

guard-of-terra 15y ago

It surely doesn't explain differences between similarly coloured countries. In Europe Italy seems to be the bluest and yet things are not good. Ireland is very pale yet it fared pretty well before the recession. I would argue that in many cases wealth causes IQ and poverty takes it away. E.g. ex-ussr is rather blue for its sorry state, and I guess it would be much bluer if measured 25 years ago. Argentina is pretty blue but yet it fails to monetize that. Mongolia is very blue and it's effectively a placeholder.

colonel_panic 15y ago

I purchased your fancy new razor but the blade snapped off when I tried to slice Korea in two. I want a refund.

moldbug 15y ago
Best comment of the thread. Alas, an infinitely thin razor isn't much use...

nhebb 15y ago

The graph on the Wikipedia page looks like it would correlate well with climate. (I've always had a pet theory about climate and the history of academic and economic development.)

wazoox 15y ago
I've read several years ago a study from MIT IIRC that actually correlated economic development with climate. Truth is that this is a complex matter with many important and simultaneous factors...

davidw 15y ago

This is why some of us point out that articles like this are "Not Hacker News". They inevitably lead to wildly off-topic, and unproductive discussions.

Jach 15y ago
Well, I've learned a lot from the various links that have been thrown around (and expect to learn more when I get around to reading more of them than I have), so I don't think it's entirely unproductive. I agree these posts are "Not Hacker News", but not for their content, or for their "unproductive discussions", but for bringing out the side of HN members for whom disagreement ==> downvote, and disagreement-from-majority-view ==> downvote-to-oblivion. It's unpleasant to witness and I have enough outlets for my unpleasant-reality-seeking desires; HN is nice because it's still not overall unpleasant like for instance Reddit.

olavk 15y ago

Doesn't really explain anything. IQ correlates with nutrition and education level, both correlates with prosperity. So it's just circular reasoning.