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The Nazi garbage is when you try to put it in policy. For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test

by ty6853 1y ago

The Nazi garbage is when you try to put it in policy. For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test (which means nothing beyond exactly that, nor does it mean the gene itself causes that), though we don't really know why, nor should that information be used to decide who to hire or what laws or policies should be in place. I don't think the problem is the science, it's the non-scientific conclusions.

haroldb1 1y ago
[flagged]
- ty6853 1y ago
  I would say racist but nothing wrong with it, as purely my subjective opinion. I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
  - haroldb1 1y ago
    [dead]
makotech221 1y ago
> For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test This is also nazi garbage. IQ isn't a real thing.
- ty6853 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - runarberg 1y ago
    There is nothing scientific about IQ tests. Just because you throw a bunch of statistics behind a nonsence theory, that doesn’t make your nonsence theory any better.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Giving a nonsense test to people and recording a correlation between the nonsense score and genotype is science, even if the questions are bunk. Never once have I claimed that the actual test results mean anything in particular -- just that the measured score is lower on average in those with genes that express as black skin which is a scientific observation.
      - runarberg 1y ago
        No, that is at best surveying. It is as scientific as asking people their favorite color or who they will vote for in the next election. Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
        ty6853 1y ago
        It isn't unscientific to hypothesize that if you give people a certain set of bunk questions that based on some arbitrary scoring system that the differences will appear correlated to genotype, and then test it and find out genotype results in some weak correlation of the results. In my case, the bunk questions I am referring to are those in one or two tests commonly referred to as 'IQ tests.' It might not be scientific to decide it measures intelligence, but it is scientific to test and observe the difference. What you're attempting to do here is debase your argument to semantics, by excluding what you don't like out of science, which is quite typical on HN when you have nada for an argument. I simply unequivocally reject this sort of 'heads I win, tails you lose' redefinition of science.
- tptacek 1y ago
  IQ is a real thing. It's just not the thing racists (and fetishistic nerds) understand it to be. It's a diagnostic tool that is useful (in a battery of diagnostics) in detecting problems in individual patients. It's not a reliable or meaningful "ranking" of intelligence across populations.
  - runarberg 1y ago
    I know BS in psychology is not a high degree, but I did learn at least that... IQ is pretty much a bogus thing. At least when it comes to population IQ. The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population. Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence. What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population. IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians. To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.

by ty6853 1y ago

haroldb1 1y ago

[flagged]

ty6853 1y ago
I would say racist but nothing wrong with it, as purely my subjective opinion. I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
- haroldb1 1y ago
  [dead]

makotech221 1y ago

> For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test This is also nazi garbage. IQ isn't a real thing.

ty6853 1y ago
[flagged]
- runarberg 1y ago
  There is nothing scientific about IQ tests. Just because you throw a bunch of statistics behind a nonsence theory, that doesn’t make your nonsence theory any better.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Giving a nonsense test to people and recording a correlation between the nonsense score and genotype is science, even if the questions are bunk. Never once have I claimed that the actual test results mean anything in particular -- just that the measured score is lower on average in those with genes that express as black skin which is a scientific observation.
    - runarberg 1y ago
      No, that is at best surveying. It is as scientific as asking people their favorite color or who they will vote for in the next election. Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
      - ty6853 1y ago
        It isn't unscientific to hypothesize that if you give people a certain set of bunk questions that based on some arbitrary scoring system that the differences will appear correlated to genotype, and then test it and find out genotype results in some weak correlation of the results. In my case, the bunk questions I am referring to are those in one or two tests commonly referred to as 'IQ tests.' It might not be scientific to decide it measures intelligence, but it is scientific to test and observe the difference. What you're attempting to do here is debase your argument to semantics, by excluding what you don't like out of science, which is quite typical on HN when you have nada for an argument. I simply unequivocally reject this sort of 'heads I win, tails you lose' redefinition of science.
tptacek 1y ago
IQ is a real thing. It's just not the thing racists (and fetishistic nerds) understand it to be. It's a diagnostic tool that is useful (in a battery of diagnostics) in detecting problems in individual patients. It's not a reliable or meaningful "ranking" of intelligence across populations.
- runarberg 1y ago
  I know BS in psychology is not a high degree, but I did learn at least that... IQ is pretty much a bogus thing. At least when it comes to population IQ. The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population. Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence. What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population. IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians. To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.