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> 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.
        runarberg 1y ago
        What is your hypotheses? What are you trying to predict? If you don’t have any hypothesis, if the only thing you are predicting is what you measure, you are by definition not doing science. Science is more then mere observations. You can observe all the white swans you like, and if your only prediction is “all the swans I have seen are white” that isn’t science, it is just bird watching. If you want to measure IQ and you observe differences in population, and you don’t give a theory as to why that is, and you don’t make any further predictins based on your observations, you are just surveying. Now, somebody might create a model based on these observations, and make predictions based on that model, then-and-only then are you doing science. If Tycho Brave had only been observing the stars, never developing the Tychonic system, he would have just been an excellent astrologer, and as you know astrology is not a science. When Kepler later used that data to prove Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, then—and only then—would we consider his observation to be scientific. In IQ testing, the only people making predictions with the data are psychometricians. They are using it to try to prove the existence of the g-factor. This effort is in vein, as this theory has long been debunked. It is modern day alchemy (or phrenology if you will). Nobody else is making any other predictions with IQ data. The only people who are using IQ data are using it to make predictions in a futile effort to prove their race pseudo-science. And they keep failing at it.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > IQ may not be real but IQ tests are and black expressing genotypes "Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it. > reliably score lower on them on average. No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    You're mixing causation and correlation. Those with genotypes that produce black skin score lower on IQ tests on average but I never claimed the gene caused it and even disclaimed it above: >> nor does it mean the gene itself causes that So re: >No, they don't. Yes, they do, but you just jumped the gun straight to your strawman because you thought you were saying 'no' to something I didn't even say, maybe because of some political motive.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      You didn't respond to anything the previous commenter said, but instead just repeated your point. You're not demonstrating any familiarity with the literature on this subject, unlike the person you're replying to.
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.

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.
      - runarberg 1y ago
        What is your hypotheses? What are you trying to predict? If you don’t have any hypothesis, if the only thing you are predicting is what you measure, you are by definition not doing science. Science is more then mere observations. You can observe all the white swans you like, and if your only prediction is “all the swans I have seen are white” that isn’t science, it is just bird watching. If you want to measure IQ and you observe differences in population, and you don’t give a theory as to why that is, and you don’t make any further predictins based on your observations, you are just surveying. Now, somebody might create a model based on these observations, and make predictions based on that model, then-and-only then are you doing science. If Tycho Brave had only been observing the stars, never developing the Tychonic system, he would have just been an excellent astrologer, and as you know astrology is not a science. When Kepler later used that data to prove Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, then—and only then—would we consider his observation to be scientific. In IQ testing, the only people making predictions with the data are psychometricians. They are using it to try to prove the existence of the g-factor. This effort is in vein, as this theory has long been debunked. It is modern day alchemy (or phrenology if you will). Nobody else is making any other predictions with IQ data. The only people who are using IQ data are using it to make predictions in a futile effort to prove their race pseudo-science. And they keep failing at it.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> IQ may not be real but IQ tests are and black expressing genotypes "Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it. > reliably score lower on them on average. No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
- ty6853 1y ago
  You're mixing causation and correlation. Those with genotypes that produce black skin score lower on IQ tests on average but I never claimed the gene caused it and even disclaimed it above: >> nor does it mean the gene itself causes that So re: >No, they don't. Yes, they do, but you just jumped the gun straight to your strawman because you thought you were saying 'no' to something I didn't even say, maybe because of some political motive.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    You didn't respond to anything the previous commenter said, but instead just repeated your point. You're not demonstrating any familiarity with the literature on this subject, unlike the person you're replying to.

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.