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The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence isn't something you're born with. People who think that intelligence is innate will

by Claudus 14y ago

The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence isn't something you're born with. People who think that intelligence is innate will refer to the "g factor". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29 The racist (technically speaking) and controversial Jean Rushton believes that "gains in IQ over time (the Lynn-Flynn effect) are unrelated to g". What's really going on with discussions like this is that humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that "smarter is better". Intelligence almost certainly exists, but is quite difficult to quantify exactly, and is further complicated by the fact that people resent others who are "better" than them. Given that there is a genetic component to intelligence to a certain degree, race becomes a factor and leads to a line of inductive reasoning that makes people uncomfortable: 1) Smarter is better 2) Intelligence is genetic 3) Race determines genetics 4) One race is better than another 5) Hitler was right (or other outrageous conclusion) As far as I can tell when you see terms like "g factor", "Flynn effect", "multiple intelligences", "crystallized intelligence", "fluid intelligence", "cultural fair IQ tests", "The bell curve"... people are really secretly arguing about one race or sex being smarter than the other, or not.

bearmf 14y ago
Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic. Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.
- ajross 14y ago
  It may be semantics, but genetics certainly does not determine "race" alone. If it did, "african american" and "hispanic" wouldn't exist as "races". The idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. First, people have been interbreeding like rabbits throughout history; there are no "pure" stocks anywhere. And more importantly, the amount of genetic variation between any two individuals from the same "race" is much higher than it is, statistically, between the aggregate genetic profiles of distinct "races". Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    You might fight about what name it's given, but someone's ancestry is definitely measurable and quite usable by whatever normal scientific tests you would normally come up with. Just off the top of my head, there are over 93000 references in PubMed to "ancestry." They vary whether they call it "race" or "ethnicity" or "region of ancestral origin" but plenty of adults are quite happy talking about it.
    - ajross 14y ago
      You're strawmaning. I didn't say ancestry had no meaning. I said it wasn't determined genetically, which is 100% true. There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. If you have a big population, you can do things like look at frequencies of specific gene variants and come up with a guess at where that population came from. But for one person there's just no way to do it. So: can a person, in isolation, be part of a genetic "race"? No.
      - danielweber 14y ago
        There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. Now who is strawmanning? (BTW, there is no blood test for autism, yet scientists are pretty darn sure it's mostly genetic.) I'm sure you can come up with a definition of "Polynesian" such that genetic tests would be useless. That more shows that people can some up with useless definitions. However, someone else can could up with a definition of "Polynesian" that is useful: people whose ancestors inhabited Polynesia (say) 1000 years ago. And genetic tests for any individual in isolation would be very very very highly correlated with the actual answer of their ancestors coming from Polynesia. (There are, of course, people of mixed ancestry, but this doesn't mean that ancestral measures don't exist no more than hermaphrodites mean sex doesn't exist.) "Black" would need serious subdivision, but nothing that makes a person on the street drop their jaw and say "I never thought of 'Black' that way." I suspect this is as far as constructive discussion has gone, so I'm going to stop here if that's okay.
        14y ago
ajross 14y ago
The idea of a measurable "G factor" isn't incompatible with Flynn's work. He simply argues that the value of G is determined by social context and background. So to go straight for the hotbutton interpretation: arguments of the form "Blacks are less intelligent than whites due to genetic factors, as measured by IQ scores" is unsupportable simply because those same whites are smarter than their own grandparents (i.e. the same gene pool) were at the same age, and as measured by the same tests. That is, there is clear proof that non-genetic factors can cause that effect, so absent specific evidence arguments for "racial intelligence" must be dropped via Occam's razor.

by Claudus 14y ago

bearmf 14y ago

Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic. Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.

ajross 14y ago
It may be semantics, but genetics certainly does not determine "race" alone. If it did, "african american" and "hispanic" wouldn't exist as "races". The idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. First, people have been interbreeding like rabbits throughout history; there are no "pure" stocks anywhere. And more importantly, the amount of genetic variation between any two individuals from the same "race" is much higher than it is, statistically, between the aggregate genetic profiles of distinct "races". Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.
- danielweber 14y ago
  You might fight about what name it's given, but someone's ancestry is definitely measurable and quite usable by whatever normal scientific tests you would normally come up with. Just off the top of my head, there are over 93000 references in PubMed to "ancestry." They vary whether they call it "race" or "ethnicity" or "region of ancestral origin" but plenty of adults are quite happy talking about it.
  - ajross 14y ago
    You're strawmaning. I didn't say ancestry had no meaning. I said it wasn't determined genetically, which is 100% true. There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. If you have a big population, you can do things like look at frequencies of specific gene variants and come up with a guess at where that population came from. But for one person there's just no way to do it. So: can a person, in isolation, be part of a genetic "race"? No.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. Now who is strawmanning? (BTW, there is no blood test for autism, yet scientists are pretty darn sure it's mostly genetic.) I'm sure you can come up with a definition of "Polynesian" such that genetic tests would be useless. That more shows that people can some up with useless definitions. However, someone else can could up with a definition of "Polynesian" that is useful: people whose ancestors inhabited Polynesia (say) 1000 years ago. And genetic tests for any individual in isolation would be very very very highly correlated with the actual answer of their ancestors coming from Polynesia. (There are, of course, people of mixed ancestry, but this doesn't mean that ancestral measures don't exist no more than hermaphrodites mean sex doesn't exist.) "Black" would need serious subdivision, but nothing that makes a person on the street drop their jaw and say "I never thought of 'Black' that way." I suspect this is as far as constructive discussion has gone, so I'm going to stop here if that's okay.
      - 14y ago

ajross 14y ago

The idea of a measurable "G factor" isn't incompatible with Flynn's work. He simply argues that the value of G is determined by social context and background. So to go straight for the hotbutton interpretation: arguments of the form "Blacks are less intelligent than whites due to genetic factors, as measured by IQ scores" is unsupportable simply because those same whites are smarter than their own grandparents (i.e. the same gene pool) were at the same age, and as measured by the same tests. That is, there is clear proof that non-genetic factors can cause that effect, so absent specific evidence arguments for "racial intelligence" must be dropped via Occam's razor.