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Since this seems to be the overall point >But when other people are totally happy to talk about speed and blood pressure and comas and the crime rate, and then
by cadlin 12y ago
Since this seems to be the overall point
>But when other people are totally happy to talk about speed and blood pressure and comas and the crime rate, and then suddenly switch to a position that we can’t talk about IQ at all unless we have a perfect factor-analytical proof of its obeying certain statistical rules, then I worry they’re just out to steal cows.... But when people never even begin to question the idea of different cultures but make exacting demands of anyone before they can talk about different races – even though the two ideas are statistically isomorphic – then I think they’re just out to steal cows.
There is of course, the opposite problem, which is that people take things like IQ and infer wild conclusions, usually in the service of white supremacy. An example of this is the MAO "Warrior Gene." There are several studies showing a weak correlation between a variant of the gene and violence. Black Americans have this gene more often.
There is a specific, very bad, study that is often quoted. It cherry picks its data, and still can't achieve a significance of p > .05.[1] Yet it is often brought up as indisputable proof of the savage nature of black people. It's ridiculous, and IMHO, much worse than the tendencies criticized in the blog post.
[1] http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi/MAOA%202013.pdf http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi/MAOA%202013.pdf
- api 12y agoSide note... Funny thing about white supremacy. If you go on raw IQ statistics alone, then whites are certainly not the master race. That title would belong to Asians and Ashkenazi Jews. But then again I'm a skeptic of IQ = everything.
- tormeh 12y agoIt's a benchmark for the brain. It's not close to everything, but it measures something and that something is significant. I'm sure you agree, but I need to get it out.
- wavefunction 12y agoIQ is only significant within its own context and that significance is functionally limited even within that context: an individual requires an IQ above a certain threshold to not be considered "developmentally delayed" but above a certain threshold, it also doesn't mean much. By context, I mean that IQ has meaning for the way life is for humans right now, but given a return to an earlier context (hunter-gatherer) or a transition to a new context (say some high-tech utopia where computers do the heavy thinking), it becomes functionally meaningless.
- barry-cotter 12y agoYou've been Gladwelled man. http://neoacademic.com/2011/10/05/gladwell-was-wrong-high-and-very-high-ability-employees-perform-differently/ http://neoacademic.com/2011/10/05/gladwell-was-wrong-high-an... http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/10/1336 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/10/1336 The nature of the relationship between ability and performance is of critical importance for admission decisions in the context of higher education and for personnel selection. Although previous research has supported the more-is-better hypothesis by documenting linearity of ability-performance relationships, such research has not been sensitive enough to detect deviations at the top ends of the score distributions. An alternative position receiving considerable attention is the good-enough hypothesis, which suggests that although higher levels of ability may result in better performance up to a threshold, above this threshold greater ability does not translate to better performance. In this study, the nature of the relationship between cognitive ability and performance was examined throughout the score range in four large-scale data sets. Monotonicity was maintained in all instances. Contrary to the good-enough hypothesis, the ability-performance relationship was commonly stronger at the top end of the score distribution than at the bottom end.
- wavefunction 12y agoI haven't been Gladwelled as I avoid the guy and this is my own opinion formed from being around a fair number of very smart people over the course of my life. In my opinion, IQ matters to a point, "good-enough" if you want to call it that, and then other personality factors or strengths and weaknesses take over.
- om2 12y agoDoes the cited study affect your opinion?
- api 12y agoLike many benchmarks, results may not match performance on real-world work loads.
- spindritf 12y agoNo, that's not the overall point. The discussion went in the opposite direction: from singular debates over utilitarian charity[1], iq[2], race[3], etc to a meta level of isolated (selective) demands for rigour. The overall conclusion is in the title. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an-extremely-cheap-way-to-help-foreigners/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an... [2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-s... [3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-culture/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-cu...
- davidgerard 12y agoThe article's takeaway is "beware demands for rigor against the scientific racism common in my social circle." This is why he's raising strawman objections to scientific racism and pretending those are the only objections to it.[1] Remember that Scott was able to write his (justly famed) Neoreactionary FAQ because he knows a pile of the neoreactionaries personally. [1] c.f. the recent case of http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/our-letter-to-the-new-york-times-criticizing-nicholas-wades-book-on-race/ http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/our-lette... in which 139 geneticists told Nicholas Wade to stop misreading and quote-mining their own results in the service of scientific racism.
- shamney 12y agoYou misspell the name of the gene and don't seem to understand p values, so I'm not sure anyone should take this criticism of that paper seriously.