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Comment by hnpc123 | Hacker News Reader

I know this is considered the most vile politically incorrect thing to say but please don't just downvote without comment.

The Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many more peoples all overcame decades, centuries, and millennia of brutal oppression to develop successful societies.

Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average).

When talking about population trends it's just physically impossible for blacks to compete on the same level as other peoples. Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence.

This is a shitty truth, one that liberals refuse to accept. But it doesn't matter what they choose to believe since this is reality.

Disclaimer: Obviously there are many intelligent black people and you shouldn't treat someone poorly because of the color of their skin.

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You should really look into the history of IQ testing. In its infancy (in the United States) it was used to show that Italian Americans and Irish Americans were fundamentally inferior to Anglo Americans, because those populations had lower IQ scores. Lo and behold, those scores normalized as those populations became more assimilated.

If you had written this comment (on paper) early last century you'd be telling us that the liberals refuse to accept that Italian immigrants are inferior to their Anglo counterparts. Such ignorant liberals!

You are right that my argument is as strong as the legitimacy of modern IQ tests.

I appreciate your saying so. If I may be so bold, I believe I have a better frame for interpreting IQ results when it comes to population studies. IQ tests were initially created to assess pupils' readiness to succeed in the French school system. It was only when transplanted to America that they were used to 'verify' that populations were fundamentally less intelligent.

Such fundamental assessments have been undermined time and again by the fact that population's scores will go up or down with their relative socio economic and cultural success.

If we were to use IQ tests in the spirit in which they were originally created, they could be used to assess whether or not there's a problem that needs to be addressed by society. So when we see a particular population underperforming in IQ tests, we should A) attempt to assess whether or not there is bias in the test itself, and B) understand that we may have discovered a population that is disadvantaged in some way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

The fallacy in your comment is that you assume the degraded state to be inherent. I'm Irish myself and while Ireland became independent of its colonial oppressor and is a fairly prosperous nation today, people used to make the same assumptions about racial degradation and so on that you do about black people.

Your argument proceeds like this: Group X is badly off, because group X is inferior, therefore it's group X's own fault. Well, if you knew a group was at an enormous starting disadvantage in an iterated economic competition, naturally you would expect its position to decline over time. But if you were to provide group X with resources to mitigate its disadvantage, why would you not expect it to revert to the mean? On the other hand, give me a license to systematically oppress any group - people in your family tree, for example - and after a few decades I'll be able to make them underperform significantly, especially if operating the machinery of oppression allows me to collect economic rents.

This would be another explanation for why African Americans (and Africans) are doing so poorly.

It's a good argument and so it weakens the likelihood of my argument but it doesn't actually refute or argue directly against my points.

Well said, I don't think logic is parents strong point though.

Lets just take this one line

"Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average)."

As someone with an interest in this (both as an African and someone who measures freakishly high on IQ tests way beyond my actual abilities, joined MENSA on a lark), I’ve had this argument over and over again. Most of this goes back to the IQ statistics cited in “The Bell Curve” as applies to Africans. The “Bell Curve” was a Storefront tract dressed in respectable clothing (sadly, every 20 years it has a successor, the most recent is Nicholas Wade’s “A troublesome Inheritance". The statistic in question was quoted as an average IQ of 75 for Black Africans. If you read the citations, it comes from a study quoted by Richard Lynn (infamous racist, google ‘Mankind Quaterly’). It is based on a study done in South Africa in 1927 by the Boer Govt (it actually concluded that Bantu Africans has an IQ of 70 and was one of the intellectual foundations for Apartheid). I leave it as an exercise for people to figure out why that study might have been slightly biased.

Keep in mind that an IQ of 80 is borderline retarded. So to believe this you have to believe that almost every black person you run into is either borderline retarded or just above that.

Now, you’ve been down voted into the grey, which I think is good, but just in case people think you’re being down voted for being ‘politically incorrect’ rather than for being a racist, here are some recommended readings

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do - Claude M Steele

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America - Steven Fraser (Editor)

The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould

The “people are where they are because of some innate fault” is a very attractive argument that has been used time and time again (I know I used it growing up upper middle class in a country with a lot of poor people. If only those people were hard workers like me and pulled themselves by their bootstraps). It is used time and time again against African Americans, and it is ironic to see it argued here in an article that is one of 2 (with the linked ’The Case for Reparations’) that clearly lays out the case as to why African Americans are disadvantaged in the U.S.

There are None so Blind as those who refuse to see.

There is so much wrong with the taking of this view. Instead of looking at the experience of growing up black, the horribly unlevel playing field, the reverberating echos of slavery and broken families. A resonance maintained by the complete disregard of the dominant system.

You point to a metric associated with intelligence only to a standard deviation at best, and say it's the reason? I think your reasoning is a lazy kind of cowardice. You want there to be a simple explanation because you want to believe it's not possible to elevate african americans and therefore you don't have to face the enormous effort that will be required to do so.

Finally, the Jews, Italians, Irish and Chinese were never slaves in america. They lived through terrible poverty as immigrants, but they were never slaves.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to place a large emphasis on the IQ distribution when trying to explain population trends. It's not laziness or cowardice in the slightest in the same way placing a large emphasis on BMI distribution is legitimate when trying to explain the prevalence of heart disease and other lifestyle diseases among populations.

Perhaps, if one asserts IQ is some quantity defined and birth, and not amenable to influence through education, diet, living conditions etc.

Then one might be justified in implying that black people are worse off because they are fundamentally, genetically limited.

But that assertion re: IQ is not at all well founded. And this is setting aside how well IQ even captures "intelligence". Let me just point out that your statement "Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence" means absolutely nothing, as in the statement itself is non-sensical. Of course "intelligence" is anti-correlated with "anti-intelligence". You go back and forth between "intelligence" and IQ as if they're interchangeable meanings.

Even if I allow you that assertion re: IQ, and join with you in believing that blacks are fundamentally, genetically limited, then that would put them in the same camp as people with down syndrome.

From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?

Why are you not looking at these circumstances and weeping for the way in which this genetically disadvantaged branch of humanity has been treated?

> From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?

He was making much the same point, at least before the post was flagged... the point being that we must take these perhaps unpleasant facts into account when making social policy, rather than maintaining elaborate fictions that force us to disregard reality in favour of expediency.

And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes, nor do we harbour illusions that with the right environment they will all be future neurosurgeons...

My point is that offering up IQ as an explanatory variable which alleviates any obligation to help another group is cowardice. Even accepting that IQ difference is an irrevocable consequence of genetics (which I don't), the next step is not "so it's their fault and we should not help them because they don't help themselves".

Which is the point of the DS analogy. It was an appeal to what I consider fundamental humanity. Perhaps it was a waste of time as an argument. Perhaps I should have just stuck to pointing out how fundamentally flawed the idea is; of formulating social policy on a metric as flexible as IQ.

> And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes

You may want to spend some time investigating the human rights abuses that people with Down's Syndome (and other learning disabilities) endure.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-peop...

I think IQ tests can sometimes measure the limits of someone's ability to learn. But in the case of a population of people with lower than average access to quality education, an IQ test probably only measures how little they have been taught.

Reminds me of the idea that people with Uner Tan Syndrome were "devolved humans." Turns out that the main reason they couldn't walk normally was that they lacked access to proper physical therapy.

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/walking-fours-hum...

Here's some clips from an old Nova episode on the subject:

"If they were born anywhere else they would walk normally." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=47m50s

"Astonishingly, no one had thought to provide them with a $30 walking frame." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=49m40s

"frustration with the situation often spills into anger." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=52m24s

At the end, they erected some parallel bars for the family and everyone learned to walk just fine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=56m35s

Anyway, if you watch the whole doc you can catch several scientists breathlessly describe how devolved these people are. And then at the end, $30 of equipment fixed the situation and "re-evolved" them.

> The Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many more peoples all overcame decades, centuries, and millennia of brutal oppression to develop successful societies

> Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average).

You're comparing Jews, et al, to a specific group of Americans, African Americans.

While it may be true that the average IQ of African Americans is low, that is not inherent to their race, and more likely a massive by product of 400 years of American slavery, and then the continuation of oppression of Jim Crow laws.

I don't usually say this, because it's usually trite, but correlation is not causality.

This is a typical white supremacist line. I'm sorry to see it here on HN.

It is. That doesn't make it incorrect. Additionally I'm not arguing from a position of advocacy for white supremacy in the slightest.

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Absolutely nowhere have I advocated for white supremacy. Any sort of racial supremacy is sick and irrational.

Spit the hook.

Thanks. Got me for a second.

What plan of action are you recommending here? And how does it differ from your plan for any person of equivalent IQ from other groups?

If IQ is that important, why use an unreliable, socially constructed grouping instead of measuring it directly?

I don't have a plan of action. If my argument is sound and we accept it then the implications for what that would mean for public policy and society are not exactly nice or easy to think about.

I do know that we predicate school funding and a lot of other education/social policies on "bridging the achievement gap" and maybe this should be re-examined.

please don't just downvote without comment.

I downvoted because your proclaimed anti-liberal bias damages your credibility and is the mark of an immature arguer. Without going into your actual argument, you cripple your own credibility considerably by pasting a great big author-bias warning on it like that. If an argument will stand, it doesn't need its author pre-emptively saying that perceived opponents won't accept it because of their bias, and in the US today "liberal" and "conservative" have lost all meaning and become marks of lazy (non-)thinking and tribal attitudes. You can do better; you're just not trying.

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