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Comment by cb18 | Hacker News Reader

It's called science bro, it's kind of detailed. Trust that the people doing it know what they are doing. If you'd like more information, you're free to study it.

The answer to your question is relatively straightforward though, different races raised in the same circumstances have been given IQ tests. Among other techniques.

Once again, this is a century old science, it's been thought through pretty well. Whatever confounding factor you come up with in 2 minutes, someone has likely thought of it.

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Fascinating, considering that other scientific research has itself demonstrated the effects of those confounding factors.

So this seems like a wash... Except that it doesn't take much to observe that it's very hard to be raised in the same circumstances when you're of different races in the US. There are very real differences in people's behavior towards people based on race, and those shape that environment.)

Things like poor nutrition and lack of other basic necessities when corrected do yield modest improvements in IQ scores, but not enough to explain the gap between races.

very hard to be raised in the same circumstances when you're of different races in the US.

Adopted siblings...

And these differences don't only present themselves in the US.

> Trust that the people doing it know what they are doing.

Science does not require trust. The wonder of the scientific method is that any old nutty crank (given the ability to convince a small panel of his peers of the merits of his crank cred) can get an article published. Then it's up to the community of malicious and slightly less nutty cranks to gleefully prove him wrong.

That's why the method goes wrong when you trust someone. Which is really hard when it's not your field, and you're just looking for someone with authority on the subject. But the reality is that the loudest voices with a lot of media time often also tend to be the nutty cranks, rather than the slightly less nutty cranks.

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