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Comment by insertcredit | Hacker News Reader

The cause of the black-white IQ gap is not relevant to this thread - not sure why you brought it up - . The fact is that the gap exists and of course one would expect it to exist in the US prison population too thus the rest of my argument naturally follows. The crux of the matter being that rehabilitation works for Norway today but wouldn't work for US (today-near future). Cultural changes to raise IQs enough to be represented in the US prison population - sounds like a moon shot - is an entirely different discussion.

Keep the downvotes coming!

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If the cause is cultural, then it's not inherent and is tractable to change through education and is not an obstacle to rehabilitation. It's just a behaviour, not an innate trait.

Even if you take the rather extreme assumption of purely environmental factors, your conclusion does not hold. "Environmental" does not inherently mean "changeable" on already affected individuals. For instance developmental malnutrition is a purely environmental phenomena that leads to stunted growth, reduced IQ, and various other issues. It's completely environmental and completely irreversible upon already affected individuals.

And even if some revolutionary discovery was made to help treat stunted IQs, prisons are probably not the place one would want to start. The IQ gap holds between populations of all classes and socioeconomic condition. You open yourself to missing the true effectiveness of such a monumental discovery due to confounding biases within the prison population. The possibility, if not probability, of coercion upon experimental "treatment" towards prisoners is also probably something we ought probably prefer to avoid.

Low IQ doesn’t mean incapable of changing behaviour. You keep assuming this link but I don’t see any reason to assume low IQ prisoners are incapable of rehabilitation.

Do you know there are black people on this site?

Is this relevant to the discussion? Does it change anything of what I wrote and referenced? Why do you keep bringing it up?

Have you provided evidence that IQ has an influence on one's ability to be rehabilitated in prison?

Said a different way, is IQ relevant to the discussion? Why do you keep bringing it up?

I made a reasonable argument and backed it with referenced facts. Besides the downvotes I received, my main posts were flagged and are now invisible. On top of that, I get low quality comments that add nothing but dilution to the discussion ("Hey did you know I am black?"). Those posts did not get flagged. It's quite clear that the thought police will not allow any discussion on these matters to take place here.

First of all, you are not a victim. Instead of blaming other people ("the thought police") or trying to call out fellow commenters, maybe try to assess why your post was received so negatively. Perhaps you could have presented it in a better way. It's possible that something you find reasonable, is not viewed that way by others.

I still can't see where you've presented evidence that IQ measures have an impact on a prisoners ability to be rehabilitated. This is the crux of your entire argument.

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