Taleb is wrong about IQ
jsmp.dk
jsmp.dk
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
He's showing us that psychologists' statistical methods are faulty, that IQ advocates don't understand the underlying mathematics and blindly plug things into R. Lo and behold, in rebuttal, psychologists try to prove Taleb wrong by plugging more things into R.
And frankly, if there is any doubt that IQ maps to intelligence, then its abuse over the last half-century has done immesurable harm to individuals and given considerable fuel to racists.
IQ tests turned out to be pretty useful when investigating the effects of Lead in paint/gas/industry/other. See Herbert Needleman's research from the early 80's.
The test itself isn't really good or bad (bearing in mind most modern iq tests are heavily scrutinized for bias in race/class/income/location/etc) it's just a tool.
Taleb argues precisely that IQ is only a good measure of unintelligence, not intelligence, and that this prevent IQ from being meaningful. He showed that if you IQ test 10K people, 2K are dead (0 IQ) and then test their performance on something, you'll still end up with correlations that'll get you published in prestigious journals, and peddle nonsense conclusions. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1115193783145123840
(the point being that in that scenario, 0 IQ perfectly correlated with 0 performance, can make the population correlation look significant even when "alive" IQ is completely uncorrelated with performance, which, in that example, it is)
Taleb's argumentation relies on fictional scenarios whose conclusion do not match what he would have gotten looking at raw data instead.
Caloric intake in children correlates to height very well below the median(+), and then it stops. You can't grow arbitarily tall by eating more food, but if you underfeed a child enough, it will end up shorter than its more-fed siblings.
In case you need some justificaiton for this intuitive claim, here's some tangential data: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human...
" In contrast, in developing countries, nutrition deficits lead to a lower heritability. The fact that the mean height of the U.S. population has almost plateaued in the past decade suggests that the nutrient environment has almost maximized the genetic potential of height, at least in this country. Improved nutrition elsewhere may have similar benefits in terms of stature."
(+) I use median here to mean some unspeicified percentile, as you did.
Here is a good explanation: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/115548736901923225...
But you brought up the same point as the parent. 0 IQ correlates perfectly with death. Really low IQs correlate perfectly with mental disabilities. High IQs correlate (almost) perfectly with socio-economic status.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8162884 https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.7688
[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916156099...
[2]: https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/
[3]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full...
You should have very little confidence in the predictive power of most psychology findings since the founding of the field.
If someone says that IQ is unreliable, they're likely right just given the track record of that field.
1. Crystallized intelligence - essentially your knowledge / what you have memorized (including useful heuristics, experience, etc). This can grow throughout your lifetime.
2. Fluid intelligence - in reality, this is basically defined as your "working memory", which is how many pieces of distinct information you can maintain in short term memory and work with. The magic number is 7(+-2). Anyway, this influences your ability to learn, since if you keep in mind what you just read/heard, you can connect the dots.
Pieces to memorize can be grouped to make them easier to work with.
As a result, an expert in a field will have pieces grouped and organized in long term memory, and WILL appear more intelligent than an amateur in the field, when discussing that field.
In my, subjective, experience this can be enough to work in one field.
When you want to be a Renaissance man, or compete at an extremely high level, low IQ chokes you. Even a difference of 10 points between 120 and 130 chokes you.
Hopefully this wasn't a rant and you know what I mean.
Do they? Where are you getting that from?
>and obviously the IQ test would further serve to protect the power structure of the people who designed those tests.
Not so obviously. No matter what IQ is, it was neither designed nor implemented as a way to 'protect the power structure'. This idiotic power hierarchy metaphor is completely overused by certain ideological sectors. Not everything is best understood as power hierarchy. Not everything is a power hierarchy. When you claim everything is a power hierarchy it is a cognitive crutch not unlike conspiracy theorists seeing the work of the illuminati behind every socio-political event.
It's either a tautology or follows logically take your pick, a system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. System integrity is the state of a system where it is performing its intended functions without being degraded or impaired by changes or disruptions in its internal or external environments.
Systems that do not protect their integrity cease to exist or they change in unpredictable ways and become uncontrollable.
> it was neither designed nor implemented as a way to 'protect the power structure'.
It is designed by someone to figure out if someone else is worthy in a certain way. That in itself alludes to some sort of power structure. Also the conspiracy theory libel is a logical fallacy.
OK, let's go with a tautology, in which case it is a meaningless red herring to your argument of power hierarchies. If every system protects its integrity (even those not based on these mythical power hierarchies), then it doesn't really introduce anything interesting to your argument.
Truthfully however 'the System' you're referring to is ill defined. It could mean anything.
>It is designed by someone to figure out if someone else is worthy in a certain way
No. It was designed to identify children who are struggling in school. That was the original goal. That is not the same thing as 'figuring out if someone else is worthy', though I'm sure you can contort the language to fit this. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts, all of which are varied and differ in the target of study and purpose of study.
>That in itself alludes to some sort of power structure.
No. It doesn't. Just because you say it, doesn't make it so.
>Also the conspiracy theory libel is a logical fallacy.
You're demonstrating the same kind of - if all you have a is a hammer, everything is a nail - type of thinking. You've alluded to the fact that everything can be distilled down to some power hierarchy. That's a tell-tale sign you've come down the ideological rabbit hole.
Here are other ideological cognitive crunches:
- Libertarians see everything as a struggle between collectivism and individualism.
- Communists see everything as a struggle between bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
- Feminists see everything as a struggle against patriarchy.
- Conspiracy theorists see everything as a struggle against the Illuminati (or some shadowy cabal)
The world is complicated. Ideology helps to make sense of it by introducing useful abstractions ... but only to a point. As much as ideology helps, it can also be a crutch.
In human societies and in liberal democracies there are always power structures, those structures are not necessarily power structures of a certain ideology or a group because as you said ideologies are abstractions... and individual belief is always synthetic and syncretic ... however that does not mean that power structures don't exist.
Where IQ is often used as a tool to identify "gifted" students, it's rhetorically written off as a tool to help those in need.
> You've alluded to the fact that everything can be distilled down to some power hierarchy. That's a tell-tale sign you've come down the ideological rabbit hole.
No I have not, you are guilty of the exact same sort of thinking you are accusing me of instead you are preferring the status quo narrative which is that it's all milk and honey which it is not. In the end we have systems that people use to govern and perhaps they have some tolerance and fluidity but that does not mean that as an abstraction they do not exist as a certain set of ideas that are carried by a set of individuals who seek to protect those ideas and the power structures that go with those ideas... because their power depends on the preservation of those ideas and those systems.
IQ is a part of that equation in that you only let intelligent people in your country and then you school them to determine who useful they are you to your system and you only allow those who are intelligent enough and predictable enough to have power in your system. Thereby you protect your power and your ensure the integrity of your system.
I think trying to debunk the current utility of IQ by invoking its original goal is almost a sleight of hand. Unfortunately it didn't stick to its original goal. IQ tests have been administered to people of all ages for all sorts of reasons. How much has it deviated from its original goal? And more importantly, how do we restore it?
I wasn't trying to pull a fast one against anyone. The specific line was a response to OP who stated: "It (IQ) is designed by someone to figure out if someone else is worthy in a certain way". I meant to convey that IQ was neither designed initially for that purpose, nor is it solely used for this purpose today. The metric is used in all kinds of studies for all kinds of reasons, and yes, it probably is used in admissions as well.
By the way, I wasn't making a case for the utility of IQ at all. I just hated OPs characterization of IQ being a nefarious tool of some power hierarchy. That is not the right way to look at it.
Technically, all logical implications are tautologies. Logic's weird like that.
"No. It was designed to identify children who are struggling in school. That was the original goal."
Yes. And as long as IQ testing is used to identify disabilities of individuals, I doubt seriously that anyone will find anything controversial.
On the other hand, one of the more immediate next uses was to argue for limiting immigration to the United States (from, IIRC, southern and eastern Europe; I think the drunken, sex-crazed, dim-witted Irish thing had blown over by then).
To give them credit, they worked doubly hard when they did show up and were sober and usually got 90% of what they were supposed to clean for the day done. Whatever other places they were trashing in IV on their nights out I can’t speak to
Sure. That's why we tend to argue by induction ... even when we claim deductive reasoning. Deductive arguments aren't very interesting.
Of course Taleb understand statistics if he wants to, but he is just pushing his rants and loses his bearings in Twitter. Even his old friends are lamenting his online personality and bitterness.
Generic arguments about personality and character don't invalidate specific arguments about IQ.
If I indulge your "argument", from what I see on twitter is threads full of very openly nordic-/white- supremacist keyboard warriors and zerohedge trolls. Of all the people to call out in these threads, Taleb seems the most level-headed.
A good portion of studies don't replicate, including fundamental ones (in particular see the failed replication here [1] on one on Rand et al, a study on the effects of priming). Priming is a huge topic in social psychology.
He understands statistics. I'm not sure his opponents properly understand that when you complain about methodology, the implications are not just "add a section in the paper acknowledging the potential for error", it's "your whole study might be fatally flawed in a way that invalidates all your conclusions".
[1]: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/91063/2/41562_2018_399_M...
Liberals are happy to question IQ and especially race/IQ work while conservatives are happy to question stuff like those gender blinded recruitment studies or those academic trolling studies that try to link conservative opinions with mental illness.
The reality is that all of it is very questionable because the entire field is riddled with shaky methodology and down right bad science. From what I've seen of the replication issues the whole field is worse than nutritional science, and that's bad.
The degree to which a scientific field is politically weaponized is usually inversely proportional to its "hardness." You don't see the same thing in math or physics. Liberals and conservatives oddly never disagree on the value of Pi or the formula for the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine. The closest things to hard science that you find massive political disagreements on are climate change and evolution, and I've noticed that more serious conservative thinkers are coming around on those topics because the evidence is overwhelming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
> The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2.[1] The bill never became law [...]
There is a big body of literature on priming. Each study is generally done to get a p-value < 0.05. In a sense, there are a bunch of replications of the effect itself. That points to priming as an effect large enough to matter.
There is another viewpoint, where priming is not an effect large enough to matter. (This is the viewpoint I hold.) The arguments for this viewpoint are that the original study does not replicate - the 2018 replication attempt I linked used a ~300% larger sample size (1014/343), but achieved a p-value of 0.366 and had an effect size 80% smaller than the original. A second argument is that priming is not used in industry, though the effect would be useful in fields like advertising or military psyops. A third argument is that there is a widespread suspicion in the field that psychology researchers are p-hacking to get spurious results.
A whole subfield exists on an effect that showed an 80% reduction in effect size with a 300% larger sample size and a 4000% increase in p-value on a direct replication. And my focus on this study ignores the fact that the group of replications turned up 9 failures in 21 replications pulled exclusively from studies picked from Nature and Science.
If psychology can botch the literature on priming this badly, what else have they botched?
Is that claim true somehow? It certainly looks wrong, looking at the scatter plot (even setting aside whether a linear regression is appropriate). Are scatter plots 'bad methodology' somehow?
(BTW the comparison of IQ to priming is ridiculous. IQ is the most replicated and reliable measure in all of psychometrics.)
This is not a high barrier to pass. Psychometrics is a field notorious for employing biased and non-existing constructs.
Just because it is well studied, doesn’t make it real. N-rays were at one point one of the most studied rays in physics. It didn’t make measurements using n-rays more reliable. If everyone is repeating the same mistake, it doesn’t erase the mistake.
You know the history of IQ and how countless studies in the past are biased in horrendous ways. It might be well replicated and "reliable", it is still wrong.
If you want to argue that IQ is "wrong" you need to explain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8162884 and every other result that has been published relating to it, not just make vague insinuations that IQ is just like social priming (it's not).
I don’t know why you are all of a sudden talking about social priming (I’ve never seen it pop up before in this thread), especially since priming is a concept from physio-psychology and computation psychology (that has apparently been borrowed by social psychologists) not psychometrics. I’m not even sure what you mean by social priming (I did a quick browse on wikipedia without success) so you have to inform me.
If you are saying that my claim—that psychometrics is a field filled with pseudoscience—is unsubstantiated, you are right. I did (implicitly) claim that, and I didn’t provide any substantial evidence for my claim. I probably should have, but that is out of the scope of this thread, so I’ll just leave it unsubstantiated. Call me lazy, and you would be correct.
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Edit: To clarify. Priming did come up in a grandparent’s comment. Priming (as my layman understanding goes) is believed to be a neurological effect that increases the efficiency of a search response for similar stimuli presented at short intervals. That is finding a particular pattern gets easier with subsequent trials. Priming effects have been demonstrated in numerous studies in the past two decades. However (as is usually the case in many scientific fields) a hype has arisen around the concept and many scientist are claiming that priming can explain several unrelated psychological constructs. Many of these studies have poor methodology and have never been replicated. Perhaps my parent comment was talking about one of these studies when they mentioned “social priming”.
Yes, social priming studies are what cljs-js-eval was referring to originally when they mentioned "priming". Priming itself is generally solid science (eg. the Stroop effect).
https://hypebae.com/2018/11/how-to-wear-birkenstock-sandals-...
can you identify any specific problems with the analysis in that post?
discussions around taleb often have a very cult like aspect to them - a refusal to discuss specific empirical claims made by Taleb and an assumption that the critics are too dumb to understand taleb's deep mathematical criticisms.
So he looks at the quantitative claims and they are just flat out wrong.
However, the non-quantitative "analysis" is just as faulty.
First huge mistake is that he claims that IQ correlating better with outcomes at the low end somehow shows that it doesn't measure what it claims to measure, "raw ability". That is nonsense, because ability is just one factor, but a necessary one, for outcomes. So if you don't have the ability, you're not going to get the outcome. But if you do have the ability, that doesn't mean you're going to get the outcome. You might not be motivated, for example.
In fact, I remember a talk from a couple of years back showing that financial success tends to be anti-correlated with the highest IQs, because those people figure out that it just isn't worth it.
But anyway, the correlation being stronger inn the "non-ability" part of the distribution does not show that it's not measuring ability.
Another whopper is that he claims that performance is is fat-tailed, without citing any evidence. According to Albert-László Barabási[1] who studies performance, success and how they relate, performance is more closely normally distributed, it is success that is fat-tailed.
And of course Taleb doesn't seem to distinguish between performance and success, which makes the whole rant pretty worthless.
Taleb: "There are problems with A because of B reasons"
Response: "B reasons prove A"
I really don't understand why this is so common. I don't fully agree w/ Taleb that the academic demographic he tends to pick on is so lost to navel-gazing that it is completely unable to understand the context of his arguments, but it's really odd how common this is.
To clarify, I'd love to see someone who actually understands Taleb's arguments to push back at him from the same premise. He says some really controversial (and potentially hugely important) stuff that needs to be challenged and peer-reviewed just to get a basic second opinion on it. This has yet to happen really because of what I described.
It's increasingly acknowledged, even in the "soft" sciences, that r-squared is not an appropriate analysis tool.
Anyway, wasn't the IQ test originally created to determine whether or not someone was mentally disabled? It seems like with more modern statistical methods it still could be useful measurement for that purpose, even if it doesn't accurately "scale" beyond 80 points. Ultimately, if you just want to answer the question "Does this person have significant cognitive deficits?" it still has its place even if it's not a good measure for broader intelligence.
> Top 10 Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics
> 1. All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence
> 2. No traits are 100% heritable
> 3. Heritability is caused by many genes of small effect
> 4. Phenotypic correlations between psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic mediation
> 5. The heritability of intelligence increases throughout development (from 41% (age 9) to 55% (age 12) and to 66% (age 17); "unlike the other findings, this one is limited to a specific domain")
> 6. Age-to-age stability is mainly due to genetics
> 7. Most measures of the ‘environment’ show significant genetic influence
> 8. Most associations between environmental measures and psychological traits are significantly mediated genetically
> 9. Most environmental effects are not shared by children growing up in the same family
Yes, and that is why over time this is becoming more important. To put out some arbitrary numbers, you can use a shovel with an IQ of 70, you can operate a backhoe with an IQ of 90, you can engineer the backhoe with an IQ of 120. Manual shoveling disappeared as an occupation 50 years ago apart from niches, driving as a profession might disappear in the next 15 -- and it does matter whether the people made unemployed by technology can be upskilled to be repairmen/engineers/programmers. If IQ is >50% genetic, they can't and you have to figure out how to deal with 10-20% of the population being permanently unemployed or employed in extremely-low-skilled jobs.
this is ... breathtakingly naive
I think this requires rephrasing: The fact you _can_ engineer the backhoe, means you have a higher then average IQ. The fact you have the engineering degree and education required gives you a higher likelyhood of having an above average IQ.
I’m sure you _can_ engineer a backhoe with an IQ of 90. But it is going to be harder for you to get the degree and education required. Whether it is harder because of some lack of some mental capabilities or because the whole education system is stacked against you because of your socio-economic status (which is predicted to be low given a lower then average IQ) is debatable.
However if you go the same number of standard deviations up (~5.333) and get to 180 you don’t see any super human mental capabilities. In fact there is nothing really that distinguishes a 180 IQ from the average 100 IQ (except socio-economic factors like education, well paying job, rich educated parents, white or east asian heretige, etc.; and you didn’t need the IQ to tell you that).
In short. IQ is never useful when you measure above the average, and only the test generating the IQ are useful when you get several standard deviations below the average.
Among the illegal drug trade and other criminal activities IQ strongly correlates with success and positions even well past 100 IQ.
The US military found increased IQ over 100 to strongly correlate with lower training costs. So initially flat out IQ tests and now an IQ proxy is still used to screen people before they can take jobs requiring significant training.
For fair disclosure, there was a study which showed that as IQ decreased, the span of time for a perfect IQ score prep increased almost infinitely, as the low IQ kids forgot the material they already learned. Maybe I will look for it later, would be very relevant here.
Though presumably that's just gaming a test and has zero impact on IQ as measured by unrelated tests. However as this makes the tests less accurate it's discouraged.
An IQ of 100 is defined to be the mean intelligence. It is a magic number (albeit not a magic number representing competence). Usually an IQ of 80-90 (around one standard deviation below the average) give you general competence, lower then that and you probably have some mental disabilities (unless the test is badly standardized; which has happened more often then it should have).
IQs above average correlate with loads of desirable things, individuals with higher then average IQ are generally more well spoken, they have higher income, they are quicker to respond to questions, they know more jokes, they are probably more handsome as well (I know; citation needed). These traits are as well desired (if not more) in the criminal world as anywhere else. But this is precisely the problem with considering high IQs. If your measurement is predicting everything, it usually means you are measuring nothing.
> If your measurement is predicting everything, it usually means you are measuring nothing.
The goal of IQ was to predict everything as it's a one dimensional scale. You can always find a better test for any given quality, and frankly should. However, that does not somehow invalidate it's wide ranging utility.
If not: Using IQ for anything else is, at best, quite useless, and at worst, severely problematic as you found out when you heard about scientific racism (such as the eugenics movement).
An IQ less than say 85 means the inability of the individual and IQ of 140 does not mean that much.
His basic argument is, after certain IQ when you look at their economic outcomes they are evenly distributed.
When you grow up failing spelling tests, under-perform in timed math tests and all sorts of random memorization subjects (things with lots of name and dates in them: biology, geology, etc), you get bogged down. Finding out my IQ, and the limits of the test, did help me understand myself a little bit better, and helped convinced me to get my college degree (my high school guidance counselor was telling me not to bother, just start working on the local farms, maybe get a little bit of community college).
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confound...
But the claim is that IQ measure wealth, not intelligence.
These sort of arguments always ring hollow for me, because I am not a WASP and the test I took didn't resemble a WASP-culture test in the slightest. The test I took was all "given this series of abstract geometric patterns, which comes next," not, "During which season is the weather at Martha's Vineyard the most temperate"
Maybe wrapping your mind around abstract geometry is something WASPs are good at and, say, people from the Islamic world suck at, but I really really doubt that considering the relatively elevated roll geometric patterns have in Islamic culture compared to WASP culture.
Of course I am neither a Muslim nor a WASP, but even so I am pretty sure I didn't struggle too hard on that test.
That example probably popped into my head first, because of the long controversy around IQ tests cultural effects and the history of using those tests to make arguments that race determines intelligence
Even if you feel that Psychologists have failed to do so, you still have to explain why East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews consistently outperform WASPs.
there is also no evidence of strong cultural bias of the sort you are speculating about.
His larger point with respect to IQ is that it only predicts substandard IQs. Measures like the variance are largely influenced by the effects of IQs below the average, not above the average.
A second point which I don't see addressed is that IQ measures share features with testing. If how you test in school affects future income, and testing well in school predicts testing well on IQ, then more robust analysis is needed. A sample space of people in a wide band of IQ ranges who all got about the same grades in school would be a true test of the predictive value of IQ on income.
If I were to guess why this IQ debate keeps coming up is that it is a bit taboo now (which makes it very tantalizing in and of itself). There is also some gaslighting going on with certain segments claiming IQ is completely junk and has no genetic basis (even partially). This triggers the contrarians, who then themselves may overstate the science, prompting responses that may understate the science ... and so on.
-Height differences do not exist because the measuring scale used to measure height is inaccurate.
-Height differences are not dependent on hereditary because height depends on nutrition.
-Assuming that height differences between the races are inherent tantamounts to racism because height differences are clearly depend on nutrition.
-Bad nutrition is caused by discrimination, since bad nutrition results in shorter heights it's clearly discrimination that indirectly causes shorter height.
-Height is not hereditary because short parents can have tall children and vice-versa.
-Person X measures very short using a 'height' scale, but he's a great basketball player. Hence obviously height is not a factor in being a great basket ball player.
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-14/nobel-prize-winner-ja...
Well ... perhaps in some way:
Since 1991 there has been the presumption that persistent heat affects the IQ over
generations. It was initially assumed that living in lower temperatures requires a higher
physical fitness and causes higher social demands. Richard Lynn, a professor at the
University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, also assumes that the colder temperatures
increase the brain volume. Whether brain size is at all related to intelligence, is
controversial.
In general, a hot climate is considered a disadvantage for the development of
intelligence. The reason is nowadays primarily seen in the high physical energy demand
and the resulting stress.
Another study suggests infectious diseases might be a cause for lower IQ scores. In that case, perhaps infectious diseases spread more easily in hot climates?
See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-average-iq...
Why is this sad, and isn't it obvious that we already have? I mean, it's been well proven that humans are smarter than many other species, even when those animals are raised in "human-like" conditions.
It seems completely obvious to me that, since we see genetic-based differences even within species in numerous traits (height, strength, speed, memorization ability, etc.), why would we think intelligence would be any different.
I'm skeptical of the IQ heat idea - it'd be readily demonstrable if it existed - but the numbers available, particularly outside the US/Europe, are largely current/recent, not from pre-1950s.
> A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs.
https://psmag.com/education/a-compensation-for-cold-weather-...
As everyone knows, the world is big, only ~4.3% of people live in the US. Unfortunately for you, the US it's not the center of the world. By the way, I couldn't care less about a study correlating the whitest and darkest states in the US, a country that shines in racism, academics in there probably go out of their way to make brown people look bad, like that pseudo scientist James Watson.
Quoted from your article:
> the ancestors of Swedes and Norwegians who were clever and resourceful enough to survive in that harsh climate passed down those heightened mental abilities to their descendants.
That's really funny, since the smartest people in the world are Asians and Italians. What northern Europeans are superior though, in the US mostly, is assuming they are better. Going out of their way with mental models to consider themselves superior.
[0] https://newleftreview.org/issues/II97/articles/mike-davis-th...
Either you assume that IQ is 100% not genetic, or you have to admit that race seems to be correlated.
No human capability is likely to be 100% genetic.
But my concern is that if there is a genetic component to intelligence at all, that is a problem. 40 IQ points less on average is no joke.
High IQ may or may not correlate with success in our civilization, but considering that our civilization is highly dysfunctional and has positioned itself on the verge of numerous forms of self-destruction, how much does that really matter? There are clearly many more components than IQ-style intelligence that contribute to a good life and a stable society. Anyone who thinks that either a person’s or an ethnic group’s performance on an IQ test says anything about that person’s or group’s value to the world is an idiot regardless of what their IQ might be.
The fundamental problem with racists and group identitarians in general is that the things you know about a group don't tell you anything about the individual. The promise of the West is supposed to be (and i argue still is, despite Twitter) that we judge individuals by the content of their own character and not by their group memberships.
Which is why it's almost certainly junk science. 40 points on a scale normalized around 100 is an absurdly large disparity to try and hang on genetics. Are there any heritable traits that show that kind of variation between human populations?
Height is a pretty obvious one that ranges dramatically worldwide, but the gap is more like 13%, not 40%! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_w...
Which goes to say that no matter which genetic advantage you might have at birth there’s nothing that the socio-economic factors cannot surpass. In this particular case the socio-economic factors were very much in favor of an American runner being allowed to win an Olympic Games race while being doped, and that happened because the US is a huge market for all the athletics/related producers and almost all of the Olympic Games sponsors.
With male runners, doping would stilll be a factor, but there is less headroom for manipulation. You can't dope someone into arbitrarily high performance, and if you could, other physical characteristics wouldn't matter at all, which is clearly not the the case becasue we don't constantly see short, fat dopers popping up in elite contests.
Don’t know if it’s anywhere on the Internet but I remember an East German trainer saying something along the lines of: “It’s much easier to make a man out of a woman than it is to make a Superman out of a man”, all this in relation to East-Germany’s official doping policy. So I’d rather trust a professional in this matter (the East-Germans were truly the masters of doping) when saying that it is indeed easier to artificially increase the performances of female athletes compared to male athletes.
Not to end it all on a pessimistic note, there are also “happy” cases of naturally gifted athletes being at the right time and at the right place in terms of external socio-economic factors. The latest such example is the recent Tour de France winner, 22-year old Bernal, who won the Tour on its highest stage which I think reached 2700 meters, while he himself was born and grew up at 2800 meters of altitude. But he also won the Tour because he is a member of the infamous British team Ineos (the former Sky), which also gave the winner of last year’s Tour, Geraint Thomas, a guy born and bread in seaside Cardiff and who until last year’s victory had never had a Top 10 finish in any of the big 3 tours. He’s 32 now, if I’m not mistaken, cyclists much greater than him (like Pantani or Ulrich) were basically lynched by the public opinion for doing less egregious stuff (they at least were talented at climbing).
Kenyans/Ethiopians have held the world record in the marathon since 2003. An Ethiopian also held it for a few months in 1998, and most of a year in 1964. Were Kenyans not genetically dominant until 20 years ago? Or are there other factors that caused the rise of a large number of elite runners from a particular area of the world?
Running is one area where it is mindbogglingly obvious that there are significant genetic factors involved, yet there are clear and significant changes in running ability by country of origin for reasons that have nothing to do with genetics.
40 IQ points less on average is no joke, but also doesn't point the finger at genetics any more than it does at culture or primary education.
"50 Years Ago, Kenya Established Its Distance Running Dominance
The African country became a medal-winning power at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in August 1966, and hasn’t looked back."
Obviously (1) getting invited to the event and (2) learning the rules of a particular event are major selection factors when drawing conclusions from event results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...
All we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037248/
Of course, genetics interact strongly with environment. That's precisely why someone raised in a high-altitude Ethiopian community but whose ancestors are from, say, the Netherlands would not be expected to be as well-adapted to altitude (or long-distance running) compared to their historically Ethiopian neighbours, all else being equal.
>That's precisely why someone raised in a high-altitude Ethiopian community but whose ancestors are from, say, the Netherlands would not be expected to be as well-adapted to altitude (or long-distance running) compared to their historically Ethiopian neighbours, all else being equal
You say "would not be expected to be" because, of course, no-one has actually done this experiment and no-one knows what would actually happen. Nor indeed would we be able to verify that any given individual from the Netherlands does in fact lack the putatively relevant genes, since we don't know what they are.
The abstract to which you linked points out that "Kenyan and Ethiopian distance-running success is not based on a unique genetic or physiological characteristic." That seems like a strawman, as I don't think anyone ever claimed that any single characteristic or gene has been making all the difference. The abstract calls out "favorable somatotypical characteristics lending to exceptional biomechanical and metabolic economy/efficiency." Sure, but how much of these characteristics and exceptionally favourable response to training and living at altitude is potentiated by genetics? The answer of "none" would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
> You say "would not be expected to be" because, of course, no-one has actually done this experiment and no-one knows what would actually happen. Nor indeed would we be able to verify that any given individual from the Netherlands does in fact lack the putatively relevant genes, since we don't know what they are.
I'm not aware of any interventional study that, say, separates high-altitude-native twins so that one twin grows up at low altitude but with everything else being equal. That sounds completely impractical. However, there exists observational evidence from human migrations to and from high altitude. Some examples:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4201282/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17329275
Finally, to address your earlier comment that "all we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't," this is a grossly inaccurate summary of scientific understanding of the multiple examples of convergent evolution that have produced genetically altitude-adapted populations in Kenya/Ethiopia, the Andes, and Tibet.
If you remove all constraints on effect size, then everything is a factor in everything. There is no strong reason to think that genes unusually prevalent among Kenyans play a large role in success at distance running. Note that this is not identical to the claim that genes do not play a large role in success at distance running. Certainly, performance in any given sport is significantly influenced by genetic factors (though the details are not well understood). But the following is not a good argument:
Genes significantly influence athletic performance
Keynans are great at distance running
|- Keynans have genes that make them better at distance running.
The article points out that Somalians and Kenyans don't (on average) have particularly similar somatotypical characteristics, and yet both nations have produced exceptional distance runners.
>Finally, to address your earlier comment that "all we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't," this is a grossly inaccurate summary of scientific understanding of the multiple examples of convergent evolution that have produced genetically altitude-adapted populations in Kenya/Ethiopia, the Andes, and Tibet.
This is just bluster. We know little about the genetic details, and even less about any possible effects on elite athletic performance.
This contradicts scientific findings.
> Genes significantly influence athletic performance
> Keynans are great at distance running
> |- Keynans have genes that make them better at distance running.
I've been discussing Kenyan and Ethiopian runners for brevity, but as you point out, I should have been more specific: this chain of reasoning should conclude with the much more compelling observation that "from 1980 on, ~40% of the top honours available to men in international athletics at these distances (Olympic medals, World Championships medals, and World Cross Country Championships honours) have been earned by Kalenjin." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalenjin_people
> The article points out that Somalians and Kenyans don't (on average) have particularly similar somatotypical characteristics, and yet both nations have produced exceptional distance runners.
The Kalenjin identity predates modern borders of Kenya and Ethiopia, which torpedoes the "but multiple nations have produced elite runners" argument. They are massively disproportionately successful at distance running, and it's well-established that their specific genotypes are key to their success -- not the only key, but a major part.
None of this is "bluster." We can politely disagree here all we want, but the fact is that we both have near-instant access to reams of supporting evidence for the fact that Kalenjin genes uniquely predispose them to distance-running prowess, similar to how the Bajau of Southeast Asia are genetically predisposed to have 50% bigger spleens as a free-diving adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sama-Bajau#Free-diving_adaptat...), or how Tibetans are adapted across multiple genes to thrive at high altitude in a different way from Kalenjin or Andeans (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jul/02/mutation-gen...), or any of the other specific examples of genetic adaptation to ancestral environments whose existence might be uncomfortable to some, but are nevertheless real.
That's pretty vague. You keep saying that things are "well-established" by science, but don't provide proper citations. The literature on Kenyan athletic performance is mostly pretty speculative and inconclusive. The article that you yourself cite in an earlier comment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037248/) has a very tentative conclusion:
"A critical analysis of this unique phenomenon has shown that these athletes do not descend from a single isolated genetic profile.4 The data suggest that the genes most studied and associated with performance in aerobic endurance running (ACE and ACTN3) do not seem to fully explain the success of these athletes. It seems unlikely that Africa is producing unique genotypes that cannot be found in other parts of the world. So far, the evidence shows that the subjects’ phenotype (molded over time by several factors) seems to have greater influence than their genotype in their long-distance running success.4 While recognizing that this field of study is at an early stage of understanding, the available results show that the identified candidate genes for human performance neither determine nor exclude the possibility of athletic success. Although, the right choice of parents can help in the search for athletic success, this is not the deciding factor between success and failure in sport.4"
This is such a brilliant quote that I have to bring it in again:
"Another item that ought to prompt the thoughtful reader to question the very large discrepancy in intelligence that the authors assert to exist between various human sub-populations is the extraordinarily low average IQs assigned to many African nations. For example, the authors claim that the mean IQ in Equitorial Guinea is only 59, well shy of the threshold score of 70 below which the testee is classified as mentally retarded. Anyone who has spent significant time with an American or a European whose IQ is that low (as I did for a year while assisting in a special education program) can attest that such an individual is not capable of independently managing his own life, and will require constant caretaking to get on in the world."
[Edit: https://mises.org/library/does-iq-determine-wealth-nations And it's the Mises Institute.]
Giving "IQ points" any meaning at all, 40 of them is an obvious difference. As in, big enough that this shouldn't be an issue.
It's just a topic we really don't have a good grasp of, as is the case with most of medicine. We understand a lot of strategies, but our understandings of root causes is still very poor.
In other words, IQ does not measure how educated one is.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294274?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
This phenomenan is especially notable nowadays where wealthy parents canb buy a diagnosis to givetheir children extra time on IQ tests.
And then of course ADHD drugs and other stimulants raise the question of what it means for a person to "have" an IQ, if that IQ (and/or test score) is influenced by doping. Stimulants and the brain question our notion of what is an "individual", much as the bacteria in our gut do. The idea of an "individual" is a very synthetic Western mathematical concept that does not have a strong basis in the science of the natural world.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-tree-stump-is-mysteriously... "Scientists Find Weird, Zombie-Like Tree Being Kept Alive by a Forest 'Superorganism'"
I would expect this to be true of all environmental effects, unless they do permanent damage, or there is some critical window for learning.
Stability over a person's lifetime, regardless of experience, is what you'd expect of a genetic effect. Environment varies. Genetics doesn't.
* Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
* Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
* Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality
* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Oh, and The Bell Jar, although that doesn't somehow imply that 1950 was the peak of White Culture.
and also, there is not a single piece of evidence on this planet that IQ is 100% hereditary.
Or, bear with me here, you have to admit that IQ tests can only measure trained skills that correlate loosely to raw intelligence.
The issue is that I think there is very little evidence to suggest that IQ is only measuring trained skills.
Otherwise people could get much, much better at IQ tests given practice, but this does not seem to be the case.
I have taken multiple (3) professionally administered IQ tests, and my highest score achieved was on the first of those, when I was eight years old.
I don't think that means anything, but there you go.
But that does not mean "races" have to have different inherent average IQs.
Right?
No, it is not. "Races" are identified by a range of superficial characteristics relating to appearance and by language and cultural background. The connection to genetics is very loose. The idea that black people in Africa all belong to a single "race" would seem quite absurd to most Africans, for example.
Sure, racists are interested in race and everything related to it because they feel they are superior, and conveniently disregard the things that don't support them being superior.
But race is not a cultural construct, as evidenced by the fact that you can't culturally adapt your skin to change colors.
It is entirely possible to note the differences between men and women without being sexist. It is also possible to be interested in and note the differences between different parts of the human population without being racist.
But people who believe in "races" don't think that it's just a matter of skin color. They think that skin color (or whatever other feature) is a marker of some deeper difference. That's where the mistake lies. Otherwise racial differences would be of no more significance than, say, differences in hair or eye color.
Racial categories are nowhere near as objective as you suggest. For example, Italians used not to be considered "white" in the US. Many Americans who self-identify as "black" would not be considered black in many parts of Africa.
And then of course with ever increasing mobility, the differences are probably 'smoothing out' so to speak.
>Otherwise racial differences would be of no more significance than, say, differences in hair or eye color.
Interesting example, because red haired people generally have more sensitive skin and are prone to burning in the sun. This is an example of the kinds of differences that it is actually interesting and helpful to study.
No, it's completely correct, in the sense that there is no objective or scientific definition of "race". Every cultural construct is based on something.
>This is an example of the kinds of differences that it is actually interesting and helpful to study.
And of course, these are exactly the differences that people obsessed with "race" aren't interested in.
2. Racists can't point to actual genetic variation to establish their ideas.
3. Racists can go fuck right off.
It's also very hard to research since actual IQ is strongly affected by environmental factors like nutrition etc.
But come on, it's weak. The relationship that chart shows clear as day is wealth. Wealth is super correlated. The top of the chart are exlusively industrialized democracies. The bottom are exclusively impoverished (and mostly unstable) backwaters.
And within those cohorts, sure, you can kinda/sorta say that east asians sit above europeans, maybe. Or maybe not. Four points of IQ are nothing -- it's like three decades of development per the Flynn effect, or maybe one decade of really focused investment in education.
There are counteless other good hypotheses for a weak signal, and this isn't an area amenable to direct experiment, so realistically we're never really going to know.
And the same stuff is true of the linked article. It's poking holes in specific statements by finding rigorous numbers that "disprove" it, but only very weakly. Basically, the point to the article isn't that "IQ is solid science", it's that Taleb's paper was too aggressive in its conclusion. Which is sort of a yawner, and not really a good excuse to bring race into the discussion.
But yeah. It's possible that darkies are dumber or that the gooks are smarter. It's possible. What drives those of us on the left absolutely bonkers isn't the possibility that you might be right, it's the fact that you look at messy data like this and immediately go to the least tolerable conclusion as if that's what you want to be true. And... yeah, yuck.
(Edit: and right on cue three quick responses about "but that doesn't prove race isn't correlated, here's another hypothesis for why race might be correlated!", which sounds to me suspiciously like "I really want race to be correlated with IQ!" The truth is we just don't know, we might never, even if it is it's weak, and I for one would rather live in a world where people don't want this to be true than the one I'm stuck in. )
Just a thought. What's that quote from the Big Lebowski again?
And that's what horrifies us. Is that really a worldview you want to have?
Compare with the distribution of GDP per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
Honestly, this could be put to rest fairly "easily" (obviously this wouldn't be that easy and is never going to happen) if you took 1000 expectant mother's who have just become pregnant from Equatorial Guinea and transplanted them to various wealthy countries. Then measure the children's IQ as they grow up and compare them to the rest of the local population.
I have a feeling the difference in IQ would be negligible, and that the vast divide can be attributed almost wholly to nutrition/etc in early development, but you can't maintain that this is the case until you've actually tested the hypothesis, which as far as I'm aware has not been done.
I'm not entirely sure how the Flynn effect is relevant, unless the claim is that certain countries (African ones mostly) are not being retested at all, but European countries are. Is that the idea?
In the US the people we talk about (and again, suspiciously, tend to be the focus of this IQ stuff) as "african-american" or "hispanic" are members of predominantely creole populations with staggeringly broad genetic backgrounds. Which you'd think would get them thrown out as obvious confounding outliers, but yet...
But not every population is genetically diverse, and if intelligence is genetic, this could obviously manifest itself in an entire, non-genetically diverse population. Watson himself seems to be racist based on his later comments (where he did specifically mention black and white), but I think it is worth pointing out that his 2007 comments, for which he first earned the racist badge, made no mention of race. Rather, he said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really".
He was not talking about African-Americans / black people in general there, but rather about Africa and Africans, which as a whole have been more genetically isolated than the rest of the world. Africa has always had a hotter climate (which many have argued is less evolutionarily selective for intelligence than colder climates) and worse nutrition due to less arable farmland. If intelligence is at all genetic, all of those factors could have a serious impact over 1000s of years on what the "baseline intelligence" is. Obviously regional IQ tests are not sufficient on their own to show that this is the case, but the argument itself is not inherently flawed. We just don't have the data to point in one direction or the other.
Claiming that race is a good indicator of such is flawed, as race and genetic diversity are not inextricably linked as the racists want to claim, as you have pointed out. But postulating that Africa as a region is less genetically intelligent due to a variety of evolutionary factors is not flawed in the same way.
Trivially disprovable by looking at children adopted into wealthy families. Spoilers: they stay wealthy.
You seem to be talking about the fact that in many societies, inheritance and an ossified hierarchy exist. This is obviously true, but not really a trivial disproof of the above.
The wealth of the family had to be generated from somewhere. Are you saying that the progenitor of this wealth was just as likely to be unintelligent as intelligent?
But not as much as their non-adopted siblings. Correlation of 0.23 vs 0.33
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-pe...
So, to say that "wealth comes from intelligence" is false implies that, whatever it is that allows one to get wealthy, making better decisions is not the decisive factor... which I may agree with in many cases, but not as a general rule... and when measuring the wealth of a whole country, the general rule would certainly tend to dominate. Geography and resources availability also play a big role, of course, but as we can see easily, many countries that are quite unlucky with regards to those things still manage to score very highly on the wealth rankings - and perhaps not coincidentally, have high average IQ.
"Let's look at Germany. Lynn and Vanhanen cited four studies that found that West German IQ scores ranged from 99 to 107, whereas East German IQs were as low as 90 back in 1967, and later studies pegged their scores at 97 to 99 points. Taking the extremes, these data imply a gap as big as 17 IQ points between West and East Germans. How to account for the rise East Germany in less than a generation of 7 to 9 points? After all, East and West Germans are not all that genetically different. Lynn's data now show an average German IQ of 102 points. Similarly Lynn and Vanhanen report that average Greek IQs were 88 in 1961 rising to 95 in 1979. An increase of 7 IQ points in 18 years, as Unz points out, "is an absurdity from the genetic perspective." " (https://reason.com/2012/08/07/nations-smart-rich-wealth-crea...)
"Another item that ought to prompt the thoughtful reader to question the very large discrepancy in intelligence that the authors assert to exist between various human sub-populations is the extraordinarily low average IQs assigned to many African nations. For example, the authors claim that the mean IQ in Equitorial Guinea is only 59, well shy of the threshold score of 70 below which the testee is classified as mentally retarded. Anyone who has spent significant time with an American or a European whose IQ is that low (as I did for a year while assisting in a special education program) can attest that such an individual is not capable of independently managing his own life, and will require constant caretaking to get on in the world." (https://mises.org/library/does-iq-determine-wealth-nations)
> Honestly, this could be put to rest fairly "easily" (obviously this wouldn't be that easy and is never going to happen) if you took 1000 expectant mother's who have just become pregnant from Equatorial Guinea and transplanted them to various wealthy countries.
Even if you got full consent for everyone involved, can you not see the absolutely massive confounding factors around cultural support? To do this experiment, you'd have to cover up all the physical differenes beween the Guineans and the locals (including visual appearance and phemeromones and gut biology), adopt the babies into local families without their knowledge, and never telal anyone what happened, without adding other confounds.
Exactly... one may conclude from this one of two things:
* countries become wealthy for unrelated reasons, allowing its populace to get wealthier and achieve a higher IQ. * people with higher IQ can generate more wealth, hence countries with higher average IQ become wealthier.
I think that the first hypothesis may be true in certain cases, e.g. oil-rich places... but it seems more likely to me that the second hypothesis is correct, after all I would expect a group of more intelligent people to achieve more than a group of less intelligent people, or is that a polemic claim?
Imagine if a bunch of "more intelligent" people invent a nuclear bomb and blow themselves up (might yet happen), or discover the amazing properties of lead and poison their brains across an entire civilization (already happened). then the less intelligent people might achieve more, eh?
Let's dive right into a big racial/IQ claim: Jews have above average IQ. Assuming that, that makes them more successful as a group, perhaps? On the other hand, starting from say 1930, Jews were absolutely horrific at average achievement, thanks to the Nazi Holocaust. If the Jews were less intelligent, perhaps they would have blended into society better (after all, Jews don't look especially different, except for Jews that kept their mating pools limited) and been less noticeable by the Nazis.
For instance, average height of a population is not a fixed value but changes with the progress of a country. Presumably due to the diet improvement in the mother's generation.
Another consideration: parasites, I would be surprised if they don't influence the development of child intelligence.
First is that there are plenty of environmental factors to consider, especially with regards to 3rd world countries. In rural parts of Africa where people are predominantly subsistence farmers, there is a very high rate of prenatal and neonatal malnutrition. And that can cause mental retardation. And so can getting malaria and a variety of other infectious diseases in infancy.
Second point is that you are assuming that race is a well-defined genetic construct. But it isn't, it's largely a social construct. Population genetics for humans is a continuum, and we just arbitrarily draw the lines.
Two tall people aren't guaranteed to have a tall kid.
Two intelligent people aren't guaranteed to have an intelligent kid.
Two empathetic people aren't guaranteed to have an empathetic kid.
Two white people are pretty much guaranteed to have a white kid.
Basically, if you try to divide people up into broad categories of race, you will find individuals in race A that are more genetically similar to some individuals in race B than other individuals in race A. You can define race in terms of the handful of genes controlling skin color, eyes, hair etc, but all the other genetic differences between people won't generally fall into that same pattern
When using the more accurate definition of race, people are usually talking about different but highly related species. For example Chimpanzees and Bonobos are different races. African and Indian elephants are different races. The Neanderthals was a different race of humans. With this understanding there is currently only one race of humans.
Claiming the existence of some Irish race (and let alone white race) is at best confusing, but usually wrong.
Genuinely curious: isn't this an example of cherry-picking outliers in an attempt to refute the overarching rule? So what if it's technically possible to find a minority of non-Irish who exhibit some traits that are much more common among Irish people, and it's possible to find Irish people who are phenotypic outliers? In general, the fact that clusters in a dataset are fuzzy and imperfect doesn't imply that the clusters are meaningless.
I don’t believe that is the case. I think all we need to do is show that a race categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to demonstrate the uselessness aspect of it. And we do that by showing that there exists a non-irish person that has enough traits generally regarded as belonging to the Irish race (not necessary), and that there exist a person of Irish heritage that doesn’t nearly all of these traits (not sufficient).
But regardless of it being guilty of cherry-picking. As long as the dataset is fuzzy, I think the opposite opinion will necessarily have to be arbitrary to define which traits, how many, and how consistently they inherit in order to be defined as a race. I know the technical definition is also arbitrary (when are two populations distinct species?) but at least the arbitrariness is consistent with how we view the rest of the natural world. That is we don’t consider gray wolfs with darker coats to be a separate race from gray wolfs with lighter coats. We correctly differentiate them as belonging to separate populations. Applying this only to humans is arbitrary.
The controversy is from folks trying to take that correlation, reframe it as causation, and then attribute it to genetic factors.
There are tons of non-genetic factors that can affect IQ and are correlated with race: exposure to pollution, economic situation, nutrition, etc.
Then there is the test itself. I’m not sure how localization happens, but it’s a pretty hard problem that lends itself to biases.
The top 5 highest scoring countries, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and China all have a cram school culture that prepares them for the endless rounds of standardized tests they have to take to secure a position in society.
I would expect people trained from infancy to excel at standardized tests, to excel at standardized tests.
Many of the reasons I listed would explain why, in the US, the states of West Virginia (98.7) and New Hampshire (104.2), despite having very similar demographics have such different average IQs. One state is richer than the other.
It would also explain why Hawaii, which demographically is comprised of people (about 1/3rd) who share genetic lineage with people from high IQ nations, has a relatively low average IQ. Hawaii has a pretty bad public school system.
Until someone locks two children in an Edu-Pod from birth to adulthood and feeds them the same stream of information and nutrition and measures their IQ when the pod ejects them at the end of the test, we'll never know for sure, but my gut tells me that all of the people who think "genetics is destiny" are losers.
Try doing a sport competitively at a high level, where the whole team is eating the same, working out the same, and some plateau at a 315 deadlift and start getting injured all the time and others keep going to 450 without any problems.
And that's ignoring obvious things like deformities, asthma, insulin resistance, etc.
That covers maybe 1% of the population. Meanwhile the other 99% of us have environment effects (nutrition, education and training, role models, weather, exposure to niche opportunities and advantages) that are greater sources of variation than genetics.
"We need to openly talk about race differences in IQ, lest the neo-nazis appropriate it and use it as recruitment propaganda" is a very common refrain, and pretty transparent in its intentions, as it itself acts as recruitment propaganda.
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1116342266195476481 <- this Twitter thread addresses the country-IQ argument effectively, and I haven't seen it properly refuted so far.
The schools tend to be very heavy in STEM subjects, which does not seem an implausible source for high IQ test performance, which favor the kind of abstract, logical thinking that STEM subjects strengthen.
So, IQ could be a measure of abstract thinking capability, and it might be the case that one's ability to think abstractly can be developed through proper education.
Additionally, there is also my anecdata of improving my SAT score purely through study.
"The assertion that IQ measures human intelligence in any general sense, or that the source of variance in IQ scores is primarily cognitive in nature, remains unsubstantiated after decades of investigation.": https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0382/3398d781543cd0edcf51f1...
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(12)00584-3
If you're going to try to convince people of your "race realism" bullshit on this platform you're gonna have to try a lot harder than unsubstantiated shit posting.
A side note: Taleb's writing ability goes to hell when he rants.
1) You dont get smarter. Its not like knowing you are 120 vs 100 IQ changes anything about your ability to solve a problem
2) IQ is more of a speed of learning not an ability to understand. With enough time you can learn anything (challenge placed) the biggest barrier is discipline and desire.
3) IQ is abstract and is very useless within any context. If you want to know if someone is good at math give them a math test. If they are a good writer look at their portfolio. IQ is like determining someone is good at being a chef by only asking them questions. IQ is very far from any specific field of knowledge.
IQ is like space knowledge. Its only important/useful subject for a select few people.
2. "With enough time..." is a totally irrelevant argument made by people who don't understand competition and how it applies to the real world, as in for scholarships, promotions, etc. Time is everything - and its a luxury. It also cuts into your free time heavily.
3. This is true. Except, when you read some code or a complex math concept, have fun if your working memory is sub-par and you can't even remember what the inputs to a function are.
"Its only important/useful subject for a select few people."
It's the exact opposite of that - it is applied to learning any field fast.
It's not particularly important to know your own IQ as an individual (you probably already have an idea of your abilities) but it's very useful for that sort of public health purpose. If there are other neurotoxins floating around which we don't know about, IQ will be important to identify and justify banning them.
Well, that statement is clearly false. The exams are designed by very sophisticated nerds.
I think an IQ is much closer to what the clock rate is for computers. Just because a computer runs at a higher frequency, doesn't mean that it is computing more important calculations.
In fact, there is no advantage in having 3 times the processing power if you are just running a word processor. Equally, there is no advantage in having 3 times the IQ if you are just going to shop groceries.
Yes, there are a few use-cases where having more processing power is relevant (e.g. when you have a limited time to make a good and impactful choice), but I think those cases are not a frequent as most people think they are.
"Taleb has an updated post up at medium that takes care of most of this. You could take the time to weigh that in against this all over again.
And if you come back here in a few days, I may have a post up about how this is a trivial misunderstanding of NNT's case. Quantitatively."
Anybody who understands Taleb's argument realizes that these "counterarguments" are missing the mark. The fact that they spend more time obsessing his "meanness to them" than on his arguments, without understanding that his meanness is never directed at people who disagree, only people who bullshit, proves that point.
If you live in a big city, you can probably find a place to do it for less than $100.
> All the claims from the article that I looked at, that can be interpreted as something specific and tested in a real data set, turned out not to be correct. If Taleb hadn’t blocked everyone who disagrees with him, perhaps he would have found out about this, and not published a post with all these incorrect claims.
there are versions of this, but is anyone surprised that an attempt of big-S Science to put a single number on humans, has fundamental challenges ?
I don't think it can be. I think (at least, important part of) intelligence is ability (or speed) to learn (patterns in the data?). So it can only be measured on something you haven't learned yet. Since as humans, we cannot "unlearn" things, the result will always be skewed by your previous experience.