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Comment by tpush | Hacker News Reader

> It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda.

The science is clear on this question, and has been for decades; there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities.

> One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?

The position isn't even that there are no differences in IQ between populations; the well-supported scientific consensus is

a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and

b) IQ differences between populations are largely not caused by genetics.

Note that neither of these statements contradict the heritability of IQ, which a statistical effect.

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> a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and

What does this mean? I assume I am interpreting it wrong, because it just seems like nonsense.

The fact that IQ differences between individuals in a population is larger than the alleged IQ differences between populations seems totally obvious. Any given population probably contains some disabled people and also some geniuses, for, let's say, a 50-point spread. But it would be a meaningful population-level difference if the average Finn was 100 but the average Swede was 110. Or are there people out there seriously arguing that there are peoples out there totally consisting of super geniuses or extremely disabled people?

If you mean that there’s no evidence of a difference in iq distribution in different populations, I think it’s clearer just to say that.

One particular (I think well founded) worry about the hereditarian position is that if genetic differences between ethnicities are admitted, people start thinking about stuff like, say, an active "blackness" that drags people down, and that they'd start insisting that every black person has to be dumb or something like that. That people would stop really meeting people as individuals (woke blank slatism, of course, has that exact effect already, which is partly why it sucks).

It's somewhat hard to get people to dispassionatedly understand that all the hereditarian position being true would mean that what differed between populations would be the counts of people with a certain levels of ability, and that's it. Dunk a smart black man, a smart white man, a smart East Asian and a smart Ashkenazi in green paint and you have four smart green men unburdened with any mystical force acting on their mental faculties.

Another possibility would be fears of things like "eh, they're dumb anyway" to justify giving up on people with a certain skin color because they won't achieve highly anyway, which would be heinous.

"Well-supported scientific consensus" and "scientifically well-supported theory" are doing a lot of work when the loudest enforcers of the "consensus" consistently operate in dishonesty for strategic reasons, see e.g. the 2019 Cofnas paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.16...

> there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities

I feel like this is the key to your argument, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. Theories don't show causes, they attempt to fit data into a mental model that can then be falsified or fail to be falsified.

Are you saying we should reject data because a satisfying theory hasn't been found yet? I don't agree with that principle. In my view, that seems analogous to rejecting the idea of gravity because we don't have a good theory of how it works, or that the data leading to the string theory hypothesis should be discarded because we can't test and falsify string theory.

And yet a recent study showed at least some is heritable. And this whole “between” populations nonsense doesn’t mean different populations have the same mean.

So some variation in IQ is caused by genetics, but to a very small degree compared to other factors. Am I interpreting (a) and (b) correctly?

Intelligence is very highly heritable, at least within populations.

Apparently yes, sound like the wage gap

  - differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place
  - differences between populations are largely not caused by *sexism*

It makes no sense to posit that IQ differences between population have a different cause than IQ differences between individuals. Adoption raises the IQ by at most 5 points ! What environmental difference could have a much more dramatic effect than that (between population IQ difference are up to 15 pts) ?

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