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There used to be a whole stereotype around "lazy Southerners" that turned out to be a massive hookworm infestation!

> ...victims succumbed to an insatiable exhaustion and an impenetrable haziness of the mind that some called stupidity. Adults neglected their fields and children grew pale and listless. Victims developed grossly distended bellies and “angel wings”—emaciated shoulder blades accentuated by hunching. All gazed out dully from sunken sockets with a telltale “fish-eye” stare.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

> In 1899, American zoologist Charles Wardell Stiles identified progressive pernicious anemia seen in the southern United States as being caused by the hookworm A. duodenale. Testing in the 1900s revealed very heavy infestations in school-age children.

> On October 26, 1909 the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.

> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm_infection#Eradication...

Also changes in the way corn was processed after the Civil War exacerbated pellagra.

Ah... I hadn't heard about that:

> Pellagra was first reported in 1902 in the United States, and has "caused more deaths than any other nutrition-related disease in American history", reaching epidemic proportions in the American South during the early 1900s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#United_States

> There used to be a whole stereotype around "lazy Southerners" that turned out to be a massive hookworm infestation!

It's worth noting that this is one of the great public health interventions of American history, and that the intervention consisted entirely of getting people to wear shoes.

Unfortunately “used to” is a bit optimistic. Hookworms are still a problem to this day.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.

It isn't necessarily just laziness. The first step to fixing the problem means accepting the results, which in this case meant accepting a certain racial group of (silently lead-poisoned) kids had measurably lower intelligence. I don't think I need to explain why that is a minefield.

Right but ironically, the fact that it is a minefield is likely what drove this teacher to make that discovery. Imagine if it was just a random scattering of students living in such apartments (but same number of people). It may have never been discovered in that case.

Everybody accepts that. The only difference is the hypotheses that some people have for explaining that difference. Those who accept a genetic hypothesis are unlikely to look for the real cause.

Now instead of lazily explaining differences with "there must be some testing bias, black kids are just as smart as white kids", we're lazily explaining differences with "it must be systemic oppression, black kids are more oppressed than white kids".

Couldn't you argue the disproportionate number of black people being stuck in lead-filled houses is still an example of some sort of oppression? It's not like black people who were shopping for their houses said "Gee, I'd sure like my kids to have lead poisoning."

I think the critical difference is that a gut reno to eliminate the actual source of low IQ is significantly more feasible than swiftly eradicating most of the other issues that contribute to oppression. Identifying low-hanging fruit is a good quick win, so long as it doesn't weaken broader efforts.

Sure, I'm all for quick wins; get lead outta houses, I'm all on board, but we also shouldn't forget the circumstances that caused black people to disproportionately be in lead-filled houses (presumably mostly economic).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that lead poisoning is a symptom of a bigger issue. It's perfectly fine (and encouraged) to treat the symptoms, but I feel like the comment was replying to was acting like we shouldn't attribute things like this to systemic oppression.

I think everybody agrees that we should get rid of unnecessary environmental sources of lead as rapidly as we can. But it's not all that cheap[1], and there's probably a correlation between not owning the place you leave (i.e., not being entitled to massive renovations) and being a member of an oppressed group.

Even as a financially secure white tenant, I have found my landlords to be extremely hesitant to initiate any testing that might legally obligate them to renovate (or at least cover/shield) sources of lead. And in most municipalities, your landlord is only obligated to follow up on lead concerns if they have personal knowledge of lead paint usage on the property; they're not obligated to go through the property's history and refute the possibility of lead.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_abatement_in_the_United_S...

Living in lead-rich environments is an example of systemic oppression, iiuc. There is a lot of nuance lost in any generality but in this case I do not believe it is a misattribution as much as it is an incomplete descriptor

I think this is an illustrative example of how abstract ideas like "systemic oppression" can compete with their original concrete meanings for attention. I see it a lot in business, too - buzzwords that become detrimental anti-concepts after acquiring an existence separate from what they referred to.

The problem with using lead-rich environment as an example of systemic oppression, and the reason why activists are taking very little about lead these days, is that unlike “systemic oppression”, lead exposure is something very concrete, and it can be tested and studied. We did a lot of studies, in fact, on this particular issue, and the results are pretty clear: differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here. It turns out that in many places, exposure to lead is either overall minimal, or there is no big difference in exposure to it across races, but the gap is just as big as everywhere else. This is inconvenient for the lead blaming narrative, and so the narrative is abandoned in favor of more magical, less well specified theories, that cannot be studied as easily.

Or perhaps "systemic oppression" is being used to refer to all the little things that add up in aggregate.

Perhaps lead levels contribute only a small amount. But then also, micro-aggressions have a tiny affect. Testing bias might also be very small. Maybe less income also leads to being less likely to get glasses when you need them. Perhaps food deserts in minority communities leads to poor nutrition and poorer outcomes, but only a negligible amount. Then there are poorer, urban neighborhoods that might be loud at night causing children to not get quite enough sleep.

And sure, you could blame a lot of this just on poverty in general, but then of course, you have to acknowledge our racist history that lead to so much less wealth in minority families.

It goes on and on and pretty soon you have death by a thousand cuts and a phenomenon that is far too complex to explain in anything less than an entire encyclopedia so you sum it up with "systemic racism".

> differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here

Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution. In practice, those are the differences that everyone will ask about. Why are so many X's (relative to Y's) living in socially marginalized settings, resorting to crime, ending up in the justice system? Why are there so very few X's in very high-skill, high-effort occupations like computer programming and other hard-STEM fields? The X's and Y's will vary by time and place, of course. And societal oppression of various sorts is always playing a role in these dynamics, if only as an amplifying feedback. But either way, these are questions about uncommon, tail outcomes not average or median ones!

> Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution.

That's true, but the gap is already huge at the median. As a rough approximation, the distribution of outcomes has same variance, but mean is shifted left by 1 sigma.

Where is that research? http://ippsr.msu.edu/research/inequality-lead-exposure-and-b... says the opposite.

The proper way of phrasing this argument is that the systemic oppression was mediated by lead exposure. Meaning that if you intervene to mitigate the latter, you've managed to deal with a significant chunk of the former.

It would be if politicians opted not to fix the problem because of who lived there. But doesn’t oppression generally require action/choice by some party? Or are we inferring that a choice simply “must” have been made not to help?

Does systemic oppression not include economic relegation or societal indifference to being raised in lead-contaminated homes?

Wealth or lack therof is one of the primary components of systemic oppression...

Completely agree with you. I’m just continually surprised that some (many?) can so blithely disregard wealth and its concomitants when analyzing oppression in a capitalistic system.

they objectively are? I think it's lazier to think nothing can be done about it

Blaming testing bias is a great way to gain support from disadvantaged minorities without having to actually do any meaningful work. Conveniently, it allows allows the elite to exclude the educated bourgeoisie from their elite institutions, instead replacing them with underqualified candidates who pose no real threat to the power hierarchy.

I guess. But seems to me that if you are going to claim testing bias, then you have some work to do in creating an unbiased test.

No. The plan is to eliminate testing altogether.

https://edsource.org/2021/university-of-california-sticks-wi...

definite "maybe" on that.. the statement "it allows" is made with certainty, yet at most, that is only part of one possible scenario.. among many

"Of defects did the spirit of those Saviours consist; but into every defect had they put their illusion, their stop-gap, which they called God."

Or focus all resources on the wrong problem and ensure everyone is trying to optimize the wrong thing, thereby actually exacerbating the very problems that we as a society need to address. Sometimes the wrong solution is much worse than doing nothing.

People underestimate just how much minor public health measures can dramatically improve livelihood and overall prosperity.

Before the advent of iodized salt, the prevalence of goiter in certain cities in Michigan was as high as 60%. This also led to various mental deficiencies in people in those regions. It turns out this was a direct consequence of the soil in the Midwest being naturally deficient in iodine, leading to drinking water not naturally supplementing the diet of those who lived there. Iodized salt, introduced in the 1920s, almost completely eradicated goiter in the developing world.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#:~:tex....

While it's uplifting story and I can easily believe that higher lead exposure for Black kids over white kids led to lower IQ results in tests in that specific case, there are no school districts in US with no gap between white and Black students. So far there has not been identified single parameter that explains White/Black gap and not for the lack of trying.

Yeah, the changes in IQ described in studies on lead exposure are much smaller than gaps between races.

I mean in an interview Steven Pinker himself said there’s some things that we may not want to know, because if the parameter is wholly outside of human control it’d just contribute to racism and serve no useful purpose.

Also even if a study found parameters like that, it would never be published as the scientists career would absolutely be ruined.

Steven Pinker is right in this regard and so was Plato: … The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons … they are stories not to be repeated in our State …

I had always thought Plato's argument was a reductio ad absurdum.

Looking at it now, it seems he WAS actually arguing FOR censoring stories of the bad behavior of the gods AND FOR censoring Homer's Odyssey.

Sigh.

He was, because those stories and ideas, if widely known, would threaten the state built on the narrative of virtuous gods and deviations from that narrative would lead to worse outcomes for everyone.

Our state is built on the narratives of democracy and equality thus while those factors have ability to undermine the narrative (as we've seen in not so distant history) we have to censor them and do the research behind closed doors, otherwise we risk more damage than any possible benefit.

That's a hell of a minefield, but I'll bite: might a few more generations in our increasingly globalized world (airplane travel, etc.) cause a "melting pot" where pedigree devolves into a homogenous blend that puts everyone on the same playing field? Hard to predict, and it's kind of scary (enjoying the cuisines and other cultural differences is quite special) but the equity would be fascinating.

It's going to take a lot of generations interracial couples are not particularly common.

It will happen eventually though, because you can't unmix races. Which is why the Nazis, the KKK etc were/are so worked up about miscegenation, "the annihilation of the white race", etc.

It's a question of rates, and culture. Not all countries and groups will be affected the same way.

Pretty verboten topic though and kind of unpalatable to think about, even if you don't particularly care about these sorts of demographic shifts.

Personally I like that the whole idea of "race" might become increasingly indeterminate and vague in liberal societies.

The phenomenon is real but for fully understandable reasons not much is published about it.

Isn't merely laying out the reasons why these parameters should never be studied/published fuel for racists?

There's no such thing as a parameter that's "wholly outside of human control" when you account for technological change. If there's an easy way of providing a free +1 INT, +1 WIS boost to a non-trivial chunk of the population via, let's say, tailored mRNA vaccine injections, I'd sure want to know about it!

Research is not even close to being restricted by those moral matters. There isn't an easy way today, not even close. If there was, it would also be a way to rid us of ugly debuffs ranging from genetic disorders through allergies to cancer.

mRNA can change gene expression locally for limited time, enough to train your immune sysem but not for permanent changes. CRISPR can make permanent changes but but for now only to few cells in vitro, not to whole organism. Even the Chineese CRISPR modified twins are mosaics of modified and unmodofied.

Where can I read more about this?

I suspect the deviation would most largely result from the parameters of a given test itself. Redefining the test content, subject matter, test environments, conditions, and/or other factors may grow or shrink that gap. If that is so there is cause for research to determine why certain test factors are preferential and if removing such preferential factors does/does not result in higher quality student performance.

Isn't there an IQ gap between poor people and wealthy? Isn't a large chunck of that attributable to healthcare, nutricion, schooling, stress, pollution, etc, etc.?

Aren't those same factors going to show up in racial differences?

yes, yes, yes.

stress in particular has a measurable impact on cognition, behavior, and motor development. even prenatal maternal stress.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w18422

parental leave, cash and food support, and other assistance during pregnancy and childhood, are probably one of the easiest policy wins towards improving outcomes for a huge segment of the population. better schools with smaller class sizes and individualized support for each student would be the next step.

Having it repeatedly drilled into you your entire life from birth that you'll never succeed without the pity and generosity of a few benevolent saviors among a sea of hateful racists who are this this all-powerful/privileged alien race that surrounds you (assuming you manage to dodge all the police bullets flying at you) because the system has been created to keep you down, and therefore any success you do have you owe to those people, would be extremely stressful and demoralizing.

You could be on to something here. I've seen many other factors like education and wealth being adjusted for but not this. I wonder if anyone has attempted to quantify the damage this causes.

>So far there has not been identified single parameter that explains White/Black gap and not for the lack of trying.

Actually there has been, we're just not allowed to apply the components of the explanation to this context, so we continue on a fruitless search in every other direction, spending money, contorting society, and increasingly tearing down achievers in a misguided attempt to bring up the underperformers.

We know of hundreds of genes which are strongly correlated with IQ and directly influence behavior, and we know how those genes are distributed among various demographics. The science itself is not controversial or uncertain. But the logical conclusions are social and career suicide.

Your claims seem to be both racist and unfounded.

Whether you think a fact is "racist" has no bearing on whether it is true. Do you deny that there are measurable, meaningful genetic differences between groups of people? How can you justify the belief that adaptation to drastically different environments over thousands of generations after leaving Africa magically stopped above the shoulders?

What about geographically isolated interbreeding with other homonids? Those genes are also unevenly distributed; why would these genes not influence cognition?

One striking example is the so called warrior gene, which completely alters the metabolism of monoamines, like dopamine and serotonin, which have direct influences over reward seeking, mood, and behavior. This mutation is nearly absent in many populations. There are plenty of other such unevenly distributed variations.

Note that this does not imply that all people from group X are Y. But it does neatly explain, at least in part, multimodal statistical distributions like those we see consistently reflected IQ and crime frequency.

What you’re saying is simply not a fact.

It’s a hilariously wrong assertion that could generously be regarded as an opinion, albeit a racist one.

Along with replies by ’ClumsyPilot and ’ruined, remember that Brown v. Board of Education was passed only in 1954 and 1954 is just yesterday.

Also see this HN comment from a day ago on how much a black person had to fear even in 1980:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30061511

An excelelnt book regarding these is 'Simple Justice by Richard Kluger

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justice-Education-Americas-Str...

Another book focusing on computing is 'Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis

https://www.amazon.com/Stuck-Shallow-End-Education-Computing...

There is a wealth of info regarding these things, see redlining for example:

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

Not a small town, but the Philadelphia Tooth Fairy Project sounds similar: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/public_health/The-Phil...

I first learned about this from Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...

What is the vector for lead exposure from paint? Do we think they are all eating it, or that their parents/landlords are constantly sanding it for some reason and not simply painting over it?

edit: Why am I being downvoted?

In New Orleans at least, there is a ton of lead in the soil. When I was working for the City, playgrounds were prime targets for remediation.

You shouldn't be. Lead paint in-situ isn't dangerous. Disturbing lead paint is dangerous.

Mitigation/ removal of lead paint is more of a danger than the original risk.

Normal wear and tear?

"Most lead poisoning in children results from eating chips of deteriorating lead-based paint" [1].

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...

Right. It doesn't pass the sniff-test that a whole 1/3 of world's children would be getting poisoned through ingesting paint chips. I'm as curious as the GP about what the actual vector is, but it seems that per the article there really is not enough data to say definitively.

My understanding (from growing up in an old apartment with lead and asbestos everywhere) is that, even your children aren't picking lead chips off of the wall, they're being exposed to pulverized paint dust when they e.g. play on the floor. It's apparently especially common when children's rooms have openable windows, since windowsills shed their paint easily.

I'm wondering this too, i couldn't find very much information on the actual risk vectors and required exposure levels and concentrations to trigger an increase in lead blood levels, I'm still looking

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29487787

So, lead paint actually tastes sweet, which can explain why kids who don't know better will eat it.

Why do you think lead paint tastes sweet?

The Romans used lead acetate as a sweetener[0], but the exact compounds used in lead paint are different. It doesn't seem that those are sweet.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate

[1] https://healthyindoors.com/2018/11/lead-paint-sweet-aint/

There are indications that lead acetate (which is only mildly sweet) was occasionally used as a drier in oil-based paints a long time ago. But I've seen no good evidence regarding how common this may have been.

But even if that's true, lead acetate would have been used only in tiny quantities (like any other metallic drier). And lead acetate degrades rapidly, so there wouldn't be any lead acetate left in the paint after a short time anyway.

Latex paint steadily degrades until it's dust. The breakdown is accelerated by UV light, but the end product of all exposed latex painted surfaces is the same; it chalks, flakes, and steadily emits dust and fine particles into the environment.

Regular re-painting can keep the old paint largely encapsulated, but it's still there waiting for an unsuspecting home owner to sand or scrape it loose while doing repairs or renovation.

Outdoors, that dust contributes to the lead load in the soil around the house. Indoors, it's house dust, which babies and kids are naturally bathed in because they live closer to the floor than adults do, and because they put everything in their mouths. In both cases the vectors of exposure are both oral and by inhalation.

Another big contributor to lead dust in households is older (early 2000's and earlier) vinyl window blinds [1]. Many vinyl products contained lead, and vinyl chalks the same way latex paint does as it degrades.

1 - https://cchealth.org/lead-poison/pdf/miniblinds.pdf

It's not so much from walls, but dust from joints around windows and doors.

But seriously: we vaporized 200,000 tons a year in gasoline. Where do you think it all went? Places with lots of cars: cities. Definitely do not eat food grown in a city garden- always use raised planters filled with country dirt.

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/epa-requires-phase-out-...

See figure 2 here:

https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/the-hour-of-lead.pdf

I believe that the major vector indoors is dust coming from the lead paint on windows and window sills. When the wear surfaces rub against each other, a small amount of lead paint dust is created and inhaled or ingested by children.

Outdoors, the problem is the lead dust in the soil. Chickens are getting lead poisoning in urban areas:

https://now.tufts.edu/articles/backyard-chickens-and-risk-le...

> There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests.

> One teacher decided to look deeper to see if there could be some other factor that could explain the difference.

A "several point difference" sounds like an unusually narrow gap - depressed white scores, maybe? On an unbiased test with no environmental problems, you'd expect to see a gap of around 15 IQ points.

That lead to (no pun intended)

Apologies for an OT nitpick: the past tense of "lead" is "led."

> The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests.

They did not rule this out? Could still have been a contributing factor.

They didn't rule it in either. They chose to ignore the results of the test instead of search for a tangible explaination.

> That lead to (no pun intended) …

The correct form here is led, even though it ruins the potential pun. :)

> I can't give a cite for the following

Because this did not actually happen.

Simpson’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I am wondering how this could be Simpson's Paradox.

You could force it into that mould by saying that the black kids were at least as smart as the white kids within the two groups (exposed to lead, not exposed to lead) but they were less smart when the two groups were combined.