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Is this a conspiracy theory?

At the risk of dragging this thread back onto the topic of the story...

The story describes a number of people who put obstacles in Gwen’s way. None of them are described as being malicious, none of them got together and “conspired.” Some of them genuinely thought they were acting in Gwen’s best interests.

So if someone says that IQ tests were set up in such a way as to create bias, perhaps we can believe that yes they were biased, and possibly deliberately so, without thinking about conspiracies or racism, just people attempting to do what they thought at the time was in everyone’s best interests.

"Set up in such a way as to" is a deliberately ambiguous construction. It allows the reader to believe that there is, or is not, a conspiracy.

If I say, "Harvard admissions are set up in such a way as to admit large numbers of Jews," someone believing in a Jewish conspiracy will hear my dog-whistle and agree with me. But to someone not believing in a Jewish conspiracy, I can deny everything. A highly useful and malignant propaganda device.

And when you add "possibly deliberately so," you prove this point completely. What else could "deliberately so" mean? So, it may be a Jewish conspiracy that Harvard admits lots of Jews. But it might not be. That's some compromise position.

Normally, when we think of conspiracy theories (like Holocaust denial), we classify Holocaust deniers and "Holocaust agnostics" in the same bin. And rightly so. I'm certainly not interested in compromising on the position that maybe the Holocaust happened, but maybe it didn't.

Also, when I believe things, I prefer to believe them on better evidence than "perhaps we can believe." Sorry - I know it's an inspiring story and you're not looking for a flamewar. This is Asperger-infested HN, however. Geeks like their facts cold, hard, and entirely factual - don't they?

I am often deliberately ambiguous about the motives of people I don’t know well. For example, you may or may not be deliberately grinding your pet axe about race and IQ tests in a story which is not really about intelligence but actually about overcoming obstacles.

And I choose to believe that you are capable of adding more signal and less noise. On very poor evidence, so far.

He is capable of adding extraordinary quantities of both signal and noise, as evidenced by his collected writings: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/

I wasn't responding to the original story, but to a comment which I felt made unfair and scurrilous accusations about scientists of the past whom I respect.

It's true that these charges are conventional in our society. Most people would let them pass without notice. However, most people would not endorse letting the unacceptable pass without notice - so I don't think I'm being antisocial.

Geeks like their facts cold, hard, and entirely factual - don't they?

Sort of. Those of us who live in the real world, where there are shades of grey around every corner, and where subtlety and nuance count for a lot, have realized that we can't always have things served up to us like that.

Unfortunately real life stubbornly refuses to bend to the will of us geeks (and yes, I definitely am one) who want things to behave in ways that can be modeled strictly by cold, hard facts.

"If I say, "Harvard admissions are set up in such a way as to admit large numbers of Jews," someone believing in a Jewish conspiracy will hear my dog-whistle and agree with me."

Actually, in the past Harvard deliberately restricted the number of jews they admitted: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ha...

> Is this a conspiracy theory? It sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory to me. Just sayin'.

On the contrary, it was probably a mixture of ignorance and 'common knowledge.' I'm going to assume that if you're posting on this site that you probably are involved with making websites or software. Were you aware that a portion of your customers are colorblind in some way? Did you actively design your site to be hard for them to use? Probably not. Does that mean it is a non-issue? No. Much in the same way, white male test-makers make IQ tests that they think "anyone should know," without realizing that capable people with different backgrounds would not score very well at all.

It's not a conspiracy theory.

>However, it would be interesting to hear someone explain how they were designed by racists to be racist.

No one in this thread has claimed this. Stop trying to invent a polemic.

It just turns out that whatever IQ does measure correlates heavily with income and where you were born which in turn correlates with race.

> It just turns out that whatever IQ does measure correlates heavily with income

Yes, also with high job performance. Actually, IQ correlates with income regardless of family background. That's exactly why it's useful.

I tried to pry the source from JSTOR but failed miserably so here's a crappy pdf copy of "Income Inequality and IQ" http://www.aei.org/book/society-and-culture/citizenship/inco...

No one in this thread has claimed this. Stop trying to invent a polemic.

Note that this comment was posted before raganwald wrote "and possibly deliberately so," above. So it's not as obtuse as it looks.

For many IQ tests there is a correlation between wealth and high IQ results (and conversely, poverty and low IQ tests). IQ tests, do no measure 'innate intelligence' (mostly because no-one really knows what that even is or how to measure it). As a result if you have more, and better education and schooling, you more more likely to have a higher IQ. So if you're in a group that has worse and less education, you're more likely to have lower IQ.

As an example of how IQ test results aren't too reliable: IQ tests have been rising year on year for decades (the Flynn effect). Either we're all a pile of geniuses (which makes you wonder what score people in the middle ages got), or IQ test is inflenced by external things.

> For many IQ tests there is a correlation between wealth and high IQ results [...] As a result if you have more, and better education and schooling, you more more likely to have a higher IQ.

But the causal link between parents' income and kid's academic success is small to non-existent[1] so even if there are factors influencing IQ, wealth doesn't seem to be one, at least not in this way.

[1] "Low Family Income Not a Major Reason For Poor Student Achievement" http://educationnext.org/low-family-income-not-a-major-reaso...

You said correlation, not causation, and that's an important point. Wealth is also correlated with what's presumed to be "innate intelligence", as is education. We don't know what the direction of causation is - whether intelligence causes education which causes wealth, or whether intelligence causes both education and wealth, or whether wealth results in more education which result in higher scores on IQ tests.

The measure we usually associate with "innate intelligence", the so-called "G-factor", is actually defined as the correlation between several different factors (education, grades in several subjects, various standardized tests including IQ, career success, socioeconomic status) that all trend in the same direction. It's basically a PCA on the observed metrics. There's no way to measure intelligence directly or even know for sure that it exists as a separate innate "thing" - all we know is that a large number of observable metrics are positively correlated, and then we give a name to the correlation.

This is kind of a weird explanation of g.

What g really means is that you can't design a meaningful intelligence test that doesn't correlate with all the other intelligence tests - with slightly divergent axes for verbal and spatial/mathematical skills. Thus, for instance, backward digit span correlates with Raven's matrices, even though these tasks have nothing obvious in common. Someone who's good at one will be good at the other.

It's also very hard to produce training/educational effects that show an effect on g, though dual N-back perhaps has some promise:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back

However, these kinds of brain exercises have very little to do with education as we know it. The obvious null hypothesis is that we're looking at a physiological effect, such as the quality of myelin insulation in neurons.

Obviously, we see the same correlation effect in CPU benchmarks - any benchmark at all will reveal that a Xeon is faster than a Celeron. The obvious null hypothesis is that the Xeon has smaller transistors and more of them. The causality behind neurological g is probably something just as crude and straightforward.

One could argue, however, that when we compare Xeon motherboards to Celeron motherboards, we see faster DRAM and the like. Perhaps it's the fast CPU's environment, rather than its lithography, that makes it faster.

But... this isn't an argument anyone would make without a strong prior conviction that all CPUs are created equal. It's unclear where such an idea comes from in the case of the human brain, but it doesn't seem evidentiary in nature.