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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

The thing that all the moralisation around IQ misses, is that IQ is a serious problem in a lot of places around the world, and turning it into a career-ending taboo topic basically ensures that it goes completely unaddressed. I’ve worked with governments and companies in quite a few developing countries around the world where the average IQs are between 1-2 standard deviations below 100, and that problem is right up there with corruption when it comes to what’s holding these countries back. It would be great if solutions to this problem were being studied, but idiots like this author basically guarantee that will never happen.

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Isn't an IQ of 100 by definition the average IQ of the country studied? What do they define as an IQ of 100 if not the average of their population, what are the tests calibrated on?

Obviously 100 is calibrated to western populations.

I believe IQ has also risen steadily with time in the west. It might have risen an entire standard deviation. It's called Flynn's effect, 3 points per decade.

That can't be explained by pure heritable genetics. Epigenetics possibly, nutrition, better education systems, higher information dissemination.

> Obviously 100 is calibrated to western populations.

How could you calibrate a cultrually-specific test like most IQ tests are by comparing with another culture?

I'm also pretty sure that people don't use the same tests across "the West", so that seems dubious to begin with.

> I believe IQ has also risen steadily with time in the west. It might have risen an entire standard deviation. It's called Flynn's effect, 3 points per decade.

That is more easily studied, as you can use the same test across generations and notice trends.

> but idiots like this author basically guarantee that will never happen.

Could also be intentional

> I’ve worked with governments and companies in quite a few developing countries around the world where the average IQs are between 1-2 standard deviations below 100, and that problem is right up there with corruption when it comes to what’s holding these countries back.

Also consider how much brain drain contributes to this. Anyone in those countries who is smart enough to recognize this will just emigrate to more developed countries, and their home country will never get to benefit from their (relatively) smarter people.

So the country's IQs might be just about average, but if their top deviation is constantly leaving...you have a negative feedback loop through no one's fault.

The use of IQ is a problem, or are you taking the metric seriously?

I bet the solution is heavy on "access to clean water, food, security from war and violence, and education", amirite? sure let's fire up the "IQ science" machine to give us reasons to not have to do something so boring as to improve the lives of those living in developing nations.

I think you've misunderstood the comment you're responding to.

They're suggesting that to give the optimal assistance to those countries, the IQ of the current adult population needs to be considered as an important variable in the equation, but it's taboo and stigmatized to discuss or acknowledge, so the people get sub-optimal solutions instead.

If you want to help some community in need, but you're not allowed to address certain taboo topics- IQ, substance abuse, STDs, domestic abuse, religious beliefs or cultural norms, whatever may be relevant for that group, then you're probably not going to design your programs for assistance in the best way.

> I think you've misunderstood the comment you're responding to.

respectfully I would suggest you've misunderstood mine

Well that’s certainly true, but my main point is that you want to study what interventions can be deployed to raise the IQ in these places. This absolutely is not being studied in any serious way, and I doubt it feasibly could be in the current academic climate. Obvious suggestions like “clean water and food” aren’t specifically helpful in any way, because this issue exists in plenty of countries that don’t have widespread issues with access to calories and bottled water.

And if you don’t take into account characteristics of the population you’re trying to introduce these things to, you’ll fail.

the notion that one of these characteristics could plausibly be "the population is less intelligent on average than other populations around the world, controlling for all other factors such as health care, education, happiness, etc.", that's what we call racist. it's why attempting to "study" such things are rightly frowned upon.

Science starts with questions and hypothesis, not with conclusions. I personally don’t think it’s significantly related to any of the factors you’ve listed (or with genetics either), but thanks to perspectives like the one you’re presenting here, the only possible outcome is that the world will permanently have a large low-IQ underclass (which as other have mentioned ITT, perhaps that is something a lot of people want).

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