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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

So, what would you say about looking for intelligence differences between people of different ancestry?

We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a single place or two: marathon winners come disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim.

Few people dispute the above. The really controversial question is whether there are any such differences from the neck up, so to say.

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If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?

> two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means

It depends if we talk about means or tail ends. The GP post referred to marathon runners, presumably winning marathon runners, even within the Rift Valley in Kenya don't get selected from the mean of the population but from the tail-end. So, while there isn't much of a difference for means between runners in Albania and Kenya, when we look at tail end we might find very large differences.

Same thing for any case where is a selection process. If you have any "top-X" selection involved, then looking at means is a bit more confusing.

> Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal

Hmm, I don't see here people anyone arguing not treating people as individuals. Of course we have to treat people as individuals. But not sure how that contradicts looking a distribution of traits, features, disease markers, etc.

If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal? If we could identify some genetic marker that increased the probability by a few percentage points of identifying intellectual marathon runners would that justify discriminating to favor them at the expense of others? Many dystopian scifi stories start from a similar premise.

> If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal?

Maybe you're arguing for or against some point the GP poster made. I was mainly saying relying on means in the particular example doesn't seem to work. I was helping you out! If you wanted to refute GP's point you could have said, "here marathon runners statistics doesn't quite apply".

Yeah I know "the means are closer to each other than the standard deviation" is the "standard" (pun intended) thing that high school and college kids get about difference between men vs women and other population characteristics and you're trying to make a very good point, but it just doesn't always apply and sometimes repeating it when it doesn't apply, instead of convincing people, could end up confusing them.

The only way of knowing whether such differences are big or small (or whether they exist at all) is by performing a scientific analysis.

To insist that nobody should look into it because what they might find could upset you is just bizarre.

"If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation."

Overlapping normal distribution, yes, but slightly different means, well within a standard deviation seems to be overconfident.

"Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal."

No contest here.

"So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?"

Because the difference at the extremes would be significant, and would explain overrepresentation and underrepresentation of certain groups among, say, top scientists.

The competing hypothesis, which explains differences among groups by discrimination and/or poverty, doesn't fully explain why heavily persecuted groups such as Jewish or Vietnamese refugees still manage an academic rebound within a generation or so of arriving into safety, even though they are still targeted by racial hatred. Taken globally or even just in the US, the correlation between academic success and persecution/power status is weak enough that it makes people doubt the "discrimination/poverty" explanation and motivates them to seek alternatives.

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