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Comment by metal13 | Hacker News Reader

I thought he sold it because he wanted money and art.

"Mr Watson told the Financial Times he had become an “unperson” after he “was outed as believing in IQ” in 2007 and said he would like to use money from the sale to buy a David Hockney painting."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Watso...

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For anyone who isn't familiar with the backstory, Watson didn't become an unperson for believing in IQ, he claimed in an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine that testing proved that black Africans aren’t as smart as white people, then followed it up with the sentiment that ideally one should think that all people are equal, but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1673952,0...

http://www.wired.com/2007/10/more-on-james-b/

You forgot the detail which massively complicates this : James Watson' claim about the test scores is true [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Note the first paragraph in the Wikipedia article : "The connection between race and intelligence has been ... It is still not resolved what relation, if any, there is between group differences in IQ and race."

Currently we have about 104 years of data, which shows, to put it mildly, a clear pattern of racial differences in intelligence (and pretty much every other metric. Size. Weight. Speed. Color. Body temperature...). Worse, they also show a clear difference in intelligence between different ideological groups (e.g. religion) (again, and they also show a large difference in other metrics).

To some extent Watson, in his first claim, has a point that we seem to be unwilling to make. There is a clear conclusion to be drawn here :

Different races are different. In pretty much any metric you can come up with.

Furthermore, if you look at the effect of average differences in a certain metric to examples in individuals, you get an even more politically incorrect result, based on pure math. If you take 2 groups, who differ by x percentage points in "blueness". Then if you take a random individual from group 1, and a random one from group 2, what are the chances that the first individual is more blue ?

x = 1% => p =~ 76%

x = 2% => p =~ 92%

x = 3% => p =~ 98%

So this means that if blue humans are 1% taller than green humans, then if you meet a blue and a green human on the street, the chance is about 76% that the blue human will win (be taller) than the green.

(Only intelligence scores vary more than 1 standard deviation. The largest difference is between 2.5 and 3 standard deviations (and does not involve either a white ethnic or a black ethnic group))

Could the downvoters give a response? - I presume you are downvoting because you disagree with wasps - I'd like to see your argument. Thanks.

I didn't down vote, but the inherent bias in the test is a possible reason but even with that factored out, the relevance is a more reasonable objection. We're not talking the difference in between being able to grock quantum physics or not, we're talking a few questions on the exam. And IQ happens to be a pretty sweet bell curve, so if you're an average white guy, then you're still dumber than 49% of the black guys out there, and dumber than 54% of Chinese guys.

So we should give up on Africa because the average black guy didn't answer the 2 train question correctly? Should we also give up on Europe and North America because the white guys didn't answer that correctly either?

The use of this stat, were it even possible to be accurate, really only serves racists. No meaningful outcome could result from the number.

> And IQ happens to be a pretty sweet bell curve, so if you're an average white guy, then you're still dumber than 49% of the black guys out there, and dumber than 54% of Chinese guys.

Those numbers are not accurate given the data on the wikipedia page. The first number is about double the real value, the second needs about 6 percentage points added to it for it to be accurate.

I was making the numbers up, because we cannot exclude and accurately asses racial and other socioeconomic conditions. So the numbers on Wikipedia do not tell any more truth than me making them up. The point, is that whatever the numbers are, they're irrelevant as nothing useful can be done with the data.

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