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Comment by pius | Hacker News Reader

" . . . studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited.

You're misconstruing Gladwell's position. He's not arguing against inheritance of intelligence; he's arguing against a biologically innate and immutable race-based component to intelligence.

"Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me."

Actually, you made the latest claim. You set up a somewhat absurd strawman for what Gladwell argued and then tried to lampoon it and make his position look illogical when, in fact, the interpretation you constructed relies on the researchers literally ignoring the most basic of statistics. That needed to be pointed out, lest people buy the strawman and actually get swayed to believe that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites.

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I hardly made a "strawman", which would require a construction of the form, "Gladwell said XYZ", which I did not do. Rather, I showed a single example of how different kinds of pairings could result in different kinds of results. Here is an example of a strawman argument, for your reference:

There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence.

Anyway, as for

researchers literally ignoring basic statistics

Their statistics may be pure as a mountain spring. It doesn't matter. What I suspect is that there are factors they completely didn't account for--something that happens to every scientist. It tends to happen more to scientists trying to prove political points.

he's arguing against a consistent, innate, statistically significant, race-based component to intelligence

He needs to quit picking-and-choosing studies then. I've seen the German study, and I'm glad to take it into account, and if there are repeated examples, I'll take them into account also. Well, here's something most of us have probably seen already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

...the thing to reflect upon here isn't that innaccuracies exist (because they do). Rather, the gross consistency of the results--why do poor countries like Thailand and Malaysia have passable scores compared to Africa? Do Africans suffer from a particularly racist sort of poverty? Why does a country like Iraq--living under a dictator, facing decades of war and mass starvation and international isolation have a higher average IQ than every African country? More racism?

Why would China, a country that still has hundreds of millions of peasants score much better than every African country? Compare China to Hong Kong--areas with racial similitude, but vastly--diametrically--different histories and circumstances, with every advantage going to Hong Kong. Should not the difference be greater than 7 points?

Eventually, the question is, "How much evidence does it take?" and the answer is obviously, "No amount of evidence is enough". It's an idealogical question.

Let me present the inevitable extremes. The list of Jewish scientists (which wikipedia warns is "incomplete") is broken down into numerous sections:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_p...

The list of African Americans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans

...contains no scientists at all. Yes, I know some exist, but no one thought well enough to add any. Blame the community, I guess.

Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?

You pretty clearly set up a strawman by saying that Gladwell ignored a study because it supports the idea that intelligence is largely inherited, a position he's not at all trying to refute. Then, you took the position you manufactured and discredited it in hopes that people would get confused and dismiss his real argument. That's the textbook definition of attacking a strawman.

The statement of mine that you quoted, ironically enough, is not a strawman. It may be an ad hominem attack, but it's definitely not a strawman. ;)

Thanks for revealing what you believe. I respect the fact that you're willing to come out and admit that you think blacks just aren't as smart as whites. Now we're getting somewhere! You're allowed to believe that without needing to justify it with pseudo-science.

I'll let this sit for a while -- hopefully you've got the courage not to delete it -- and I'll finish my coding tonight. Tomorrow, if I'm up to it, I'll retort.

...

You know, on second thought, I don't think I will. I can't help my position anymore than you already have.

-You practically conceded (or at least haven't adequately rebutted) the points I brought up against your characterization of Gladwell's article as illogical.

-You've weakened your position in an argument about the measure of biologically innate and immutable intelligence by resorting to bringing up a bunch of cultural phenomena that anyone on this board can easily rebut using vast socioeconomic factors. (If you really want to take it there, by the way, you can repost this to a new YC discussion thread questioning the legitimacy of the claimed non-biological factors that have stunted the economic growth of African-Americans and I'll address it there.)

-Most importantly, you've shown the people reading this that, indeed, there exist people who think that blacks are intellectually inferior to other races by their very biology. This is useful evidence I can point to every time someone says that racism no longer exists except amongst the most uneducated segments of society.

vast socioeconomic factors

Snore. Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia. There's no one else to stick the blame on, even if you want to bring up "society" and "economics". Hell, the only country whose socio-economics can be traced to white people is the only one with a decent economy. And, what do you know, another one, Zimbabwe, took a nose dive right after its ethnic cleansing of whites. Shock. Horror.

Thanks for revealing what you believe.

I believe the facts, sure. If there is anybody here who thinks that blacks and Jews are genetically equivilent in intelligence, raise your hands. Please, I beg you. But you have at least 2500 years of evidence fighting against you, so bring some counter-evidence first...unlike pius.

If there is anybody here who thinks that blacks and Jews are genetically equivilent in intelligence, raise your hands. Please, I beg you.

Ooh, this is getting nasty. A smart guy once told me when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I'm black and even I can figure out how to heed that advice! This is instructive though, so keep doing what you're doing.

Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia.

Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists. For example, as hard as it is for you to believe, the first great libraries (pre-dating even the one in Alexandria) were in Africa. I guess you think that because Native Americans were successfully conquered, subjugated, and impoverished they must not have been very bright either.

There's so much to say, but again you're really doing a great job sinking your own ship. It's hard not to respond to you, but for the sake of my coding, I'm gonna try to keep my finger off the reply button for the rest of the night.

Again, if you want to take this cultural discussion further, do feel free to post a new thread and I'll address it at length tomorrow or so, I promise.

you're really doing a great job sinking your own ship.

You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?

The reason I brought up Jews was because I'm not Jewish and so I consider myself neutral in the matter. I have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues jews might have. But the evidence still stands... I also have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues the Chinese might have. But the evidence still stands... I'm also not offended by the Parsis or Armenians or Brahmans or any of them, despite their achievements. What does it cost to be honest? People are different, and if we deny it, we make mistakes...

Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists.

It's just a cop-out. Every piece of land in this world (with a few exceptions) has been overrun and plundered and ravaged time and time and time again. People just can't get over those evil European colonists. No one ever complains about the Turks or Tatars or Mongols or Huns or Aztecs or Arabs or a thousand others...all monstrous in their time.

You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?

That's because I'm no longer arguing with you. You haven't pieced together much that's cogent enough for me to debate and your conclusions are nearly as despicable as they are preposterous. You're trying to argue that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites and other races, a view controversial enough that the burden of proof lies with you. Let's review how you've set out to prove it.

You tried to discredit Gladwell's article with fuzzy math and attacking the strawman; I exposed it. You failed.

Then you tried citing other people's research into IQ to support your views. Unfortunately there's no serious research that supports your world view, so you were left citing "studies" that have been widely discredited and debunked. (For example, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" literally concludes that most of Africa is functionally retarded.) Reductio ad absurdum, you fail.

Then you gave up citing research into IQ and g, and started citing cultural phenomena that clearly are not relevant to the biological innateness topic at hand. Even the cultural phenomena you bring up aren't particularly compelling. (For example, you're comparing the plight of cultures conquered by the Ottoman empire that fell in the 1600's to that of African nations occupied and conquered by the British empire, which didn't leave in many cases until the late 1960's and, in the case of Zimbabwe, until 1980.) Failed again.

Finally, you got frustrated and started blurting out that it's "trivial" to conclude that blacks just aren't intelligent as other races, figuring that a few upmods on YC.News will make you seem right without proof. Fail.

I'm sure you're going to find another flawed study funded by known white supremacy groups to justify your beliefs. Or maybe you'll start citing phrenology or Nordic theory. I don't know what you'll pull out next, but I can assure you that I won't care, unless it's got some legitimate scientific basis.

You're making a fool of yourself.

It's often the dumb ones who take the stance on discussing other people's intelligence. There is a wealth of circumstances and complexity of the issue that never crosses this posters mind, yet he is quick to make definitive claims of such gravity. Racism has the interesting tendency of exposing the fools even amongst the most educated individuals.

Oh, where would I start... The structure of the brain? Our understanding and concept of what is "intelligence"? Nonexistentent genetical variation between the so called "races", which are themselves based on fallacious premises? The theory of races after all started in Germany as measured by the differences in the shapes of skulls, and was mainly categorized as an issue of beauty. With Germans obviously appointing themselves (aryans) the most graceful and beautiful "race" of them all. And now people are trying to retrofit genetic explanations on such an old theory based purely on pseudo-science? There is at maximum 5-15% genetic variation between the continental populations, and note that this is not the same as our naive notions of "race". There is less genetic variation in humans than in any other mammalian species. Worldwide genetic variation in humans is less significant than in 2 closely related chimpanzee species having evolved closely together in western Africa, to give you some magnitude for comparison. 90% of the genetic variation occurs on a local level as opposed to globally, if you can wrap your head around what that means? And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age. Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected. The only thing conceivably affecting their training are chemical balances, malnutrition, toxicity of the environment, and so on...

Basing your theories directly on empirical evidence about the economies of the world obviously can't factor in all the relevant facts. You say that all the African countries with no whites are poor? Did you know that a lot of them have been paying the debts created by the colonialists ever since they were "liberated"? Do you know how the West still sponsors guerillas and pays diamond merchants in many parts of Africa? Only a secluded mind could have such delusions of grandeur. I recommend debating with some intellectual and educated black scholars.

At the current state of research, nobody claims to know enough about how the brain works to conclude that the mind is "an empty plate of neuron waiting to be connected." Trisomy 21, or Down Syndrome, can be classified as mental retardation, and you might call it an abnormal lack of mental capacity. This is a completely genetic abnormality. Obviously, they go through the same stages of neonatal development, neuron pruning, etc., but their ability to form neuronal connections, like yours and mine, is limited, at birth.

I picked a rather extreme example just to illustrate the point. I don't disagree with everything you wrote, but it is a mistake to believe early manifestations of genius have nothing, or even little, innate roots. Daniel Tammet is your living example. If his brain were a bit different, he'd be just another Kim Peek. It will be very hard to argue that this is due to rigorous practice from an early age. Kids with autism don't just gradually lose their aptitude to comprehend emotions by lack of practice. They are born with a dysfunctional empathy circuit. Kids with epilepsy don't just develop their symptoms. They are testable and predictable, and heritable.

I'm not saying what you say is wrong -- it depends on what you mean by intelligence. But you're being unspecific about "intelligence" while being specific about how it is related to genetic, inborn traits. This opens the door wide to attacks like mine -- just pointing it out.

One more thing. The statement "The theory of races after all started in Germany" evaluates to false. I assume you're referring to early 20th century Germany. It started with the European colonialists, which wasn't even such a German thing. That's also the Eurocentric interpretation of the word. I'm sure other cultures had their own ideas of race dating to much earlier. The Chinese always called the people outside their country borders barbarians. And Orthodox Jews consider themselves the chosen people. Take that interpretation, then I'm among the unchosen barbarians, or race, whatever.

The genetic diseases you mentioned are significant mutations leading into strong dysfunctionalities in how the brain is supposed to function. Leading it not to function correctly. This is far from evolutionary path leading one population of people into some sort of mental retardation, especially when evolutionary selection would be against it. In addition most of the mentioned diseases are recessive which is the only reason they have survived, as any offspring with the disease won't survive to pass the genes on.

Autism is a different case because it's not necessarily genetic (although I'm not sure if there are also genetic cases). In fact autism cases have exploded in recent history, so environmental factors are likely a contributor. One such theory is the vaccines containing mercury which is a strong neuro-toxin decaying neuron connections which would result into the observed behavior. I'm not going into that discussion however.

I'm being unspecific about intelligence because it's inherently a very ambiguous concept, which is one of the fallacies of the IQ testing and the arguments given by the racists like in this thread. I can see short comings and non-objectiveness in almost every IQ test I have seen. And that without even taking into account the fact that they're "adjusted" periodically to reflect the norm which obviously means they're not perfectly objective to begin with.

I was referring to 18th century Germany and for example theories created by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumenbach

There are lots of points to address in your post but I choose not to. Thanks for the Blumenbach post; it was very interesting (but nevertheless does not show Germany to be the origin of the concept of race).

Anyhow, I saw this on reddit and found it related, and interesting in general:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/mit-corrects-inherited-retard...

"The MIT study found that FMRP and mGluR5 are at opposite ends of a kind of molecular seesaw." These kinds of "molecular seesaws" are everywhere in the body. When things are only slightly out of balance you _may_ get drastic effects. Emphasis on may, because at this point nobody knows exactly what and how much of it is required to achieve what effect. But there you have it -- once it is identified, it is manipulable. The more important point is, many symptoms are graded in severity, and as this study shows, autism could be found to be less disconnected from normal than you may think.

And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age.

Completely laughable, and completely unverifiable. The only passable tests of such things that I am aware of are studies of separated twins, which have indicated quite clearly, time and time again, that variance in intelligence is attributable in great part to inheritance. There's no arguing around such tests--bring up as many chimpanzee breeds that you want.

Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected.

The oldest error in the discussion. Start your elementary education in the subject here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06...

Pinker spends an enormous amount of time bowing down to the antique emotionalisms of the age, and so the book shouldn't be too offensive to the weak-hearted.

EDIT:

user: politrix

created: 1 day ago

It seems pretty blindingly obvious that intelligence is both genetic and environmental. They're not exclusive.

I've been saying that over and over. Maybe you should say that to someone else.

Obviously intelligence has a genetic factor, there is no question about that. Why is cat's intellect different from humans? Due to its DNA. But that is not the point, when it comes to humans, there is no significant enough variation that could lead into large scale intellectual differences. Likewise due to the genetic mixing you couldn't label one traditionally understood "race" as one or the other. Furthermore it makes little sense from evolutionary perspective.

The child genius comment is not laughable. A genius is always tied to a particular skill given in a cultural context. For example playing a piano, or juggling. It is possible that a child is born with certain innate physical qualities that help him in whatever he practices. Like being fair, or strong, tall, etc... But to assume that any 5 year old learned to play piano as some kind of a genetic gift is far more ludicrous. It takes hard practice to perfect your body and mind to work in unison for any particular task, approximately the same for everyone bar perhaps the effects of personal motivation and rigor of the exercise.

With the exception of people with disorders that in some way may make them amazingly good at certain tasks, like having eidetic memory.

I'm not sure if there is a standard emoticon for raising a hand. But that looks sorta right.

And your evidence?

Good luck.

Anecdotal.

I've made more than enough mistakes in judging individuals. Doing it based on the colour of their skin is just the most egregious.

I've met white slackers, I've met chinese pot heads and I've worked with black men who humble me with the grasp of subjects I'm considered an expert in.

It's just a stupid (and I don't use that word lightly) way to judge someone.

I just wanted to point out that in the black/white terminology, where Asians are yellow and Indians are brown, the Jewish aren't necessarily white. Jews are from the Middle East, whereas the common white-folk are from Europe. That is, depending on how you look at it, they are "racially" different (quotes significant).

Also, I am not a Jew, but Jews are a particularly interesting group by themselves and are not to be ignored. IQ and the Wealth of Nations is not really what you want to read. Gregory Cochran is (regardless of how vilified he may be). The list of Nobel laureates is also nothing to shrug off as simply a result of environmental factors. Steven Pinker gave a (supporting) talk on this topic. Statistically speaking, the "Jewish" (which is a fuzzy definition if you look into it) are, without any doubt, the group of people with the highest collective scientific and financial achievement in the world.

Meanwhile, who has ever pointed out that there are no Jewish basketball superstars, sprinters, weight lifters...? Are they endowed with inferior physical ability? Perhaps I shouldn't say so, but this "deficiency" is as glaringly obvious as their accomplishments, and it doesn't seem as sensitive a topic.

It's all about relative distributions. If a patient goes to a hospital to treat Torsional Dystonia, 99.9% of the time, they are Jewish. It also happens that heterozygotes of TD have higher myelin density. It also happens that Einstein had abnormally large glial growth (which affects myelin density). It is also common knowledge that Einstein's brain was structurally different than most humans and this difference was a genetic alteration.

No matter how you look at it, there are genetic influences in intelligence. It is logical that certain genetic traits may be more prevalent in certain localized populations. Now I said nothing about these groups based on skin color, but as a group that has been highly in-bred, the "Jewish" group of people are, statistically as a whole, incontrovertibly, "superior" in certain areas, that the current society finds valuable.

I'm surprised you've chosen to point to IQ and the Wealth of Nations. It is not exactly the paragon of scholarship. As has been mentioned before, for the majority of those nations, no study was even available, they extrapolated from neighboring nations. As the result we can posit that the lowest scoring nations (at least those distant from one another) actually had studies, of some sort done (let's not question that validity of said studies for the moment, even though they should hardly count as IQ tests).

Let's examine the neighbors of the five lowest scoring nations:

Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea.

Each of these nations are fairly distant from one another (ie: at least two hops on the world graph). Yet if you flood fill at a depth of two from each of them, you discover something pretty interesting: nearly all of Africa is filled! These countries were given a score of about 64, a bit more than two SD's below the world average. If an averaging of the scores of nearby nations took place, and it must have by the author's own admission, then the mere presence of these five low scores depresses the scores of the entirety of Africa, and this negative influence spreads all the way to the middle east. There's your consistency.

I'm aware of problems there. (As the wikipedia article discusses.) It's still the best overview, though. I am tempted to say that a country that can't administer a credible IQ test probably doesn't need to.

Actually, the African countries aren't of serious concern. [1] Rather, the disparities between developing countries' current wealth and predicted wealth based upon current IQ have their uses:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FEMKX&t=my&l=off&...

[1] The "are black people less intelligent?" question is actually pretty trivial, and has very few practical applications.

Trivial? You have to define black, you have to define intelligent, and if the answer happens to be an unorderable set, you have to define _less_.

I'm unconvinced that they're measuring generated wealth by IQ, either. Most of the administered tests weren't IQ tests, they were educational tests. They measured the standard deviation of the _nation's_ mean, and then mapped that to an IQ. The correlation thus isn't a direct one between IQ and generated wealth, but rather between educational performance and wealth. More obvious, this one is.

In any case, he's not even arguing about intelligence per se. Rather, he's supporting James Flynn's argument that IQ tests are flimsy instruments for measuring intelligence. Flynn's argument is that kids from societies/households which require high abstract cognition (read: modernness) will score better on some of the IQ sub-tests (eg. similarities and abstract taxonomy).

This suggests that kids can be "trained" to score well on IQ tests. There is more than socioeconomic factors at work here, and cultural factors (particularly those that influence cognitive modes of thought) are important. But ultimately, IQ tests are probably a dubious measure of someone's general intelligence anyway.

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