Intelligence and Race: How Smart Are White People Really?
I’m at a pool to draft this.
Snapped now at 1045. It’ll be packed by 1400.
This is an interesting pool, though. I see lots of folks every day I’m here, of fair complexion reading books and exercising their thumbs on devices…in the shade; presumably to avoid screen glare—a sure sign of high intelligence, just as I’m exercising as I type here. Conversely, I see a lot of folks of darker complexion out soaking up the sunlight: simple basking, or in the water. It’s such a very clear association, with only a few outliers. Another observation: the outliers on the low intelligence side of fair complexion seem to be out in the sun often enough early in the swim season, while the outliers on the higher intelligence side of darker complexions end up in the shade often later in the season. So the association is definitely distributed, with significant crossover.
But to address the fatty part of the distribution, the darker adults are so apparently inept that they’re playing around in the water with these little, brownish skined people who, for some inexplicable reason, repetitively yell…”Marco”…”Polo”…over and over and over! …How stupid is that?
Pools can be very, very confusing. Is light skin causing people to better educate themselves via books and the higher learning represented by “Likes” on their Facebook accounts? Is dark skin causing adults to entertain silly childish games of verbal repetition and with no apparent point?
While there could be a lot of associations worth looking at (breast & penis size, stature, the ratio of arm length to leg length, arm circumference to waist, skull circumference, etc.) all of them pale in comparison to pale vs. dark skin. It’s so damn easy and obvious. It’s only all that other stuff that’s arbitrary. …What we can safely dismiss is that there’s not some kinda cause lurking here. The association is just far too strong in this pool.
Now I better understand other kinds of pools, like gene pools. [/toungincheek]
…Coupla weeks ago I put this up: Judgment Passed: Everybody is Wrong About I.Q. Pretty controversial post with a decent number of comments. What was kind of ironic, though, was how many white people showed up to assert that the post was wrong about there not being an association between race and IQ (no such claim was made; quite to the contrary). Other white people—as though unknowingly signaling that such associations don’t really count for much—seemed to very easily entirely miss the whole point of the post, which was:
- Some guy wrote a Harvard PhD dissertation on the association between race & IQ. It’s controversial so let’s blog about it.
- Lefties tend to take two approaches, the first being to deny that race really exists—which is dumb—and the other being to cover their ears and go lalalalalala, then attempt to ban mention or discussion—which is also dumb.
- Righties tend to assume that they know what intelligence is, acknowledge and emphasize the racial association with that convenient “knowledge,” but usually stop short of blatantly asserting that white people are smart and black people are dumb—for obvious reasons (that’s just dumb).
- Another association is offered, that of nutrition, but not in any way assertive of absolute causality. But, after all, if a brain is starved of nutrients while another is replete, how far a stretch to speculate that the well nourished brain will perform better in learning the stuff necessary to make them a good cog in the machine (“intelligence”)?
- A white chick goaded a bunch of white folks into putting on a less than super intelligent display.
The whole thing was made even funnier by emails I got pointing me to similar inabilities to comprehend, particularly in the case of a certain Joisey Girl sporting reptilian-80s-styled eye makeup—who most surely only dates guys with mullets.
Not to worry though, whiteys. It’s all just associations.
I guess I misjudged though, because I got the Judgy Bitch’s whole point in a nanosecond, which is why I asked to post it. Initially, as comments began coming in within minutes of publishing, demonstrating deep consideration, I started fielding them. Then I just stopped and turned to other things for some hours.
Later on I got to it and answered stuff beginning here, and so on and so forth for a lot of comments. And then, all of a sudden, shortly after I’d finished and turned on the TeeVee, BANG! A comment from someone with not only experience being tested over and over from when she was 5 until she got her PhD (physical chemistry—it’s just like “women’s studies”), but has actually participated in the evolution of constructing IQ tests. Now, I’m assuming she always tested quite low and doesn’t really know much about it at all, but you can decide for yourself.
Richard, I just noticed this post. Fantastic – everything you say (though I can’t stand JB and usually disagree, but I recognize it’s mostly her writing/attitude that grates).
I have to agree on everything you’ve written in your post and your comments/replies – I’m amazed!
Nigel sums it best. [Ed: “IQ tests are a load of old bollix”]
Your example with the Hadza and rectilinear shapes is perfect and if anyone doesn’t get the inherent bias in any ‘aptitude’ test after that, they just are not trying.
Since I was 5 and until I graduated with my last graduate degree, I took dozens of “IQ tests” and was studied by the Canadian psychological society chapter in Quebec. Once an adult, I was a tester for modifications on a bevy of tests that make-up what is still popularly known as the IQ test. The reason I bring this up is because the emphasis was on finding bias, but here’s the kicker, it was Not cultural bias that we looked for Because that was even then considered Inevitable. There’s a heck of a lot of research on that, then and up to now (the bias on which I had to feedback was in test delivery, the way you ask the questions can make it harder or easier to do, especially the auditory portion).
A big problem for any ‘hardwire’ argument btw is posed by immigrants, specifically, somewhere between second and third generation the ‘race’ difference of some immigrant populations vanishes even in the average (for that generation).
The reason the Harvard guy got his thesis accepted is exactly because he did Not try to claim a genetic aka inheritable aka ‘hardwired’ difference, but managed to convincingly link test performance to race as far as race can commonly be determined.
So yeah, to then try to use that in immigration policy is dishonest, for many reasons, any single one of these reasons being enough to knock out the idea of ‘IQ’ testing in immigration, so for example, anything from the problem of averages and the individual variability that you bring up all the way to the case where some race may be monolithically ‘dumb’ per our tests, in which case it would matter Why they performed badly on them since that would say whether or not it’s a Changeable performance, especially for the kids. Anyway, since when does an immigrant country need only rocket scientists, or even only ‘average’ cashiers/tellers?
Humans as integrated beings, yes, exactly. [Ed: a reference to one of my comments]
Oh but wait, the anti-imigrant camp would then want to have tests for ‘hard-working’, ‘persevering’, ‘creative’, ‘artistic’, ‘strong’, ‘enduring’, ‘emotionally stable’, and… yah, while we’re at it, let’s breed like-to-like, slot them in occupations for life and sterilize the underperforming….oh, wait someone wrote that book already.
There are many points to take away from this but the principal one is that of the attempt to make tests non-culturally biased by instead using math—as though IQ testing is like when aliens found V’ger and sent it back to us, or we put math shit in space capsules in general, just wild ass guessing that people who go into space and retrieve it know a little math.
So we make the math as simple as possible. Geometry: straight lines, points—and their assemblage into curves—planes, intersections, angular ratios and such. Problem is, a “non-intelligent” human animal who never interacted with modern civilization has seen only two straight lines in his life, both manmade: an arrow and a spear. I assert that’s the root of your “intelligence”—and the rest is merely details, degrees, and scale any competent mind can learn on average, given time and attention. Just as in my AHS presentation—where I stole the idea from Frank Forencich—that the very root of human epistemology is the paw print; not just the print or a picture of it, but the recognition that a very lot can be known or reasonably speculated, tested, refined…and enough that it could further survival in a way that no other animal is capable of.
I have a modest suggestion. Instead of pulling people into our context and judging them by what we had the advantage of experiencing from day one of birth, we find a new word. Because it’s NOT “intelligence.” H. Sapiens intelligence is that they can survive in the integrated context of their environment as adaptive beings. And it’s an a priori fallacy to even suggest such is not the case for any viable population anywhere, no matter how remote. They exist. In complex social structures. I defy you to tell me that’s not intelligence of a human kind. You just want to test for scale, your scale. That’s what you want to do. To wit:
Just be honest. Just admit that our IQ tests really judge an individual’s mastery of scalar techniques and skills available in our context of life. In the HG world, some individuals are better than others, just as it is in our Rocket Surgery world. But in general, I assert that on average, we’ll fair worse on their ”intelligence” tests than they do. And if we were honest and actually really displayed the very best essence of humanity that we ceaselessly pat ourselves on the back for, we’d just come out and say that they probably fair poorer on average, simply ’cause it’s kinda Greek to them and who can understand Greeks except my Greek commenter, quoted above? Give ’em some time—a few generations—to assimilate and integrate—but oh, oh, wait...isn’t that what all these stellar examples of humanity are trying to prevent in the first pace?
Confirmation bias taken to fulfilled prophesy? YES. And exactly so.
Y’all are shooting at the wrong target because it’s so easy—color blindness is an outlying trait. But having beaten up mercilessly on the veiled racists, let me suggest that probably most aren’t really racists at all. They might really be something else that needs to be understood, integrated and refined. Before I do that, a word to the Commie Party and the Stupid Party:
Commies: let’s just be honest and admit that you want as many ignorant, dependent people unaccustomed to our culture as possible, because they are the easiest to snake oil-sell for votes. With all your talk of “opportunity,” your actions undercut, with one dependency program after another.
Stupids: while you surely recognize what the commies are up to, you’re too stupid to take up the easy and obvious solution. Why? Because you’re not just stupid, but afraid. You can’t give up the public trough you benefit from—just as much as the commies, who want to share it with the unwashed masses at your expense. So you fight a futile, stupid war seemingly not realizing you’re about 150 million against 150 million commies + billions of ignorants the world over being promised your money to vote for your enemies. How stupid is that?
So aside from just getting rid of the idea and practice of a public trough for IQ satisfactory whiteys in general that ought be done instanter, how about dump the silly racism and become Culturists—and prejudicially, a practitioner of Culturism? I have been, for a long tiime. After some years of thinking and making distinctions and never mentioning it to anyone, I recall finally discussing it in an inebrated state with Beatrice, on my 40th birthday—which would have been January, 2001. It goes like this:
- People are generally born equal with a full range of potentials. Cultures are man made, some a function of environment, difficulty of survival, and so on.
- Culture, while very heavily associated with race, ethnicity, and religion, is completely devoid of any such requirements. For example, white women can marry an Islamist and proceed to be as stupid as she has the potential to be, acting it out by covering and shutting off her mind and body from the world.
- It is completely OK and encouraged to judge harshly any culture or sub-culture (like redneck or hip-hop), because it’s man made and has nothing to do with genes. One isn’t born a 14th century, dirt-scratching savage, into the exalted league of virgin piercers by means of blowing themselves and a bunch of others up—that’s man made.
- Race is highly associated, but it’s not the cause. Moronic stupidity and hierarchical authoritarian convenience is the cause.
I was reluctant to blog about it. Came up with the idea years before taking about it with Bea, started this blog in 2003, and finally blogged it in a post I called “Culturism,” in 2005. Were I to write that post today it would read differently, I know. While I have often considered simply doing a from-scratch post on it, I have resisted that as well, because I believe the essence is still sound 8 years later and reflects my thinking at least 8 years prior to that.
It’s not even very long, because it’s pretty simple.
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Hahahaha.
I’ll just leave this here
Even anarchists go astray sometimes. Good reminder of the fallible nature of us all.
Sometimes, that contrarianism gets the better of you, Richard. Remember, this is not about individuals
but distributions.
Oh you also may want to take a look at this little thing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
No more arguments from me as this stuff doesn’t matter in day to day life but only for government coercion purposes.
More funny is that you don’t even have a clue how that transracial adoption study bolsters exactly what I posted. I know of that and many others, including identical twin studies.
You’re simply asserting that white people are smart and black people are stupid, are merely too pussy to just come out and say it. It’s most certainly what you think, whether you lie about it or not. Just another run of the mill racist, content in ignorance.
You really ought to try contemplation, though. It’s always that when a person assertively calls themself something like that, it’s 100% of the time a fraud.
Yeah Asians do well in all g-loaded tests.
Also, ‘skin color’ is a complete red herring. Skin color is only important in so far as it correlates with population substructure and that’s it. Turns out that population substructure correlates pretty well with observed color differences though obviously on average, so, for example, there are quite a lot of African-Americans with 30% European admixture who look darker than those with 20% European admixture.
Here’s a quote from the following paper : :
I will also, again, recommend Razib Khan’s superb post
blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a-biological-construct-matters/
And this didactic analysis of IQ tests and racial gaps.
lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm
[…] The Animal / Posted on: June 02, 2013 Free The Animal – I’m at a pool to draft this. Snapped now at 1045. It’ll be packed by 1400. This […]
“Good reminder of the fallible nature of us all.”
Nonsense. I’m white.
You can’t have your cake & eat it too. What goes around comes around. If you’re going to judge individuals based on averages then be consistent about it.
From my perspective, it’s remarkable the hubris of dumb white people.
You make me ashamed to be one.
yes. but if u dont want to stand your ground then all the jealous little thieves will take everything you got, and will not say thankyou, and even forget they did it.
Richard,
Great to see you commit to a continuation of this.
I was hanging out on the block once and with the weed in us, we were asserting how stupid The Man is, emphasising straight lines and that Nature has no straight lines.
I thought about that for a long time. It’s not true. A shadow has a straight link to the object and you see it in rays of light from the sun past clouds. I am sure in Nature, if given enough time, a human, any human, will recognise this and many more.
You get a 3yr old from an industrialised country and a 3yr old Aborigine to draw their houses and you get two completely, mutually unrecognisable drawings. How could you judge who is more intelligent?
Why will others need acculturation? Have one big world all thinking the same? We all need a little more Ozymandias in our life. Just enjoy your time!
Not too sure what is the points spread from Intelligent to Stupid. Madonna is meant to be very intelligent, she is passionate about her causes. This week she asserts “Literacy is a right. Without it, you have no life!”. My 9yr old called BS on that!
Actually
Poor whites outscore rich blacks on g-loaded tests like the SAT.
Cite 1 : jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
Cite 2 :
Cite 3 : books.google.com/books?id=b25VQklHaY4C&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=sat+scores+%22low+income…
[…] white people were shocked by how little they knew about Aborigines, Yothu Yindi was more surprised. As a band […]
Yes Richard on the aggregate that is exactly true, though it doesn’t make much sense.
You will search long and hard for black Fields medalists, and I wish you good luck in your search.
As a libertarian this doesn’t matter to me beyond the theoretical of course. I treat people as individuals when I meet them, but I won’t apologize for things which are TRUE.
I’ve been reading up on this issue off and on for a few years. It seems to me that IQ is measuring something real and important, but I think its misleading to call it “general intelligence”. What its measuring is certain mental abilities that make a person successful in modern life…abstract math, the ability to plan ahead, think abstractly about novel situations etc. This is a fairly specific domain in life. What makes it so important is that we have formulated a society that values such things far beyond other traits.
If I don’t consider an individual person with a higher IQ superior to me, then why should I give a shit if another race or ethnic group has a higher IQ than me? High IQ doesn’t protect against being an asshole or being wrong. It just makes you able to formulate more complex arguments to justify yourself when you’re wrong.
It seems obvious to me that the various populations of people on this planet have evolved different mental attributes, IQ being a specific example but not the only one. Of course, I’m speaking of averages, not making statements about individual people. This should be non-controversial. It should be a given.
What should be the controversial assertion is the idea that populations who were separated for at least 80,000 years (in some cases) living in vastly different environments ranging from tropical rainforest to arctic tundra have evolved drastically different physical features but ZERO differences in their brain function.
I’m sure that some people use science to justify beliefs about white superiority. Which I find odd considering that Asians score higher on IQ tests.
Another interesting assumption you made is that I’m white.
Obviously I’m anonymous and so not intent on proving or disproving it, but lets just say that may not be accurate. Again, since your nuance flies out the window when this topic comes up baring the leftist inside, let me remind you that I’m a libertarian anarchist and I start with Bayesian inferences. Its all about knowledge. When you see someone walk down the street and you know nothing about them except their context, their clothes, the time of day outside etc, you start with assumptions most consistent with these. For example, a young, black male, is found walking in a hoodie and baggy jeans at 3am on a city street. First assumptions aren’t favorable.
Then you start talking to him, and his accent is French! He’s an Art History major at CUNY Baruch or something. Hey, now you have new information, which as a rational Bayesian, you _update_ with.
Stop being obtuse and adopting leftist name-calling.
“What should be the controversial assertion is the idea that populations who were separated for at least 80,000 years (in some cases) living in vastly different environments ranging from tropical rainforest to arctic tundra have evolved drastically different physical features but ZERO differences in their brain function.”
The confounding variable is that humans form a ton of their neural connections in the first few years of life, likely influenced by direct experience. Then they continue to do so at a slower pace throughout life. I read something the other day about how all these gadgets and online social interaction we’re engaging in is forming new neural pathways, like physically.
I am not asserting their are no differences in brains, even base genetically. I’m saying that skin color is too arbitrary a way to account for differences on average distributions and in terms of individuals it falls flat. Then someone brings up the Fields medal, an award so very rare for anyone it tells nothing. What are other associations with winners, such as ethnicity, geography, culture. How many Asians or Indians are winners, both populations with tons of engineers and math geeks.
To give another idea of how hopeless distributions are, you can even find crossover between humans and other animals. I’ll bet some mice are more adept at negotiating a maze than some humans. That would be an interesting IQ test. You could have cheese as the goal for the mice, a lifetime porn subscription for the 20-sumthin’ living in mom’s basement.
A real world example is provided by an interview I heard years ago by a park ranger in Yosemite, where they have the problem of bears living in the same space as humans. Aside: as a kid, the very first wild bear I saw was at Yosemite, but in the 60s there was not yet procedures in place to actively keep them from access to human food. So that first “wild” bear I saw was a brown bear head down in a trash can.
Yosemite bears are very intelligent. How did they get that way? Decades of selection based on ability to get human food. Now, since everyone is aware of the perturbing effect, everyone takes aims to keep them away from human food and their garbage, so they have steel lockers with access mechanisms to both store camp food and dispose of it. In the words of the ranger, paraphrasing:
“The problem in designing these lockers is that we find there is a significant crossover between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
Nigel said it best: IQ tests are a load of old bollix.
“baring the leftist inside”
Laf. Now there’s an assumption for ya.
The only redeeming quality of the right is that by & large they’re just stupid and married to stupid fantasy ideas because they have to have levels of God and they get their ethics from ancient texts, Mother Goose, etc.
The lefties are evil, and that’s the nicest thing I can say about them.
I grew up in a Right culture, and even my Democrat maternal grandparents would be right wing conservatives by today’s standards.
What you are seeing is my attempt to help the right get rid of stupid arguments. The left is irredeemable. Just last week I emailed a family member to stop using the false argument that gun control is bad because the NAZIs got rid of guns. Dumb argument, and false as well.
“Its all about knowledge”
What actual knowledge do you possess as to survival in the depth of a rainforest or in the heat of an African savanna? Because you probably don’t possess much and almost surely far less than the indigenous populations, ought you be judged as unintelligent, or, ought you be extended the benefit of the doubt that the kind and scale of your intelligence is qualitatively different and only to be evaluated properly in the context of your life experience?
Okay let me expand then. Its about the capacity for acquiring knowledge commensurate with increasing complexity of the knowledge. A little hairy I admit, but again, we all have niches, and if you’d like to think of it that way, thats fine too. Modern technological civilization can be called a niche and Pygmies are likely not to be fit for it ever regardless of who raises them and what they eat. Similarly, due to Smart Fractions, and the preponderance of > 130 IQ required in fields essential in maintaining technical civilization (like structural, electrical engineering, etc), you will likely always have a disproportionately larger number of White, Asian and Jewish people in these fields.
The converse is that you are not likely to see a technical civilization develop without the help of white, asian or jewish engineers or scientists manning the utility companies and labs in Africa. Of course, comparative advantage, free trade, and decent government can manage these problems pretty handily by importation of skilled engineers and other personnel required. This is why colonialism worked pretty well in many areas, though not so well in others.
Here’s Intelligence researcher Linda Gottfredson on why ‘g’ the ‘General Factor of Intelligence’ matters in everyday life (obviously here we are assuming a modern technical civilization!)
udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf
What does the actual distribution look like of IQ by race? I have read that the mean IQ scores among the different races are rather small compared to the actual range of the each individual distribution. For example: A black person in the 70th percentile would still be in the 50th percentile for a white person IQ. Or that a random black person would have a 40 percent chance of having a higher IQ than a random white person.
I just made up those numbers for illustration but there is significant overlap amongst the races and the above numbers might not be far off.
I wish it was just that righties are dumb and lefties are evil. I tend to get along with lefties better – probably because I’m more of a social misfit than most – but they’re all a bunch of busybodies who love telling other people what to do. My problem with righties is that they’re hypocrites. They try to claim that they want more freedom, but they’re every bit as eager to use the power of the state to tell other people how to live their lives as lefties are. They just don’t want to admit it.
Humunculous
The median difference in IQ by race standardized to a mean of 100, is one standard deviation or 15 points.
There are some cool animated plots here theunsilencedscience.blogspot.com/2012/04/sat-bell-curve.html
As you will note, the further you go into the tails (right or left), the more the absence of one group or the other.
Although I understand the whole “you would not do so well in a rainforest” bit, it’s really not a good argument. We’re not comparing black hunter-gatherers to civilized white people. We’re comparing black people, born and raised in modern society, to white people, born and raised in modern society.
A better example might be a person born in a trailer park, redneck neighbourhood. Probably eats cheap food, and raised in a not so educated household. Now if we took a Jewish or Asian person and raised them as trailer trash, are they going to grow up to be a doctor, or engineer? Not so sure.
“We’re not comparing black hunter-gatherers to civilized white people.”
You’re not, I am. Why not? Do you get to pick the standard? We’re talking about base intelligence.
“We’re comparing black people, born and raised in modern society, to white people, born and raised in modern society.”
Now factor in decades of programs specifically designed by democrats to keep them as dependent as possible for vote buying, break up families, shuttle the inevitable drug trade to them and then lock them up for engaging in that voluntary trade, and etc. etc.
As I said, this is self fulfilling prophesy we’re seeing.
“Its about the capacity for acquiring knowledge commensurate with increasing complexity of the knowledge. A little hairy I admit…”
Exactly so, allowing also that as knowledge grows and expands, it’s commensurate with the basic average of folks picking up on it—with the outliers on both sides.
“Pygmies are likely not to be fit for it …”
Way to present a BIG problem. Pygmies are outlier in themselves. Who knows? have any ever on at least some social cultural level (not lone individuals) ever integrated or tried to with our notion of civilization? If not, how could we possibly know? I believe that smallness of stature is associated with intelligence on average in at least males, right—or are there a lot of super tall jews winning Nobel prizes. Just thinking out loud, but I assume you get my point.
It goes to really the principle point of my post: self fulfilling prophesies via public policy that either bars brown and black skins or, if they do get here, bombarding them with dependency programs so that they never develop culturally like Irish, Germans and Italians did.
“Similarly, due to Smart Fractions, and the preponderance of > 130 IQ required in fields essential in maintaining technical civilization (like structural, electrical engineering, etc), you will likely always have a disproportionately larger number of White, Asian and Jewish people in these fields.”
Begging the question.
“The converse is that you are not likely to see a technical civilization develop without the help of white, asian or jewish engineers or scientists manning the utility companies and labs in Africa.”
Beyond begging the question once again, here you have an example of what I’ll call ‘evolutionary scalar ignorance.’
It’s the notion that since you see a race or small set of races really take off in the space of a few hundred years—the ones who pioneered and the copycats who glommed on early enough to get on the bus, that everyone else is just hopeless ignorant morons.
Someone always has to be first.
It’s quite a shame in my book that on an evolutionary scale that encompasses millions of years that we tag genetic traits as “unlikely to succeed” (the essence of your words in a couple of comments) based upon a couple of hundreds of years of industrialization, which has the added stigma of an exponential element.
How very convenient in the self fulfilling prophesy of it all.
“You’re not, I am. Why not? Do you get to pick the standard? We’re talking about base intelligence.”
Well it’s like comparing two people in two different sports, and asking who is better at basketball. It just makes more sense to see how they do, growing up playing the same sport. How do you even test intelligence for a hunter-gatherer? A lot of them could simply be alive cause they’re a bad ass with a spear.
Though they probably would be smarter with all that animal fat and lack of bread.
“There are some cool animated plots here”
Took a look. No different than most of what I’ve seen over many years but the crossover is always most interesting to me, as well as the outliers to the right.
This is what informs me that it’s merely association, and that the real issue is cultural acclimatization if we are to judge them by our standards. In large part, I agree: hey, our pool and this is what is required for entry. I get that. I do not subscribe to any notion that those who were not part of the general deep building of this industrial culture are hopelessly lost to ever be mainstays in it on average, forever dragging around a stigma of nothing-they-can-do-about-it.
This is why I had to add the part in the post about the commies. I absolutely believe that in large measure, the democrats attempt to achieve their political aspirations on the backs of minorities by essentially making them their forever whores.
It’s why they are evil. They actually knowingly and willingly destroy family units in order to keep them dependent voters for more and more dependency programs. Sadly, the whites are going headlong into dependency as well.
The average difference in 15 or 1 standard deviation of a distribution normalized to a mean of 100.
Gregory Cochrane and Henry Harpending wrote the 10,000 Year Explosion
and they also have evolutionary explanations for high Jewish IQ, among other things which they argue
are due to Neolithic selection pressures.
I wanted to comment on culturism but all the comments on that post are from six or more years ago, so I’m commenting here.
I question to what extent a person can escape the culture of his or her childhood. I have a 3-year-old and we recently moved to another country, so lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what a person learns about the world before age 5.
Almost nobody remembers more than a few faint things from their preschool years, yet by about age 5 or 6, children know what’s important and what’s not, what to expect from the people around them, and what they should be spending their time on. All those things are part of culture, and if a person has the misfortune of being born into a harmful culture, I’m not sure he could escape it so easily.
For example, if you’ve learned that education is not important, is it ever really possible to “unlearn” that? The most you can do is observe your surroundings and draw your own conclusions about whether that’s true. A lot of people are able to do it for one or two things that they recognize that their parents taught them wrong.
Now imagine re-examining every single assumption you’ve ever made in your life! It takes more than changing your friends and environment. Very few people (in my opinion, obviously) have the courage, attention to detail, willpower, and persistence to take every truth that they never remember learning, re-examine it, and change their actions accordingly.
You’re bound to miss something.
@labbygail – “I question to what extent a person can escape the culture of his or her childhood. I have a 3-year-old and we recently moved to another country, so lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what a person learns about the world before age 5.”
Completely agreed. In psychology this is coined as imprinting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_%28psychology%29
I’m personally convinced that it occurs in humans, just like other mammals, though it’s rarely discussed.
It’s not so different than a sheep dog being left with a flock for a few months (from 3-16 weeks of age) will imprint with them and act as a protector for life.
@Richard — “Nigel said it best: IQ tests are a load of old bollix.”
That statement strikes me as absurd; I’d say most folks who have worked with the developmentally disabled would agree. There are precious very few skillsets someone with an 75 IQ would perform better than someone with 105 IQ, let alone 135 IQ.
I agree that the Democrats/commies have made those minorities their clients and profited from their perennial dependence on the public purse. I don’t claim that the present circumstances are the best we can do. But I’m confident that test scores reveal a heck of a lot, and the self fulfilling prophecy is bollocks in this case as Africans did way better under the most “racist” governments i.e. colonial administrations in Africa. Also believe it or not, the social indicators of African Americans were better during segregation. This is not to justify segregation of course, but its shocking nonetheless. I believe it was more due to self-dependence, a culture of living up to standards and a judgment by white people, instead of the current practice of shouting ‘racism’ at any criticism of minority behavior.
EVEN SO, Its unlikely that you will get many rocket scientists or mathematicians from the community, even if they become well behaved petty bourgeois. Thats my central point.
The idea that leftists are evil and right-wingers are stupid is a good observation. I have a soft spot in my heart for conservatism, though I am turned off by the Bible thumping “God bless ‘Murica” rhetoric.
But I would go a bit further and state that there is no real right-wing in America.
Everyone in America is some shade of liberal. I define liberalism as the belief in some form of human equality and a teleology of “progress”.
Leftists believe in human equality and equality of outcomes. So when outcomes are unequal, there must be some sort of unfairness or injustice at work which must be remedied. Hence they view society as eternally unjust. They are in an hopeless struggle against the inherent inequality of nature.
The conservative’s idea of equality is all about “freedom” and the rugged individual pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Since everyone is “free” to act as they wish, those who end up amassing wealth must be morally superior individuals, certainly not because they have inherent traits that make them so.
Old school right-wing differs from American liberals and conservatives because it is anti-egalitarian. It rejects the central tenant of America, i.e. that “all men are created equal”. It believes that it is self-evident that they AREN’T equal. Some men are smarter than others. Some men are stronger than others. Democracy is rule by the stupid. Society needs hierarchy, tradition, and a sense of organic identity in order to function. Everyone certainly has a place in society, but it is largely dictated by nature or fate, with “fairness” being a childish concept.
I find Bible thumping Christianity fairly repugnant, but I find it ironic that religious people reject evolution but ACT as if its true. They understand gender distinctions. They have fertility above replacement levels. They tend to live in more organic tight-knit societies that act more or less like tribes or clans.
Liberals claim to believe in evolution. Yet what do they do with this information? They consider it morally virtuous to sterilize themselves. They propagate biology-denying beliefs like “feminism”. They support any and all other cultures other than their own to the extent that backwards beliefs like Islam are overrunning former liberal countries in Europe.
And to top it off, they believe that “all men are created equal” which only makes sense if you believe God created humanity and endowed them with souls. Apart from using it as a stick to beat over the heads of “rednecks”, liberals don’t have much use for science.
Liberalism is an evolutionary dead-end. But good thing they don’t believe in Creationism, right?
Thanks for the links Contemplationist. Seems like the average difference in black vs white SAT score when controlling for income level is ~ 100pts. It would be interesting if there was information when controlling for two generations of income level. Also interesting would be controlling for parents SAT scores and see what kind of regression we get to the mean for the different races.
@Bob
“Leftists believe in human equality and equality of outcomes.”
Not really. Leftists typically believe in equal _treatment_ under the law. Subtle but important difference.
Everyone having a fair shake under the law doesn’t mean everyone is equal.
@labbygail
I think that too is individual. I know a lot of expats who became expats all along the spectrum from being kids to adults and there’s no apparent rhyme of reason I can see for how some stick with their fellow expat communities and other simply fully integrate.
My dad and all of his younger brothers are good examples. The whole family came over in 1952, he was 14. You’d never known he lived the first 14 years of his life in Germany during WWII and its aftermath. Doesn’t even have an accent.
I know another guy who’s Italian. Recently got his citizenship. He cam over here to get his PhD in chemistry, got a job with Intel and stayed. It would be hard for most people to detect he’s not American born. Many similar stories. Also on the other side. Some fiends of my grandparents who also came over from Germany in the 50s never quite made the transition away from staying close to other Germans.
I know Indian and Pakistani families who’ve lived and raised their kids here for two decades and they actually seem more British than Indian or Pakistani.
@Dan
Well, if you need an IQ test to tell the difference between someone mentally disabled and gifted, I don’t know what to tell you. If you think that a difference either way of 15 or so points between your average folks on the street, again, don’t know what to tell you. An interesting test would be to have someone converse with a bunch of people for some given time, then that person estimates IQ test performance each one relative to the other (this one scores higher than that one, etc.). You’ll probably get about the same results as flipping a coin for all those in the fat part of the distribution and will only nail it for obviously smart and obviously dumb people—so again, what is the utility of an IQ test?
Again, the point is not to assert that there’s no difference in intelligence amongst people, just that race is a silly way to slice up differences. Add to that the problem of knowing what intelligence really is. It may be very useful to be a math genius, but if you don’t know to change clothes and wash your hair…? Culture is a far better way of slicing it up and it’s not nearly so loaded as here in America at least it tends to wash out in a few generations, whereas race takes a lot longer (given some amount of interracial unions over time).
@Contempationalist
“Africans did way better under the most “racist” governments i.e. colonial administrations in Africa.”
That undercuts your argument about race and supports mine about culture. Colonialism’s core feature is that it molds culture over time.
And yes, in many ways the civil right movement has been bad for blacks, encouraging them to remain in destructive sub-cultures and essentially be paid to stay there. I think things are finally beginning to swing the other way, hopefully.
“Its unlikely that you will get many rocket scientists or mathematicians.”
Again, problem of scale. Celebrating performance in math & science has been part of “white” cultures for a very long time. When and if it becomes more central and appreciated in black cultures, you’ll get your science geeks. Could be decades down the road. It’s hardly surprising that you don’t have a lot when black kids are constantly told that they are “being too white.”
@Bob
+1. Much Word.
@Rn,
“Well, if you need an IQ test to tell the difference between someone mentally disabled and gifted, I don’t know what to tell you.”
That’s exactly why IQ is considered an important quantification, the differences between extremes are so obvious and life-impacting.
“An interesting test would be to have someone converse with a bunch of people for some given time, then that person estimates IQ test performance each one relative to the other (this one scores higher than that one, etc.)”
Sure, that would be interesting. I do think it would be a lot more accurate than a coin flip though. Just ask a few questions that would be considered casual knowledge.. “Who is the vice president?” “Who is your favorite fiction author?”
For instance, I’d guess almost all of your blog commenters have between 115 and 135 IQ. Any lower and they wouldn’t understand the utility of reading this blog, much higher and they’d have better things to do; the content here would seem superficial.
Dan Linehan,
great on the imprinting, but after that I’ve got to point this out : No, “IQ” tests really are a load of bollix.
Intelligence, the large variety of neurological processes that comprise the human mind and the apparently infinite variety of its manifestations, is too broad to define, let alone quantify. I try to expand on this below.
My eyes crossed with many of the other comments but I’m getting into this one because I know that you like catching incongruities in reasoning and there’s a big misconception on IQ tests.
For example, the fact that the developmentally disabled score lower on a Developmental test (that is what old “IQ” and even “aptitude” tests are usually named today) shows exactly that they have Developed less of those skills being measured on the test.
So just ask yourself, why do you think this result for the disabled means that the Same test indicates something quite different for the higher scorers, ie. that it indicates some innate property of intelligence?
Or look at it this way : the fact that a person already Known to have reduced mental capabilities scores low on a developmental test does Not automatically mean that any low score Indicates reduced mental capabilities. It’s not a two-way correlation.
The low score indicates less development of those skills being tested, that’s all. The reasons those skills are low can of course be Down’s syndrome, but they just as well can be cultural/educational.
In other words, please consider that for everyone taking it, all that a developmental (aka ‘aptitude’ aka ‘IQ’) test shows is the state of development of certain skills and in fact, of those skills at that time.
Is there a personal limit to how high a certain individual can go with training? I’m sure there is, but we don’t equally train everyone from birth and Then test them, therefore the test is not measuring innate ability.
So, all the test can show is how well anyone has acquired those skills at that time.
That’s it.
The rest below is just tackling the arguments from different sides, including ‘culture’….and maybe a bit of ranting! (skip at will ;)
It’s simple really, No one has succeeded in creating an actual Intelligence test in nearly 100 years now.
How do you know that? You know it because if what is being measured is an innate intelligence, or any sort of Innate ability at all, you shouldn’t be able to train for the test, to acquire those skills and improve on the test.
The first thing a cognitive psychologist will do with any such claim of an intelligence test is give similar tests over and over to a test group and see what happens to their scores. They always improve and get faster at them and without even the targeted skill training that one gets nowadays for the somewhat related, weighted ‘educational aptitude’ tests like the SAT/GRE.
In other words, even without the obvious reasoning regarding definition of intelligence or impossibility to avoid cultural bias, you can treat a test like a ‘black box’ and just measure ‘input->output, that is, more training -> better scores.
By definition, a skill is not innate if it can be acquired! (though of course, the earlier point about personal limits always applies).
As an extension, whoever (not you necessarily, but I’ve seen this a lot) acknowledges that the SAT/GRE tests measure specific skill sets, but then thinks these tests show anything remotely related to Innate ability for those skills has apparently never heard of the Princeton series of prep books or Sylvan learning centers or for that matter the correlation between better schools/higher income and averages in test scores.
I guess rich kids are on average innately smarter! Of course they must be, they come from rich parents who must have been born smarter in order to get rich, eh?
Why, it’s selectivity/evolution at it’s finest….Except, then why do they have to pay to have the kids drilled on those skills and those tests specifically, for years? You can see where I bang head on table when I hear this argument (and Damn Richard, some of his commenters are giving me a head ache! :)
[BTW, I’m not saying Self-made rich people are not smarter on average, who knows? But the fact that they made it rich is a poor argument in favor of their average intelligence, especially in the face of other necessary character traits].
It comes down to the fact that there are no reports or studies showing invariance in test performance to training nor to cultural background for any such test (the background of home, school and social environment, from which anyone of course acquires a lot of those skills to begin with), because a developmental/”IQ” test that passes any invariance testing has not been created.
BTW, as to it being predictive of ‘outcomes’ or ‘success’ even within the culture that is administering it, note that there are young people with visible Down’s syndrome (which has a broad range of symptoms of course) specifically scoring ca.85 on such tests, who are in college and who do graduate and go on to get jobs. It takes them longer to learn. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching two. It’s an extreme example, but it does illustrate the point about outcomes and more about training (and dare I say, perseverance and other character traits that no test ever measures…yet someone wants to use such a test to predict immigrants’ aptitude for success in our culture?!)
Richard,
an argument I see a lot, across the political spectrum, seems to have to do with ”evolution”.
Specifically, that it is somehow unreasonable to think that evolution ‘affected’ a bunch of other traits for different geographically associated groups but did not affect intelligence.
Quite aside from the inability to define intelligence or measure it with any test, is this evolutionary contortion a problem of using vague language do you think?
I mean, the physical traits are not just randomly ‘affected’, they make each group Better Adapted to specific conditions in their environment.
So, is there some evidence that the environment on a northern asian island or an asian sub-continent, or the environment in western Europe required the development of higher intelligence for people to survive it? Shouldn’t the Inuit be ‘way ahead’ by that reasoning? Or the peoples of the Amazon with all those poisonous critters, deadly plants and predators to learn about and deal with?
The rise and fall of civilizations across the globe has been going on for some millennia, like you say. You’d think that everyone would have noticed by now :)
“How Smart Are White People Really?”
Maybe it’s the Internets (it seems to attract them like dung-flies to a shit-heap), but nigeepoo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/i-see-stupid-people-part-one-live-to.html ;-)
I got “bollix” from Bill Lagakos. I think that it’s funnier than “bollocks” and it can be used anywhere!
I believe that every country has a “bell curve” of intelligence for its population, from the really dim bulbs to the really bright ones. The dim ones seem to make the most noise! ;-)
As mental faculties are influenced by Vitamin D status (mine certainly are), this adds a racial element. Dark-skinned people are at a disadvantage if they live too far away from the Equator, due to Vitamin D insufficiency (on top of having higher RRs for diabetes, CHD, cancer, depression etc).
The IOM Committee is as useful as a chocolate teapot in decreeing that 600iu/day of Vitamin D is sufficient, highlighting the 2.5% of people who get increasing RR for CHD above serum 25(OH)D of 30ng/mL (almost certainly due to Vitamin K2 insufficiency) and ignoring the fact that mean RR for all-cause mortality decreases monotonically with increasing serum 25(OH)D up to 66ng/mL (where the graph stops). Fuckwits!
See nigeepoo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/curves-and-u-curves-vitamins-d3-and-k2.html
“That’s exactly why IQ is considered an important quantification, the differences between extremes are so obvious and life-impacting.”
Like I said, Dan, I don’t know what to tell you. If you require “quantification” in order to confirm the QUALITATIVELY FUCKING OBVIOUS, then you are just kinda lost in my view.
“Just ask a few questions that would be considered casual knowledge.. “Who is the vice president?” “Who is your favorite fiction author?””
OK, so another problem is that you apparently have zero idea of what IQ tests are supposed to measure. Is a naked hunter-gatherer who survives by wit, knowledge and generations of carefully garded and cultivated wisdom “dumb” because he doesn’t know that Joe Biden is an embarrassing fuckwit because he doesn’t know, care, or see why it’s in any way relevant, while Smart Sally on the Street recalls the Obama-Biden meme on bumperstickers from 2008 and 12?
“For instance, I’d guess almost all of your blog commenters have between 115 and 135 IQ. Any lower and they wouldn’t understand the utility of reading this blog, much higher and they’d have better things to do; the content here would seem superficial.”
I don’t know what that means and I’ll assert straight up that you don’t either. Various readers and commenters here will, of course, perform differently on any battery of tests, for what fucking good such knowledge would do anyone.
Have you considered that a better marker of intelligence is smart people who come here specifically learn from “dumb” people who garden, hunt, fish, and have a keen knack for taking up ancient wisdom and running with it.
It’s arguable that the smartest people are those who see that something is missing and undertake to learn some of those missing elements from “dumb” people.
In my personal (n=1) experience, the Sun grills neurons off your brain. I remember it distinctly: the more time I spent in the sun, the dumber I was visibly becoming: darker by the day !
“If you require “quantification” in order to confirm the QUALITATIVELY FUCKING OBVIOUS, then you are just kinda lost in my view.”
I don’t _require_ it, that’s simply what quantification means — taking an observable phenomenon, like mental disability, and breaking down into a mathematical context.
“OK, so another problem is that you apparently have zero idea of what IQ tests are supposed to measure.”
IQ tests measure the ability of folks to recognize patterns, people with high IQs also tend to have a lot of casual knowledge on a wide array of topics, which would probably be the easiest way to determine IQ via conversation. That was the discussion topic, no?
“I don’t know what that means and I’ll assert straight up that you don’t either.”
I meant exactly what I said, this blog appeals to people in a certain IQ range. If you don’t think my hypothesis is correct feel free to have a few people volunteer the information, I’m sure everyone here has taken some sort of IQ test / standardized test at some point or another.
@marie
“For example, the fact that the developmentally disabled score lower on a Developmental test (that is what old “IQ” and even “aptitude” tests are usually named today) shows exactly that they have Developed less of those skills being measured on the test.”
The tests are designed to see how _quickly_ folks recognize various types of patterns, they quantify their intelligence quotient. Nobody is saying that is all that matters, someone with Down’s can definitely graduate college (and do more complex stuff than that,) but they would need to spend more time learning everything involved. IQ is all about recognizing patterns quickly, not someone’s overall aptitude.
“IQ tests measure the ability of folks to recognize patterns”
Explain to me all the patterns you might authoritatively notice in a huge herd of wildebeests.
This is for anybody who likes to play the stats game. Please take a guess at the following: what’s the probability that a random white person has an iq higher than a random black person?
This is a straightforward calculation since we know the mean and standard deviation of each race.
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