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IQ by ethnic groups and education policy

AlaskaBushPilot

Illuminator
Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
4,341
Ashkenazi Jews roll in with an average IQ of 110 or so. East Asians or American Asians, either one, is around 105. Whites break down into Northern/Western Europe at 100, the test is scaled there, and South Eastern Europe at 95. So the average is 97 between them.

And so on down the line with Australian Aborigenes clocking in at mid-60's. Sub-saharan Africa at 70. If you follow the out-of-Africa theory with the multiple waves you'll see why the Aeta in the Philippines represent a much earlier out-of-Africa wave with much lower IQ than average Filipinos.

You have some very interesting specializations with the Ashkenazi and verbal skills vs. Spatial skills in the best of the Europeans for example.

These differences are so staggering I don't know what rational education policy would not recognize them. These are just averages. At the individual level, you can much wider differences. Compare a smart Ashkenazi vs. a dumb Australian Aborigine. That's going to be IQ 140 vs. IQ 50.

The framing of our educational philosophy goes something like this: Aborigines are under-represented in brain surgery and investment banking. So we're going to put the Ashkenazi to wheel barrels and have Aboriginals do the surgery and banking.

Average income follows the IQ difference in lock step. That's too hard for me to figure. Abstract thought always eluded me.

So you have to go three deep before you can claim white guilt as the basis for income differences. Ashkenazi at the top, followed by Asian-Americans, and then whites. In that order, for average income. You can infer the rest.

The IQ differences are one reason I am so opposed to age-sorting as the primary basis for instructional level. A first-grader with a 132 IQ can be reading 5th or 7th grade material, no problem. A first grader with 105 IQ can be reading 3rd grade material. A first grader with IQ 75 cannot read. But that's who will consume the most first grade resources.

And that 75 IQ first grader can by nine years old be an apprentice at dozens of different jobs he could make a decent living at, higher than average, with an IQ such as his. In the trades. But he is going to waste a lot of years in school prison instead of making money as a plumber, pipe-fitter, welder, concrete finisher, etc.

If you do any kind of sorting by IQ in educational policy, then logically that is the same as having done ethnic sorting, on average. I suspect that's a big reason why we don't sort by IQ. Because the result is politically incorrect, even explosively so. The Ashkenazi Jew class. The Asian class. The white class, etc.
 
When you test various ethnicities on the least culturally biased IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and you do it in a low-pressure setting, the IQ "differences" completely go away.

IQ tests and the g-factor extrapolated to racial generalizations are considered racist pseudoscience for good scientific reason.
 
Rubbish.

And the first problem is drawing the boundaries for these very broad "classes" in the first place. It's not all nice and neat, but that's been done to death in other threads.
 
Last time I heard this was when a reporter was interviewing one of the organizers of the second annual Charleston white supremacist rally. He mentioned the work of Charles Murray.

So I'm guessing something along those lines is the source
 
Why don't we deny individuals an education based on the inherent inferiority of their race?
Oh golly gee, must because those dastardly bleeding heart PC people in power are so naive.
 
Unreferenced stuff may as well be plucked straight out of thin air. Surely there is no-one daft enough to think that just plopping assertion after assertion onto this forum, unsupported by a link to the source, or by direct quotes from the author, is going to be taken seriously. I suggest this is just Poe, or a poster (don't forget his primary interest here is bigfoot) who is simply taking the piss.
 
I don't see anything constructive happening in the Intelligence Debate, with regards to ethnicity or not, anytime soon.
We are making massive progress when it comes identifying genes involved in cognitive abilities. We are also learning how to learn better, using drugs or not.
But we are just not there yet. And we are certainly not in a position to make policies based on the what some data might suggest.
 
Ashkenazi Jews roll in with an average IQ of 110 or so. East Asians or American Asians, either one, is around 105. Whites break down into Northern/Western Europe at 100, the test is scaled there, and South Eastern Europe at 95. So the average is 97 between them.

And so on down the line with Australian Aborigenes clocking in at mid-60's. Sub-saharan Africa at 70. If you follow the out-of-Africa theory with the multiple waves you'll see why the Aeta in the Philippines represent a much earlier out-of-Africa wave with much lower IQ than average Filipinos.

You have some very interesting specializations with the Ashkenazi and verbal skills vs. Spatial skills in the best of the Europeans for example.

These differences are so staggering I don't know what rational education policy would not recognize them. These are just averages. At the individual level, you can much wider differences. Compare a smart Ashkenazi vs. a dumb Australian Aborigine. That's going to be IQ 140 vs. IQ 50.

The framing of our educational philosophy goes something like this: Aborigines are under-represented in brain surgery and investment banking. So we're going to put the Ashkenazi to wheel barrels and have Aboriginals do the surgery and banking.

Average income follows the IQ difference in lock step. That's too hard for me to figure. Abstract thought always eluded me.

So you have to go three deep before you can claim white guilt as the basis for income differences. Ashkenazi at the top, followed by Asian-Americans, and then whites. In that order, for average income. You can infer the rest.

The IQ differences are one reason I am so opposed to age-sorting as the primary basis for instructional level. A first-grader with a 132 IQ can be reading 5th or 7th grade material, no problem. A first grader with 105 IQ can be reading 3rd grade material. A first grader with IQ 75 cannot read. But that's who will consume the most first grade resources.

And that 75 IQ first grader can by nine years old be an apprentice at dozens of different jobs he could make a decent living at, higher than average, with an IQ such as his. In the trades. But he is going to waste a lot of years in school prison instead of making money as a plumber, pipe-fitter, welder, concrete finisher, etc.

If you do any kind of sorting by IQ in educational policy, then logically that is the same as having done ethnic sorting, on average. I suspect that's a big reason why we don't sort by IQ. Because the result is politically incorrect, even explosively so. The Ashkenazi Jew class. The Asian class. The white class, etc.
I didn't know you were an Aborigine.
But dont feel bad, this 'data' is full of ****, as are many IQ tests, so even though you may not have scored high, most of your Australian indiginous and African brothers will likely range from at and between genious, to extremely intelligent, to just smart enough to call ******** on dumbass unsupported/poorly measured 'facts' someone wrote on the interwebz
 
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Regarding the OP, there's nothing to be gained from discussions like this, or from discussions about sports performance, for example. We all have to live together, people should be treated equally whatever their colour, race, religion, sex, sexuality or whether they have pimples on their noses, or anything else.
 
Ashkenazi Jews roll in with an average IQ of 110 or so. East Asians or American Asians, either one, is around 105. Whites break down into Northern/Western Europe at 100, the test is scaled there, and South Eastern Europe at 95. So the average is 97 between them.

And so on down the line with Australian Aborigenes clocking in at mid-60's. Sub-saharan Africa at 70. If you follow the out-of-Africa theory with the multiple waves you'll see why the Aeta in the Philippines represent a much earlier out-of-Africa wave with much lower IQ than average Filipinos.

You have some very interesting specializations with the Ashkenazi and verbal skills vs. Spatial skills in the best of the Europeans for example.

These differences are so staggering I don't know what rational education policy would not recognize them. These are just averages. At the individual level, you can much wider differences. Compare a smart Ashkenazi vs. a dumb Australian Aborigine. That's going to be IQ 140 vs. IQ 50.

The framing of our educational philosophy goes something like this: Aborigines are under-represented in brain surgery and investment banking. So we're going to put the Ashkenazi to wheel barrels and have Aboriginals do the surgery and banking.

Average income follows the IQ difference in lock step. That's too hard for me to figure. Abstract thought always eluded me.

So you have to go three deep before you can claim white guilt as the basis for income differences. Ashkenazi at the top, followed by Asian-Americans, and then whites. In that order, for average income. You can infer the rest.

The IQ differences are one reason I am so opposed to age-sorting as the primary basis for instructional level. A first-grader with a 132 IQ can be reading 5th or 7th grade material, no problem. A first grader with 105 IQ can be reading 3rd grade material. A first grader with IQ 75 cannot read. But that's who will consume the most first grade resources.

And that 75 IQ first grader can by nine years old be an apprentice at dozens of different jobs he could make a decent living at, higher than average, with an IQ such as his. In the trades. But he is going to waste a lot of years in school prison instead of making money as a plumber, pipe-fitter, welder, concrete finisher, etc.

If you do any kind of sorting by IQ in educational policy, then logically that is the same as having done ethnic sorting, on average. I suspect that's a big reason why we don't sort by IQ. Because the result is politically incorrect, even explosively so. The Ashkenazi Jew class. The Asian class. The white class, etc.

And?
 
These differences are so staggering I don't know what rational education policy would not recognize them.


Hopefully, an educational policy that recognizes that IQ tests are and always have been culturally biased. The numbers you're citing are indicators of how familiar the test-taker is with the culture of the test-writer.


Here, let Emily Axford ruin IQ tests for you. Then use your new-found knowledge to be less racist.


 
If you buy into these differences, the only logical conclusion would be to massively fund schools in areas of large populations of the "genetically less smart", at the cost of areas where children are obviously smart by dint of birth.
 
School class grouping based on ethnicity is nonsense. Differences inside ethnicity group are way larger than average differences between groups. You want grouping based on individual IQ tests, which is pretty common.
I believe there will be differences in average IQ across groups. It's mostly based on education and culture, but there probably is some genetic background. With all genetic variation across ethnic groups it would be strange if IQ just came out exactly same everywhere.
But that says nothing about individuals. Even the very flawed simple IQ tests results show only few points of difference between groups, as long as you compare similar education and cultural level. Obviously inside the groups the differences will be tens of points. The group has practically zero predictive value about the IQ of the individual.
And in school and or job you work with individual.

You should state more clearly if you are interested in effect of education and cultural background on result of simple IQ tests, methods to get better results, what IQ really is .. or if you just want to claim some racial superiority.
 
When you test various ethnicities on the least culturally biased IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and you do it in a low-pressure setting, the IQ "differences" completely go away.

IQ tests and the g-factor extrapolated to racial generalizations are considered racist pseudoscience for good scientific reason.

IIRC childhood led exposure can be a significant factor in educational attainment and there are ethnicity biases for who is most likely to be exposed. This suggests it could play a role in IQ as well. The limitations of IQ and IQ tests could easily hide an effect just as easily as it can create differences that don’t really exist.
 
Political equality is based on any and all being equally seats of experience, preference, and choice, not smarts, skills, or abilities. It is recognition that to protect life and liberty, it is voice and choice that matter.

This has nothing formally to do with equal outcomes in meritocratic systems, such as academia or business.

Where the two do cross is in the case when political equality or economic opportunity are denied on an arbitrary basis (e.g., race, nationality, gender, sect) and produce outcomes that are not fairly representative of what otherwise would have been purely personal performance. When the harm extends to denying developmental resources to a group, then it is equal opportunity that has been violated. Gets complex when work, housing, and geographic factors all work in one direction.

Where they do not cross is when groups that adopt an attitude of dependency claim a right to do so on a false basis. Oh, say, rural whites, whose complaints basically consist of asking why the benefits of urban life or modern enterprise do not accrue to underdeveloped areas. Duh, and they can KMA.
 
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Political equality is based on any and all being equally seats of experience, preference, and choice, not smarts, skills, or abilities. It is recognition that to protect life and liberty, it is voice and choice that matter.

This has nothing formally to do with equal outcomes in meritocratic systems, such as academia or business..

+1.
 
Even if your claim about IQ being linked to ethnicity were true (and by no means am I granting that whopper), I don't see why using ethnicity as a proxy for academic performance would be advisable when academic performance is already measured directly. Schools already have in place different course offerings and "tracking" at the higher levels (say high school in the USA) for students of varying academic performance.
 
Yep, this.

This is the thing, while I understand there is some evidence that the Flynn Effect itself isn't the only reason for these differences, I still don't think a good demonstration has been made that these group differences aren't due to other environmental and cultural factors. After all, the Flynn Effect itself is caused by a cultural factor: increased education in abstract thinking and problem solving amazingly leads to increased ability on tests of.... abstract thinking and problem solving!

The other thing is this: Why? What evolutionary factors could have possibly resulted in such striking differences in cognitive ability? What selective pressures would have caused these increases in intelligence in Western Europeans and Asians, but not Sub-Saharan Africans or Aborigines? The abstract problem solving skills seem to be pretty applicable in all environments. The only possible answer I can think of is urbanization: dealing with the cognitive load of larger and larger social networks. But that doesn't work IMO because while it is true that there was more urbanization in Europe and Asia than Sub-Saharan Africa or Australia, most of the human population there was still widely dispersed and rural. This has been true down to recent history in fact.

So that is the question I want answered: What selective pressures caused this difference in human populations?
 
Yes, there are differences in IQ amongst the racial groups. A politically incorrect idea if there ever was one, but there you have it. Most here (and elsewhere) will try and come up with any way to deny it, all in the name of "skepticism" and then will end up calling you names.

These are just averages. At the individual level, you can much wider differences. Compare a smart Ashkenazi vs. a dumb Australian Aborigine. That's going to be IQ 140 vs. IQ 50.

The more interesting case would be the less intelligent Ashkenazi vs. an intelligent Australian Aborigine.

Given these difference in average IQ among racial groups, what sort of education policy would you propose? I can't think of any good policies that distinguish by race - for many reasons. Firstly, these are just group averages, and the variability ion the individuals within those groups is high. Secondly, intelligence is only one metric towards competence in a particular discipline. And there are more reasons, too much to go into here.
 
IIRC childhood led exposure can be a significant factor in educational attainment and there are ethnicity biases for who is most likely to be exposed. This suggests it could play a role in IQ as well. The limitations of IQ and IQ tests could easily hide an effect just as easily as it can create differences that don’t really exist.

I'm glad lead levels and exposures have been reduced so greatly over time, but I think the lead effects are probably kind of overblown. The reason I think this is because Americans who were kids in the 60s and 70s were all, universally, profoundly lead poisoned by today's standards. So, I think the lead level correlations with IQ are more likely to be a confounding factor in the research, rather than a cause. I think it's the environment of poverty (little intellectual stimulation of the sort that raises IQ points) that's really the culprit, and elevated lead levels are the marker for that.
 
I would like to see sources for each of the first three posts.

https://www.researchgate.net/public..._Gap_on_Raven's_Advanced_Progressive_Matrices

This study addresses recent criticisms aimed at the interpretation of stereotype threat research and methodological weaknesses of previous studies that have examined race differences on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM). African American and White undergraduates completed the APM under three conditions. In two threat conditions, participants received either standard APM instructions (standard threat) or were told that the APM was an IQ test (high threat). In a low threat condition, participants were told that the APM was a set of puzzles and that the researchers wanted their opinions of them. Results supported the stereotype threat interpretation of race differences in cognitive ability test scores. Although African American participants underperformed Whites under both standard and high threat instructions, they performed just as well as Whites did under low threat instructions.
 
Last time I heard this was when a reporter was interviewing one of the organizers of the second annual Charleston white supremacist rally. He mentioned the work of Charles Murray.

So I'm guessing something along those lines is the source

Since ABP mentioned it in another thread I think the source is probably Stefan Molyneux.
 

Here's a really good interview with the guy who discovered it, if anyone's interested:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx

What has caused these changes?
The second factor is what Alexander Luria discovered when he tested rural Russian peasants in the 1930s. He discovered that pre-scientific people can't take the hypothetical seriously. That is, if you pose to them questions like, "There is snow at the North Pole; where there is snow, bears are white; what color are bears at the North Pole?" they would say, "Well, I've only seen brown bears. And only if a person came from the North Pole with testimony would I believe that the bears there are white."

They were addicted to the concrete world, not the world of hypotheticals. And that of course has a big impact on a whole range of tests. If you look at Raven's, where the gains have been so huge, the test consists of all hypothetical questions about symbols that are well removed from concrete reality.

In the past, people's minds were utilitarian. They weren't interested in hypotheticals or in classifying things together. But today people have "donned scientific spectacles," they have scientific habits of mind.

Do these rising IQ scores actually mean that people are getting smarter?
That depends what you mean by smarter. It really breaks down into four questions:

Do we have better genetically engineered brains than we did in 1900? Of course not.

If you mean, on the other hand, something like: Were people just as adapted to their circumstances in 1900 as they are today? Well, of course they were. They were able to do factory work, to hunt. They could cope with the world as it existed then. They had an average IQ of 70, but they weren't all mentally retarded. So in that respect there's been no gain in intelligence.

But finally, if you mean: Are people today mentally adapted to a far more complicated world? Then yes, there has been a gain.
 
You're doing it to: unreferenced assertions. So, got anything to back this up?

This is well established. Just take the APA overview from the mid-90s as a jumping off point:

http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com...surement/Intelligence-Knowns-and-unknowns.pdf

It is also well established that intelligence is highly heritable.

The only thing really open to debate is: Are the group differences we see attributable in part (or taken to an extreme, entirely) to genetic factors.

Murray for instance thinks some not insignificant part of these group differences likely are. I don't agree, or at least if there are I doubt they amount even close to the 1 SD difference we see between European-Americans and African-Americans for instance. I think Murray doesn't give culture as much due as he should, and how culture not only affects access to education, but reception of education as well.

A lot of what makes modern people better at IQ tests than our forebears is thinking skills honed in school, even when it isn't explicit. An anecdote I think Steven Pinker gave in one of his books is illustrative in my opinion (although I don't think the anecdote itself was related to IQ). I can't remember the exact details, so I'll paraphrase. There is a tribe of hunter-gatherers somewhere, and some scientists are testing their logical reasoning abilities. They are given a question "Sam and Bill always drink cane juice together. One day Sam was drinking cane juice. Was Bill drinking cane juice?" The answers they got might make them sound like idiots to you. They varied along the lines of something like: "Sam was drinking cane juice, but Bill was not there on that day." You know what the answer is supposed to be: Bill was drinking cane juice, because Sam and Bill always drink cane juice together. However, in coming up with that answer you actually made use of something you might not have realized you learned in school: the ability to strip a problem of all context and treat it abstractly. In real life, there might arise contingencies where Sam and Bill wouldn't drink cane juice together. Why are you being so damn literal with your "Always" anyways? To you, Bill and Sam are just labels. To the people being tested, the interviewers could have seemed like idiots. Was Bill drinking cane juice that day? Why don't you go ask him. We are born with a mind that can think abstractly, but that doesn't mean we constantly deal with abstractions. We train ourselves during our schooling to treat problems like this as the logic problems they are intended to be. To these tribesmen, the question wasn't an abstract logic problem, it was a concrete question.

Cultural specificity in IQ testing often gets brought up, and I don't know exactly how it is dealt with. That particular passage from Pinker really got me thinking about this though: How much of IQ test scores have to do, not with aspects of a specific culture, but general aspects of any culture that has ubiquitous education. How much does how that education is received by members of that culture affect things?
 
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Even if your claim about IQ being linked to ethnicity were true (and by no means am I granting that whopper), I don't see why using ethnicity as a proxy for academic performance would be advisable when academic performance is already measured directly. Schools already have in place different course offerings and "tracking" at the higher levels (say high school in the USA) for students of varying academic performance.

Exactly. Educational policy should focus on helping each individual to become the best they are capable of being. We have many ways of doing that in practice based on actual performance. These methods are not perfect, but at least they seek to evaluate the individual. There is no reason to use ethnicity as a proxy: it is not only deeply inaccurate it is criminal. In fact using "IQ" as a major factor in determining educational decisions even for individuals is itself questionable given the highly hypothetical and swishy nature of the concept and the availability of more concrete performance metrics.

"Oh I don't need to look at your test scores, SAT, or letters of recommendation. You are Ashkenazi and are therefore must be smart and are admitted to our medical program. Conversely I see from the application that this guy over here is Australian Aborigine and he can just go blow on that basis alone."

I am saddened that so many people still feel the need to divide the world into ethnic groups as some sort of a short cut to characterizing others. It is inherently inaccurate if only because the "traditional" ethnic groups do not match the genetics of it all. But more so, people are individuals. Deciding that person X must be stupid versus brilliant, or a criminal versus a paragon of morality, etc. based on their membership in a larger group is absurd.
 
This is well established. Just take the APA overview from the mid-90s as a jumping off point:

http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com...surement/Intelligence-Knowns-and-unknowns.pdf

It is also well established that intelligence is highly heritable.

The only thing really open to debate is: Are the group differences we see attributable in part (or taken to an extreme, entirely) to genetic factors.

But even if the answer is in the positive, which it very well might be, so what? We judge people as individuals, anyway, so statistics, while interesting, don't tell us anything particularily useful for treating individuals, do they? I mean, unless one believes that somehow this fact would mean that we no longer treat people equally. But then that'd be silly. I'm not as smart as Einstein, but no one believes that I should have fewer rights than he did because of it, right?
 
Cultural specificity in IQ testing often gets brought up, and I don't know exactly how it is dealt with. That particular passage from Pinker really got me thinking about this though: How much of IQ test scores have to do, not with aspects of a specific culture, but general aspects of any culture that has ubiquitous education. How much does how that education is received by members of that culture affect things?

That Flynn interview I linked to above goes into that.

What has caused these changes?
Well, everything about the modern world has changed since 1900, as you can imagine.

The three things that stand out are: first, formal schooling. That clearly has to be involved in the huge gains in vocabulary and general information we see in America since 1950 — vocabulary subtests of the IQ tests have risen by 17 points over those 50 years. If you project that back to 1900, a period for which we don't have adequate data, that would be 34 points, or two standard deviations. So that's a lot of vocabulary. It means that people today on average know enough vocabulary to mimic the speech of only the cultural elite of 1900.

Luria also asked his subjects about classification, such as, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common?" In 1900, a person would say, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits." Today you say, "They're both mammals." And that gets the question right.

In the past, people's minds were utilitarian. They weren't interested in hypotheticals or in classifying things together. But today people have "donned scientific spectacles," they have scientific habits of mind.
 
But even if the answer is in the positive, which it very well might be, so what? We judge people as individuals, anyway, so statistics, while interesting, don't tell us anything particularily useful for treating individuals, do they? I mean, unless one believes that somehow this fact would mean that we no longer treat people equally. But then that'd be silly. I'm not as smart as Einstein, but no one believes that I should have fewer rights than he did because of it, right?

Oh I agree. It isn't really a subject I care much about. When it comes to the human mind I am much more interested in our commonalities than our differences.

However, I think people are concerned because how the evidence pans out could affect social policy as ammunition for one side or the other in debates about things like Affirmative Action in education. IMO a positive answer to the question would actually increase the need for AA, but I can certainly see how it could be used by racists to say "See! They are inferior, and we shouldn't be wasting resources on them." The main take-away being: statistics matter for social policy, even if they don't matter for how you or I would treat an individual.
 
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As to the OP: an average IQ score would in the bottom 4% of the population used to normalize the scores. It is considered "feebleminded" and a sign of clinical metal retardation. It is remarkable therefore that somehow Australian Aborigines as a group have carved out a successful colonization of a continent under extraordinarily challenging conditions despite such a serious mental impairment. Or, just perhaps, the IQ scores cited are not an accurate measure of their intellectual capacity.

More generally it is fascinating that the history of evaluating "races" by intellectual capacity typically has generated conclusions that place the evaluator's race as within the high IQ range and "others" in lower IQ range. Just coincidence no doubt.
 
Oh I agree. It isn't really a subject I care much about. When it comes to the human mind I am much more interested in our commonalities than our differences.

However, I think people are concerned because how the evidence pans out could affect social policy as ammunition for one side or the other in debates about things like Affirmative Action in education. IMO a positive answer to the question would actually increase the need for AA, but I can certainly see how it could be used by racists to say "See! They are inferior, and we shouldn't be wasting resources on them." The main take-away being: statistics matter for social policy, even if they don't matter for how you or I would treat an individual.

I think evidence like this (also linked above):
This study addresses recent criticisms aimed at the interpretation of stereotype threat research and methodological weaknesses of previous studies that have examined race differences on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM). African American and White undergraduates completed the APM under three conditions. In two threat conditions, participants received either standard APM instructions (standard threat) or were told that the APM was an IQ test (high threat). In a low threat condition, participants were told that the APM was a set of puzzles and that the researchers wanted their opinions of them. Results supported the stereotype threat interpretation of race differences in cognitive ability test scores. Although African American participants underperformed Whites under both standard and high threat instructions, they performed just as well as Whites did under low threat instructions.

...shows that there aren't any differences that justify any social policy based on the genetics of IQ. The tested differences between groups are environmental and social, and policy should seek to address that.
 
More generally it is fascinating that the history of evaluating "races" by intellectual capacity typically has generated conclusions that place the evaluator's race as within the high IQ range and "others" in lower IQ range. Just coincidence no doubt.

I've had the same thought. It would be really interesting to see an IQ test devised by an indigenous Australian, and see how well Caucasians do on it.

And you're going to have the same thing happen when you're looking at the "high IQ genes" too. The indigenous Australian's high IQ scores on their own test could be scientifically correlated with their genes, as well.

There's a whole lot of room for some Texas sharpshooter fallacy type things to happen with groups, genes, and IQ tests.
 
Oh I agree. It isn't really a subject I care much about. When it comes to the human mind I am much more interested in our commonalities than our differences.

However, I think people are concerned because how the evidence pans out could affect social policy as ammunition for one side or the other in debates about things like Affirmative Action in education. IMO a positive answer to the question would actually increase the need for AA, but I can certainly see how it could be used by racists to say "See! They are inferior, and we shouldn't be wasting resources on them." The main take-away being: statistics matter for social policy, even if they don't matter for how you or I would treat an individual.

Yeah. What I find slightly depressing is that, while the right would love to use these statistics to justify racism, the left would rather ignore them because they seem to also think that they justify racism.
 
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